... except the Kyles and Western Isles: Redcastle: the genealogy of a Highland Estate

At the end of Part 3, we’d reached the point where MacKenzie of Redcastle’s creditors had forced the sale of the estate at a public roup (auction) to be held in Edinburgh on 25 June 1790.

Above is an extract from the advert in the Caledonian Mercury (full thing here - may require paid subscription). The estate could be bid for as a whole or in three lots: Easter Kessock with the ferry and salmon fishings; the main part of the estate (which was separated from Easter Kessock by Wester Kessock (now called Bellfield) which belonged to Kilcoy Estate) as far west as (and including) Coulmore; and the rest, including the castle. The upset price (reserve) for the whole was £22,402: 4s: 4 1/12d. That curiously ‘un-round’ figure down twelfths of a penny had been fixed by the Court of Session arithmetically by applying a multiple to the ‘free rent’ of the estate, namely, the gross annual rent paid by the estate’s tenants less the teinds (Scottish word for tithes), feuduty to the Crown and ‘public burdens’ (local taxes assessed on land rents). The respective figures were (rounded to the nearest £):

Gross rent: £1,200

Teinds: (£198)

Feuduty & public burdens: (£60)

Free rent: £942

A net income of £942 in 1790 is about £125,000 today so that’s the sort of money lairds like Captain Kenneth MacKenzie (see Part 3) were burning their way through every year. In fairness, though, the actual amount available to them would have been reduced by annuities to dowagers (sometimes as high as a third of the rent) and younger siblings etc. plus, of course, interest payments on debt incurred by previous generations who’d lived beyond their means. Anyway, the multiple applied to the free rent to arrive at the upset price was 25 in respect of so much of it as came from the farms on the estate (£713) and 20 in respect of the other assets such as the fishings and ferry of Kessock, mills, houses and crofts (£229).

It’s noteworthy that the rent (and feuduty) are now expressed wholly in money terms rather than the money plus quantities of grain and other commodities as in previous centuries. What in fact was happening, though, was that the tenants were paying cash in lieu of the grain etc. elements of their rents and the advert says that the rates of conversion into money had historically been “very moderate” implying that there was scope for a purchaser to take amore businesslike line in future: squeeze more cash out of the tenantry, in other words.

Photo credit: Wendy Harrison

The advert also mentions that “the mansion house” - i.e. the castle - “could be repaired at a small expense in such a manner as to accommodate a large family” and also that Redcastle Estate is a barony. That was an estate the owner of which had certain additional privileges over other owners, most notably the right to hold a court (‘baron court’) in which to prosecute and settle disputes amongst his tenants. Baron courts also functioned as sorts of mini parliaments for estates, making local bye-laws for maintaining good neighbourhood amongst the tenants etc. Barony status was typically conferred on an estate in a Charter of Novodamus (see Part 3 for what that was) and in Redcastle’s case that must have been some time in the second half of the 17th century (possibly 1680: see below) when the public records are not available online as I mentioned Part 3. A baron in this sense - the owner of a barony - was not a peer entitled to sit in the House of Lords but he did have certain additional heraldic privileges over lesser mortals and these still exist today when all other privileges of barony have gone. In recent years, it’s become possible - bizarrely, you may think - to detach the barony title with its residual privileges from the land it related to and sell it separately from the land. Such 'naked barony titles' can command five or even six figure sums from people who imagine they’re in some way thereby buying their way into the British aristocracy. And, as this entry in the Forum for the Scottish Baronage suggests, this appears to be what’s happened in the case of the barony of Redcastle with the Baillie family trustees who own the estate today having sold the barony title in 2016 to an Australian lady. (The page linked to there suggests Redcastle was created - or, in the jargon ‘erected as’ - a barony in 1680 which would have been in the time of Colin, 4th MacKenzie of Redcastle.)

