The Scottish castle restored from ruins — and yours for the weekend

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

For a man with an old house and a weakness for home restoration TV programmes, Fairburn Tower stands as the sternest of reproofs. When I visited in 2018, the 16th-century fortified tower-house was a shell, floorless and roofless, with cawing jackdaws roosting in its marooned fireplaces and perilous cracks snaking up its stone walls. Returning this month, I found the ruin reborn as a proud Renaissance residence worthy of a Scottish Highland laird.

This transformation is the work of the Landmark Trust, a conservation charity. Since 2020 — a period where I have signally failed to fix even my leaky guttering — the trust has given Fairburn Tower a whole new roof, repaired its bartizan watch turrets, replaced its stolen stone staircase with a structure-stabilising concrete substitute, and sensitively restored its interior. Last weekend the charity celebrated the tower’s official reopening as comfortable holiday accommodation for up to four people.

Two centuries of ruination meant the £2mn project was “pretty extreme” even for the trust, its director Anna Keay told me before I ventured back to stay a few nights in the tower, 30km east of Inverness. “We go in for very derelict buildings; this was at the outer reaches.”

That the restoration was possible at all is testament to the masons who built the original four-storey tower sometime around 1545 for Murdo Mackenzie, a gentleman of the bedchamber to Scotland’s King James V, and to those who added a storey and the stair tower in the early 17th century. Despite being abandoned in the 18th century, the tower retained much of its architectural detailing. Neglect also meant Fairburn escaped Georgian and Victorian modernisation and expansion, allowing the trust to seek to return it to something like its Renaissance heyday.

The result is a delightfully intriguing place to stay. The tower’s windows are small, but there are plenty of them punched through the thick rubble-built walls along with a host of defensive shot-holes, now mercifully glazed against the weather. The walls themselves still contain original stone cupboards, closets and the remains of narrow staircases between floors. One surviving set of steps leads down to an otherwise inaccessible vaulted undercroft that boasts an impressive array of three gun-ports in each wall.

Renaissance lairds, Scotland’s landed gentry, often considered fortification of their residences mainly a matter of pride or aesthetics. But Fairburn was one of a string of Mackenzie towers that guarded the approaches to the nearby Black Isle, a fertile peninsula well worth defending. When Roderick, the seventh Fairburn laird, lost his lands after backing a Jacobite rebellion in 1715, the government considered the tower sufficiently strategically important to garrison it with 30 Swiss mercenaries.

While security was important, Fairburn Tower was also an elegant home. Analysis of interior plastering that survived the centuries of ruin showed traces of yellow ochre limewash, a colour that restorers have used for the walls of the tower’s sitting room. Its new wood-beamed ceiling has been painted with colourful symbolic motifs and Old Scots proverbs modelled on the Renaissance decoration of a contemporary Aberdeenshire tower-house.

I enjoyed sitting back in my armchair to decode the ceiling inscriptions while sipping a bedtime whisky. “He suld hae a langshankit spune that wad sup keil wi the Deil” read one, helpfully translated in the history album left out for guests as: “He who sups with the devil needs a long spoon”.

But my favourite moment at Fairburn came the next evening. After a fine walk in the local woodlands and a bracing dip in the nearby Orrin river, I settled in a deckchair to examine the exterior of the tower, newly reclad in its protective cloak of traditional limewashed harling. The trust could not find any trace of the original colour of the limewash used at Fairburn, so decided to use a salmon pink that matches the tower’s dressed sandstone and is similar to the warm hues used on some other Scottish fortified houses.

Not everyone approves. “It’s very pink,” one local I met earlier in the day had said. But I found myself almost spellbound as the slanting evening sun picked out the tower in relief against a grey bank of cloud. A cuckoo sang somewhere far off. Young bulls jousted in the neighbouring field. A jackdaw flew in to settle on a chimney stack high above my head. (The tower’s corvid former occupants apparently took badly to their eviction and unnerved the restorers by wheeling persistently around the building and seeking to get past sheeting erected to prevent their return. It was easy to imagine this crow was mourning its lost dominion and looking for a way back inside.)

Marauding jackdaws were just one of the difficulties the Fairburn Tower restorers had to overcome. The coronavirus pandemic disrupted work. Resident owls had to be rehoused. The necessary scaffolding took more than three months just to erect.

That the project came in only mildly over-budget seems a marvel to a home-repairer as inadequate as me. But the Landmark Trust is already looking at a bigger Scottish challenge. The charity is seeking around £5mn in funding to save Mavisbank House, a celebrated but dangerously ruinous 18th-century Enlightenment mansion near Edinburgh. If it succeeds, I hope to be first in line for a visit. I might even have fixed my own roof by then.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter