Castle Forbes

By B. R. Forbes, Clan Historian & Storyteller

Set on a commanding rise above the River Don, the castle wears its Scottish Baronial towers and battlements with the confidence of a clan that, after centuries of feuds, debts, and misfortunes, has finally succeeded in the world. Rather than a monument to past glory, the current Castle Forbes is an act of faith in the generations still to come.

Long before the family of Forbes claimed its dùthchas, Neolithic agricultural peoples inhabited the land around today’s Castle Forbes estate. A prehistoric stone circle, dating 2000 to 2500 BCE, stands on the grounds of Cothiemuir Hill, to the north of the castle.

The site originally comprised twelve stones arranged in a circle over 60 feet (18 meters) wide, though only eight remain today. The recumbent stone itself is notable for its size (approximately 14 feet long) and for the three large cup marks carved into its outer face. These markings, which were called “Devil’s Hoofmarks,” may have served astronomical or ritual functions.

Through the millennia, early farming communities gave way first to Pictish and then to Gaelic societies. By the twelfth century, a community of Culdees—Scotland's native clergy—had settled at nearby Monymusk and held land there under grants dating to the 1130s. In the early thirteenth century, the Culdee foundation was reorganized as a house of Augustinian canons and placed under the authority of St Andrews rather than the Bishop of Aberdeen.

Between 1202 and 1236, William Malvoisin, Bishop of St Andrews, granted the barony of Keig—including the lands later known as Putachie—to the new Augustinian priory. Gilbert, Bishop of Aberdeen, soon confirmed the grant, apparently resolving a jurisdictional dispute between the two sees.

Keig and Putachie were held for over three centuries as episcopal lands until the clash of politics and religion in the sixteenth century. In 1543, David Beaton, Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews, granted a sasine for the land to George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly. The reasons were both financial and political.

When James V died in 1542, his week-old daughter Mary became Queen, and Scotland fell into a scramble for power. Cardinal David Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews, was briefly imprisoned by the Regent Arran while maneuvering to become Chancellor — and George, Earl of Huntly, was one of the nobles who helped secure his release. Once restored to favor, Beaton rewarded Huntly's loyalty in 1543 by granting him the church lands of Keig and Monymusk, land that had belonged to St Andrews since the Middle Ages.

The charter is refreshingly candid about the reason. Huntly had aided Beaton and the church “at this present dangerous time, with Lutheran heresies springing up everywhere.” Therefore, the charter was a political payoff dressed up as a land deal, executed, fittingly, by three Gordon-affiliated officials.

Owning the superiority of Keig on paper was not the same as controlling it on the ground. The territory remained firmly within the Forbes heartland. In 1552, Huntly, by then Chancellor of Scotland, took a shrewd step. He bound "Black" Arthur Forbes of Balfour, a legitimate son of the 6th Lord Forbes, to his personal service for life in exchange for the use of lands at Keig. One important condition protected Arthur's loyalty: he could never be compelled to fight against his own chief, Lord Forbes. The agreement lasted only for Arthur's lifetime, after which the lands reverted to Huntly.

Seven years later, in 1559, Huntly made it permanent. He granted Arthur and “his heirs whatsoever” a hereditary charter to the lands of Putachie and half of Keig, in exchange for a fixed yearly rent. This transformed a temporary personal favor into a lasting inheritance, although the Forbeses still owed loyalty and service to Huntly as their superior.

In just sixteen years, church land became Gordon property, Gordon property became a bond of personal loyalty, and that loyalty became permanent Forbes inheritance. Putachie passed into Forbes hands not by conquest but by grant from the very rival family that had first taken it from the Church. The arrangement proved short-lived. When Huntly rebelled against Queen Mary in 1561, the Privy Council released Black Arthur from his oaths, ending the Forbeses’ obligation to the Gordons for good. Black Arthur was killed by the Gordons at the battle of Tilliangus in 1571.

Putachie passed to his only child, a daughter named Elizabeth (also known as Isobel) — and the inheritance was messy from the start. Within months of her father's death, Elizabeth was locked in a legal dispute with her own mother over who controlled the estate's income. She eventually secured her claim in 1575, formally sending agents to George Gordon, 5th earl of Huntly, the family's feudal overlord, to establish her right to the land. In 1578, Elizabeth, then married to Alexander Innes of Crombie, granted a charter of Putachie to John, Master of Forbes, later 8th Lord Forbes.

For several generations thereafter, Putachie remained in the hands of a younger son of the chief, while the head of the family resided at Druminnor Castle.

The last younger son to be styled “of Putachie” was James, son of William, 12th Lord Forbes. He succeeded both his brother William, 13th Lord Forbes, and his nephew, Francis, 14th Lord Forbes. He gained possession of Putachie in 1723 and made considerable improvements. He remained at Putachie until his death in 1761.