Anyway, back in 1790 at the judicial sale of Redcastle, after brisk bidding the estate sold as a whole for £25,000 (about £3.3 million today) to James Grant, Younger (heir to the estate) of Shewglie, in Glen Urquhart. The Grants of Shewglie were a cadet branch of the Grants of Corrimony (at the head of Glen Urquhart) who were themselves cadets of the Grant chiefly line, the Grants of Freuchie (in Strathspey and now called Grantown-on-Spey). The second of the family acquired Shewglie from Freuchie in 1628 and his descendants were incorrigible Jacobites: James, the 3rd laird, fought at the Battle of Killiecrankie (1689) while his son Alexander, the 4th, was out in both the 1715 and 1745 Rebellions. He fought at the Battle of Culloden alongside his son James, later the 5th laird. Both were taken prisoner but while the former died in custody in London, the latter was eventually tried but acquitted of treason. Returning home, he found Shewglie House had nevertheless been burnt by the army but he built a new house in 1762 which still stands today (pictures here). The 5th laird of Shewglie’s son stayed out of political trouble and instead went to India where he rose in the service of the East India Company to become their resident (ambassador) at Hyderabad. In 1790, he returned to Scotland and spent the fortune he’d amassed on Redcastle and the following year succeeded his father as laird of Shewglie as well: he was described by a German academic in 1799 as “a middle-aged person, stiff and ungraceful in his carriage as most Scotsmen are; but he is a genuine man of business, and an excellent landlord.”

Grant connections (click for a clearer view)

Grant died in 1808 and, having no children, was succeeded as owner of Redcastle (and, I assume, Shewglie as well) by his first cousin, Lt. Col. Alexander Grant, also of the East India Company. He, in turn, was succeeded by his eldest son, Peter (also called Patrick), in 1816. In September that year, he was visited at Redcastle by a distant cousin, another descendant of the Shewglie family, Charles Grant, who, after time in India, had risen after his return to Britain in 1790 to become the chairman of the East India Company and MP for Inverness. Charles wrote to his wife from Redcastle:

The place is much improved, but I fear must be given up for a time. Peter, the eldest son, is much more of a man and of a Christian than I had reckoned on, but he is inexperienced and sanguine.

Peter (Patrick) married Charles’ daughter in 1819. The latter’s biographer noted (here):

unhappily for him [Peter (Patrick) Grant of Redcastle], he succeeded to the [Redcastle] estate after it had fallen into a very encumbered condition. The endeavour to retrieve this state of affairs occasioned [Charles] Grant a good deal of labour and trouble. He received great assistance from his two elder sons; but it does not appear that he was successful in his efforts even to the time of his death [in 1823]. In fact, much of the correspondence of these last years was occupied with this subject, and one of his last letters was about it.

Peter (Patrick’s) financial difficulties came to a head within weeks of his father in law’s death in October 1823 when he granted a Trust Deed for his Creditors. That was when a person attempted to stave off the stigma of formal bankruptcy by conveying all his property to a trustee for the purpose of selling it and distributing the proceeds amongst his creditors. In April 1824, Grant’s trustee, Edinburgh accountant Claud Russell, placed an advert in the Inverness Courier inviting the creditors to meet him in Bennet’s Hotel in Inverness to hear his proposals for paying their debts and meantime to forbear from foreclosing on the estate.

The grave of Col. Alexander Grant and his son Patrick (Peter) Grant of Redcastle in the Shewglie family burial ground at Drumnadrochit before its restoration in 2021. Photo credit: Inverness Courier

There was a big hint about what Patrick Grant's trustee for his creditors, Claud Russell, was proposing in another advert in the same edition of the Courier. This was one intimating that, not the whole of Redcastle but three lots of it - Easter Kessock, the Ferry, and Garguston and Spittal Farms - would be sold by public roup (auction) at Gibson’s Sale Room at 71 Princes Street in Edinburgh on 3rd August 1824. This advert mentioned that a “freehold qualification” would be included with Easter Kessock. That’s a parliamentary vote: before the Reform Act 1832, the right to vote in Scotland depended, not just upon owning land over a certain value but holding it feudally directly from the Crown and according to ancient valuations struck centuries ago (“40 shilling lands of Old Extent”) often bearing little relationship to the situation in the 19th century. To put that another way, you could own a huge amount of land but you didn’t get to vote if it didn’t happen to be a 40/- land OE held directly of the Crown. Easter Kessock - a very small property - happened to be both so its owner would get to vote.

