Castle Menzies

In 1913 the contents of Castle Menzies were auctioned. The following year the family papers went to Sotheby’s, where a letter written by Mary Queen of Scots in 1566 fetched £300 and a set of proposals signed by Charles I at Holmby in 1647 fetched £56. In 1918 the castle itself and 11,600 acres of estate went for £69,000. Sir Neil Menzies, 8th Baronet, had died without heirs in 1910, and within eight years the seat his family had held for over five hundred years had been sold off in three separate lots.

The castle stands a little west of Weem, near Aberfeldy, close to the site of the Weem Castle destroyed around 1502 that it replaced. It was built in the sixteenth century to a Z-plan — a central block with towers at diagonally opposite corners, so that each tower could rake two faces of the main range. Charles McKean placed it as an example of the architectural transition between the older tradition of rugged fortresses and the later one of lightly defensible chateaux, which is a fair description of a building that has the shape of a fortification and the windows of a house.

The walls are random rubble, originally harled with roughcast, but the quoins, the turrets and the surrounds of the doors and windows are cut from finely carved blue freestone. The stone weathers extremely hard, and the same quarry supplied the architectural detail and monuments at the nearby Old Kirk of Weem, which the Menzies family built and where their monuments and funeral hatchments still hang.

Above the original entrance is a marriage stone installed by James Menzies in 1371, recording his marriage to Barbara Stewart, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Atholl. It is nearly two centuries older than the wall it is set into.

Being strategically placed in the Highlands meant being involved in Highland history, generally against the household’s wishes. In 1598 John Dow MacWilliam, alias MacGregor, broke in to free a thief called Donald Menzies from the dungeons; Alexander Menzies of Weem then had the further indignity of complaining that John Murray of Tullibardine had taken in both the thief and his rescuer as household servants. In 1746 Bonnie Prince Charlie rested here two nights on his way north to Culloden.

Two later residents are worth knowing about. In 1840 an entirely new wing went up, designed by William Burn and built from the same quarry on the south side of Loch Tay as the original — which is why the Victorian work sits so quietly against the sixteenth-century. And from 1855 to 1858 the castle housed Duleep Singh, last maharajah of the Sikh Empire, exiled from the Punjab the year before and formally the ward of Sir John Spencer Login and Lady Login, who took the lease for him. A deposed Indian sovereign spent three years of his childhood in a Perthshire tower house.

The castle nearly burned in 1878. A man passing on the road spotted fire in the roof at about seven on a Sunday evening; local effort had it almost out by ten, when the engine finally arrived from Taymouth Castle. Sir Robert and Lady Menzies were away at Farleyer and hurried back. The excitement was held to have affected Lady Menzies’s health, and she died the following month.

What saved the place was the clan. The Menzies Clan Society took it on and began restoration after 1957, work that started in earnest in 1972 with a £40,000 project part-funded by a £10,000 grant from the Historical Buildings Council. It ran nearly ten years under Dr Bill Dewar and got the building open to the public. A further grant of £135,900 came in 1991 towards a £230,000 final phase on the Victorian west wing, which produced the ballroom now called the Dewar Room. The restoration meant pulling down a badly decayed eighteenth-century wing; the large Victorian ballroom was kept. The Menzies Charitable Trust was set up in 1994 to look after the castle, the walled garden and the Old Kirk of Weem.

The castle was designated Category A listed in 1971 and the grounds were added to the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland in 1987. In front of the building sits a lifting stone of 115 kilograms known as the Chieftain’s Stone, or the Menzies Stone, open to anyone who cares to try it. By the standards of Scottish lifting stones it is not especially heavy. It is round and it is smooth, and that defeats most people who attempt it.