A Proper Scottish Castle: Dunrobin Castle

 Monday July 28, 2025 

Today we docked in Invergordon, Scotland. 

Here are a few shots of sailing into Invergordon, Scotland:

You could either travel into Inverness (about 35 minutes on a public bus), stay in Invergordon or head out to the countryside. This is the only day we booked an actual excursion which took us to Golspie to visit Dunrobin Castle. We wanted to take a tour that showed us a bit of the Scottish countryside, gave us an opportunity to hear stories from a local about their area, and see a true Scottish Castle.

All of this came together with our visit to Dunrobin Castle. What a beautiful castle it is!

The earliest part of Dunrobin Castle dates from 1275. It is one of Britain's oldest continuously inhabited houses, dating back to the early 1300s! It has been home to the Earls of Sutherland and more recently the Dukes of Sutherland. This castle has 189 rooms!

It is an amazing looking structure, almost like a fairytale castle that sits high on a hill overlooking the North Sea. Behind the castle looking towards the sea were some beautiful gardens you could also walk around.

Side note: As we arrived I saw this sign... we didn't have time today... but having a "gincident" is now added to my list of things to do!

There were three main things we could see at this site:

1. A castle with many interesting rooms to tour that included all kinds of arts and antique furniture and treasures.
2. A beautiful garden overlooking the sea.
3. A falconry show where a man showed us (and told us interesting facts) about a hawk and a falcon and how they were traditionally used for hunting.

I actually had no idea about the gardens or the birds, so this was a bonus!

I'm going to include a few (probably more than you want to see!) photos of inside the castle here. It was absolutely beautiful and contained a treasure trove of antiques, furniture and books that I could have looked at for hours!

The gardens were fabulous and I wish I had more time to walk around them! Two hours was not enough to see it all!

The last thing we saw before we had to leave was a demonstration of falconry. I had absolutely no knowledge of this before, so found the demonstration quite fascinating. Falconry is the ancient art of using birds for hunting. There is a resident falconer at Dunrobin who did a presentation explaining the art, the birds and then demonstrated the birds flying and simulations of how they hunt. I was quite engrossed in the whole thing and disappointed when we had to leave early to head up to our bus.

I'm going to include a very short video (internet is not fast in our current hotel) showing you briefly how this Harris Hawk looked at the demonstration.

Our tour guide Celia told us many interesting facts about the area while we were riding the bus to the castle and then back again to Invergordon… she tended towards the grisly stories.

There were two I remember (out of many which I promptly forgot… as usual) which I’ll tell you about here.

One was about one of the Dukes that lived in the castle He was oldish (probably 40, that was oldish hundreds of years ago) and was wanting a 14 year old girl to be his wife. She was not agreeable to this idea (go figure) so he kept her locked in the room in the castle. She attempted to escape one day by climbing out the window on some sheets (think Rapunzel) and he didn’t want her to escape so he cut the sheet. She fell to her death and now apparently haunts the castle. (We did not see her during our visit!)

The second story is about the sheep. When you look at the fields you will see many sheep. There are always a few brown or black sheep. The reason for this is because when the lambs are born the crows will come and try to peck their eyes out. The brown and black sheep make them think the sheep aren’t as vulnerable because they have a protector (Lisa look this up, this sounds crazy! I just looked it up... apparently it is not crazy!). Anyway, true to her word we did see a few dark sheep in every field of sheep we saw on the drive (and we saw A LOT of fields of sheep!)

Oh! One more tidbit she told us... which seems unlikely... is that the cows can let you know if it is going to rain. She claims that if you see cows laying down then it is a sign it will rain (they are trying to keep their patch of grass dry!) I suspect this is more folklore than scientific fact.

The Scottish countryside was beautiful, It reminded me a bit of the foothills of Alberta and Iceland mixed together.

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit to the castle today. I'd love to do more excursions like this! Since Scotland has over 2000 castles (from ruins to still standing) this seems like the country to do it in! I guess we'll be back Scotland 😁