There was no vote with the ferry but the purchaser would get the inns on either side and the rent of £400 (about £38,000 today!) a year paid by the ferryman. The advert waxed lyrical about how Garguston and Spittal Farms would form a “beautiful separate estate” but despite all these attractions, the three lots didn’t sell in 1824. Another roup at Gibson’s Sale Rooms was therefore advertised for 8th March 1825, this time for the whole estate.

It was in connection with this sale that the beautiful plan of Redcastle Estate (except Easter Kessock) I linked to at the beginning of the first article in this series was drawn. Here's the link again and I’ve screenshotted the plan below but it’s worth following the link to zoom in on it for a detailed view. You can see faintly at the bottom left corner the docquet signed and dated 8th March 1825 by Claud Russell as Patrick Grant’s trustee for his creditors to the effect that this was the property you were bidding on. (Presumably there was another plan of Easter Kessock.)

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The plan also has a nice vignette of the castle:

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

This time, the estate sold. The purchaser was Sir William Fettes Bt., a rich Edinburgh tea merchant who was Lord Provost of the city 1804-06 but is more famous as founder of Fettes College there. The price he paid for Redcastle was £135,000. That's £11 million in today's prices and, taking account of the intervening inflation, an astonishing 236% real terms increase in price since the estate was last sold 35 years earlier, to James Grant of Shewglie in 1790.

Sir William Fettes, Bt. Picture credit Wikipedia

Fettes died in 1836 having been predeceased by his only son so Redcastle was sold again in 1838. The price achieved this time was £120,000 (so clearly Fettes had purchased at the top of the market!) and the purchaser was Hugh Baillie.

The Baillies had owned parts of the castle lands of Inverness since the 15th century, holding them as feudal vassals of the Earl of Huntly wearing his hat as hereditary sheriff of that town and constable of its castle. In the mid-17th century, the family split into two branches: of Dunain about 3 miles southwest of Inverness, the senior branch (read about them here), and of neighbouring Dochfour, the junior branch (see here). Hugh Baillie, the purchaser of Redcastle in 1838, was a younger son of Evan, the 5th of Dochfour but it would be wrong to think of these people as just minor Inverness-shire lairds. As a younger son of the 4th laird, Evan had not expected to inherit Dochfour and, after a brief military career in the West Indies, he acquired sugar plantations there before settling in Bristol where he formed the sugar trading firm E Baillie, Sons & Co with his three sons, Peter, Hugh (purchaser of Redcastle) and James. All four became spectacularly rich in the process. Evan's obituary in the Inverness Courier in 1835 called him one of the richest commoners in Britain but it was, of course, a fortune built on the backs of African slaves: when slavery was abolished in the 1834, the Baillies owned 3,100 slaves and they received £110,000 compensation for them (about £12 million today). Leaving his sons in Bristol adding to their fortunes as partners of the Bristol Old Bank, Evan retired to Dochfour (which he'd inherited from his older childless brother in 1799) around 1815 and in 1818 bought Tarradale, the estate which marches with Redcastle on the west (and anciently part of the Earldom of Ross: nice plan of it in 1788 here). He passed it on to his second son, Hugh, so Redcastle as the neighbouring estate to the east was a natural purchase for him.

In 1839, Hugh Baillie commissioned the architect William Burn (whose most famous works are probably St John's Church at the west end of Princes Street in Edinburgh (1818) and Inverness Castle (1836)) to remodel Redcastle. On this website, if you scroll down you can see an early sketch proposal by Burn but nothing quite so grand (or ugly!) as this was ultimately carried out and the main change was the addition of an unremarkable block to the north west elevation of the castle which you can see in the photo below (the lower, two storey part to the right of the spire):

Redcastle from the north in 1967, about 15-20 years after it was abandoned. Photo courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland

The castle's citation as a listed building (here) suggests that the 1840s Burn alterations also included the three storey block in the re-entrant angle between the main stair tower and the south wing - the bit I've outlined in red on the photo below ...

Photo credit: Arjayempee

... and also the loggia which ran along the front of the castle (gone now). But I wonder if that's correct because I think you can see both of these in the drawing of the castle on the 1825 plan (above). The red outlined block is clearly later than the 17th century stair tower to its right but I think it was added earlier than the 1840s. MacGibbon & Ross remark (here) that this block is "a more modern addition" to the 17th century (and earlier) core of the castle and I think it's significant they include it in their plan (below) which consciously omits the 1840s Burn additions.

The block outlined red on the photo above which I think is earlier than the 1840s Burn additions is marked X

Something else probably done to the castle during Hugh Baillie's ownership was the addition of dormer heads (pediments above the dormer windows) re-used from an old 17th century building in Inverness called Castle Tolmie (though it wasn't a castle as such) which was demolished in 1849 to make way for a new bridge across the River Ness to replace one washed away by a flood that year (the bridge between Bridge Street and Young Street which was itself replaced by the present bridge in the 1960s). There's a picture of one of these dormer heads (no longer in position) below and more here. Generally, I like to think Hugh had the taste to restrain William Burn from going full Victorian pseudo-gothic and keep a lot of native vernacular in the look of Redcastle.

Turning from the architecture of the castle to the agriculture on its estate, the period very roughly 1760-1840 - spanning the end of the MacKenzie ownership of Redcastle through the Grants and Fettes to the early Baillie ownership - was the era of agricultural improvement. The hand maiden of the Industrial Revolution, this was the time when farming was transformed from being primarily subsistence (the majority of the population being farmers growing their own food) to primarily commercial (growing crops to sell into the market to feed the growing percentage of the population who couldn't grow their own because they lived in cities and worked in factories). Amongst the changes in farming practice during improvement were a move from farms being held by multiple tenants to being held by single tenants on longer leases; a move from land being cultivated in irregular clusters of rigs (strips) to the more regularly shaped enclosed fields we're familiar with today; and improved crop rotations, fertilisation and machinery. In 1796, the Minister of the Parish of Killearnan, in which Redcastle was one of the only two estates (the other being Kilcoy), lamented in the Statistical Account that agricultural improvement was "backward in the extreme". That's consistent with the advert for the estate when the MacKenzies were forced to sell it in 1790 which said that it was "still in [its] natural [i.e. unimproved] state".

But almost 30 years later, the 1825 map evidences considerable change. It showed that nearly half the estate was under plantations of trees (something for which the Minister congratulated the then new owner in 1796, James Grant of Shewglie). Of the rest, the agricultural land, about a third was under six large (by the standards of the time if not now), improved single tenant farms averaging 100 acres. Another third was under 18 small single tenant farms averaging 25 acres while the remaining third was divided almost evenly between around 65 single tenant crofts averaging 4 acres and 6 farms still in multiple tenancy averaging about 50 acres.

It's also noteworthy from the 1825 plan that some of the farm names that appeared in the earliest 15th century charters and rentals are still there (e.g. Garguston, Lettoch), some have disappeared (Hilton) and some new names have emerged (Parkton, Torgormack). Some of the older names have been divided and Coulmore is an interesting example of this: the extract from the plan below, onto which I've added the boundaries of Coulmore in red, shows that Easter Coulmore (116 acres) is still an old style multiple tenant farm. The jumble of houses circled yellow is a dead giveaway of this and, in the list of tenants, its tenant is given simply as "sundries". Note that it doesn't appear to have been divided into fields. Contrast with Wester Coulmore (96 acres) which is obviously an improved single tenant farm (tenant: Donald McLean). Note also some of the crofts ranging from 1.5 to 8 acres along the top:-

Coulmore Farm in 1825

So I think agricultural improvement was still unfinished business on Redcastle Estate in 1825. The next time we get to see any detail of the holdings on the estate is the Valuation Roll of 1855 when the era of agricultural improvement is generally regarded as complete. (I can't link to this VR directly but go here, select 1855, select Ross & Cromarty under 'County/City' and Killearnan under 'Parish' and type 'Estate of Redcastle' in the 'Place' box.) Now, without paying to see the actual scans of the VRs with the rateable values, this is much less finely grained than looking at a plan like the 1825 one: you can't see the respective sizes of the various holdings and can only distinguish between farms on the one hand and crofts on the other. Nevertheless, the takeaway from the 1855 VR, I think, was that there didn't appear to be any multiple tenant farms left and there were only about 45 crofts now compared with about 65 in 1825. No doubt some crofts had been absorbed into the larger farms as they fell vacant but there doesn't seem to have been any wholesale clearance of crofts on Redcastle in the mid-19th century as was happening on the west coast at that time. There are still many crofts left on the Black Isle today and one or two on Redcastle Estate.

Hugh Baillie who purchased Redcastle in 1838 from A History of Banking in Bristol from 1750 to 1899

During his lifetime, but in which year exactly I don't know, Hugh Baillie passed Redcastle and Tarradale to his younger brother and fellow Bristol banking partner, James (picture of him here). The latter had previously bought a huge acreage in the Highlands including Glenshiel Estate in Wester Ross and when he died childless in 1863, Redcastle and Tarradale went to his nephew, Hugh's son, Henry, while Glenshiel and the rest went to his cousin, Evan II Baillie, 6th of Dochfour (1798-1883: grandson of the Evan previously mentioned and who also, incidentally, acquired Dunain in 1872 following the death childless in 1869 of the 14th and last laird of the senior Baillie line).

Baillie family tree (click for a clearer view)

When Henry Baillie died in 1885 with his son having predeceased him, Redcastle and Tarradale passed to his cousin twice removed, Colonel James E B Baillie, 7th of Dochfour (1859-1931). In 1899, he (James) sold Garguston Farm to its tenant Robert Trotter (a Robert Trotter is identified as tenant of Garguston on the 1825 plan so a lot of continuity there); Fettes & Blairdhu Farms to a Mr MacDonald (500 acres: they were bought back into the estate from his son in 1937); Coulmore and Lettoch Farms to their tenant Alexander MacQueen (this sale also included some neighbouring crofts and totalled 700 acres); and finally Easter Kessock with the ferry and salmon fishery. It was reported at the time that Colonel Baillie was contemplating selling all the rest of Redcastle in lots but that didn’t come to pass.

The sale of Easter Kessock caused Col. Baillie some bother. The purchaser, Mr - afterwards Sir - Donald MacDonald was, as well as being a magistrate and later Provost of Inverness, a ship owner. He'd bought Easter Kessock - which appears to have included Craigton to the east - with a view to improving the ferry and then developing the village as a commuter suburb of Inverness. But there was a problem with the tenants of the estate: MacDonald had understood them to be ordinary agricultural tenants (meaning they could be removed relatively easily to make way for his redevelopment) but it turned out they were actually crofters (meaning they couldn't). In 1907, he sued for a refund of £2,500 (£260,000 in today's money) from the £19,000 (£2.1 million today) he'd paid for the estate. Colonel Baillie admitted liability but disputed the sum claimed as extravagant: the Court of Session agreed and awarded MacDonald just £700 (£70,000 today).

Looking west at North (Easter) Kessock. Note the steam ferry at the pier in the background.

But as annoying as the Easter Kessock settlement was, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the financial blow Col. Baillie had suffered two years earlier at the hands of his factor (Scottish word for land agent or steward who collects a landowner's rents), Donald Grant, solicitor in Grantown on Spey. When Grant died in October 1905, it emerged he'd been embezzling his clients' money and Baillie lost over £40,000 - an astonishing £4.2 million in today's money. (I assume Baillie didn't draw all the rents Grant collected on his behalf and instead left a credit balance to build up with him: treating him like a bank, in other words. Grant had also been the agent for the Royal Bank of Scotland in Grantown. Other clients lost another £40,000. What he did with all the money he embezzled is nowhere revealed.)

Just as well for Colonel Baillie that he was married to the heiress to half the Bass brewing fortune, the Hon. Nellie Bass. Upon the death of her father, Michael Bass, Lord Burton, in 1909, she as his only child became Baroness Burton in her own right. Reporting on that event, the London Daily Chronicle noted that she:-

will, of course succeed to a large fortune; and she and Mr Baillie will in future be much more prominent in society. They have of late years lived very quietly at Dochfour House, Inverness-shire, or at Redcastle, their place in Ross-shire. Mr Baillie suffered heavy financial losses two or three years ago, in consequence of which he had to let Redcastle with its shootings.

I'm not convinced it's true that Col. Baillie had to let Redcastle in direct consequence of his losses at the hands of Donald Grant. It seems to have been his practice to let Redcastle for the 'Scottish Season' (late summer, early autumn around the 'Glorious 12th' of August etc.) before and after the Grant affair (1905) and his wife coming into her fortune (1909). Often it was Dochfour which was let and the Baillies decamped to Redcastle and the practice of letting one of their houses for the season seems to have continued almost right up to WW2: it was at Redcastle that the Baillies entertained the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor) in August 1923. There are a couple of references in the newspapers of the time to Redcastle having been their principal residence but how true that is, I can't tell. In Part 1 of this series, I described the castle as having been Lady Burton's home in the 1930s - perhaps it would have been more accurate to call it one of her homes.

Dochfour. Photo credit: Steven Severinghaus

As this is the story of Redcastle rather than the Baillies, I mustn't wander too far off topic but I couldn't resist this snippet in the Buchan Observer and East Aberdeenshire Advertiser in 1913:

Lady Burton and Mr Baillie, who usually let for the Highland Season their principal place, Dochfour, on Loch Ness, are themselves occupying it this year instead of Redcastle, Ross-shire, which has a tenant - Mr J. F. Robinson. Dochfour ... is only a part of Mr Baillie's domains which extend to about 90,000 acres. It is also not the most profitable portion, this being his Strathspey property, on which at Aviemore, Lady Burton runs a big hotel, built according to her own plans and tastes. To the alliance of Baillie and Bass the immense estates of the Laird of Dochfour owe a great deal (for they were heavily encumbered) and will owe much more.

The hotel in question was the Aviemore Station Hotel, built in 1900 and which stood on the site where the awful 1960s Strathspey Hotel stands today until it was burnt down in 1950. Now one has to take these gossip column type pieces with a grain of salt (for example the Baillie property in Strathspey was Kingussie, not Aviemore) but they did have an involvement in the Aviemore Station Hotel. How deep it was financially, I don't know, but Col. Baillie was chairman of the hotel company and Lady Burton and her son the Hon. Evan became directors after his death which hints at a fairly substantial shareholding to be represented by a seat on the board. I don't know whether they were still involved when the hotel burnt down or whether Lady Burton had designed it as the article claims, although if she did, she had very good taste. Note the similarity of these dormerheads to the ones at Redcastle - coincidence?

Aviemore Station Hotel.

As I mentioned in Part I, Lady Burton enjoyed the liferent (Scottish legal term for lifetime rent free use) of the Baillie estates following the death of her husband in 1931. She married a Major Melles the following year and lived until 1962 when she died aged 88. She was described in 1902 as having "unconventional manners". That was an allusion to the snobbery around those like the Basses whose money came from trade but about which Lady Burton made no bones at all: it was reported that she once scandalised the Marquis of Tullibardine at a ball by replying to his question that, no, she'd not heard of his ancestors who'd fought at the Battles of Culloden and Malplaquet (1709) because her ancestors had been bottle washers. Good for her.

Redcastle Mains steading, probably built during the Grant ownership (1790-1825). Photo credit: Bob Bain

Lady Burton had been predeceased by her eldest son, Brigadier the Hon. Evan Baillie who was killed during WW2, so was succeeded in her title and the Baillie estates by her grandson, Brig. Evan's son, Michael. He was the Lord Burton who was well known in Inverness-shire landowning circles (and beyond) who died in 2013 (his obit). His younger son, the Hon. Alex, now owns Dochfour Estate while Redcastle (including Tarradale) and Glen Shiel belong to a Baillie family trust called the Burton Property Trust. Which members of the family are the beneficiaries of that trust is not in the public domain and I don't know but I'm pleased to see that, having come in for some criticism of their stewardship of Redcastle (the castle, not the estate - see here for example), the trustees have in the last couple of years cleared the vegetation out of it and tidied up its surroundings. Compare the two photos below:-