After his son James, 16th Lord Forbes, sold Druminnor in 1770, the clan seat became Putachie House. This move symbolized a transformation in the clan’s identity—from medieval lairds rooted in fortified stone to Enlightenment landowners shaping modern estates.

His eldest son, James Ochoncar, later 17th Lord Forbes, (1765–1843) transformed Putachie House into Castle Forbes. In 1792, James Ochoncar married Elizabeth Hunter, the eldest daughter and heiress of Walter Hunter of Polmood and Crailing. When her father died in 1796, Crailing House and the Hunter estates passed to her, bringing substantial landed wealth into the Forbes family.

James Ochoncar served for over forty years in the Coldstream Guards, rising through the ranks to General by 1819. He commanded troops on the battlefield in Flanders, the Helder Expedition, and in the Mediterranean. He brought the same discipline to marshalling the competing visions of three architects, shifting plans, wavering budgets, persistent legal disputes, and the stubborn realities of stone. Castle Forbes proved to be his longest campaign, occupying fourteen years from 1807 to 1821.

The first architect Lord Forbes engaged was John Paterson. He proposed building an entirely new symmetrical castellated house on a different site below the old one, citing drainage and landscaping considerations. Lord Forbes rejected this plan and insisted that the new design should incorporate the existing Putachie House. Paterson developed a second Neoclassical design in 1811 that incorporated the plain three-story Putachie House into a triangular plan.

For reasons now unknown, Lord Forbes remained dissatisfied. He dismissed Paterson and appointed Archibald Simpson, a twenty-four-year-old architect who had trained under Robert Lugar and James Massie. Simpson proposed an ambitious design that incorporated the original Putachie House into the new castle. During construction, however, the older structure, built about 1731, began to crack under the added weight. It, too, had to be demolished, and its façade was rebuilt on a slightly smaller scale to fit Simpson's design. Lord Forbes soon lost confidence in Simpson as well and dismissed him. The decision led to a protracted legal arbitration that lasted from 1814 to 1822.

Completion of the castle fell to John Smith, the City Architect of Aberdeen. His most notable features are the two staircases: the square north staircase with its coffered cove and dome, and the elliptical south staircase. The finished building is a study in balance: matching circular and rectangular towers frame both the entrance and garden fronts, so that from a distance the house reads almost as a mirror image of itself. Aberdeen granite gives it a stern, crenellated, castle-like presence, but the details reward a closer look — carved stone heads of a knight and his lady peer out from one window, while grinning muzzled bears and hounds line the roofline on the garden side, including one fierce-toothed dog that doubles as a drainage spout.

Inside, the house shifts from fortress to elegant townhouse: a circular drawing room sits inside the tower beneath a domed, rosette-decorated ceiling, the dining room once had a columned screen at one end, and the library — tucked into one of the corner towers — still holds its original bookcases. Two grand staircases, one square and coffered, the other a graceful oval lit from above, complete an interior far more refined than the castle's fortified exterior would suggest.

Castle Forbes is a confident expression of design. Its measured massing speaks the language of Enlightenment balance and clarity, while its battlements, crenellations, and conical-roofed turrets reach back to the ancestral tower houses that gave the Forbes name its authority. The result is neither pastiche nor contradiction—it is a bold architectural argument: that a family with medieval roots and modern ambitions can inhabit both worlds at once, and do so with ease.

Lord Forbes’s eldest son, James, the Master of Forbes, recorded some details of the construction. Based on his recollections, James reported that the foundation stone was set on June 15, 1815, under the left-hand window in the round room. He noted that a stone shaped like a rough appearance of a bear was found at Logie-Braes of Forbes.

According to legend, this was where Ochonochar Forbhasach killed a great bear and won the dùthchas of Forbes. Originally embedded in the wall above the back gate of the old Putachie House, this stone was installed above the fireplace in the front lounge of Castle Forbes.

Lord Forbes hired the mason Alexander Wallace of Drumnabeg in Cluny for the stonework. The Master of Forbes assisted in the masonry work and recalled that most of the stones came from the quarry near Craigpot and the stone for the window molding came from Bennachie. During the six years of construction, the family lived at Bogenthort, now known as Woodlands.

Lord Forbes moved into the house with his family in 1818. He then turned his military service into a political career. King George IV appointed Lord Forbes as Lord High Commissioner to represent the Sovereign at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland for the years 1825 to 1830.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Castle Forbes estate operated under the Scottish tenantry model. Tenants on the Forbes lands typically held small to medium‑sized mixed‑arable farms, integrated into the local agricultural economy. Estate records and regional agricultural surveys show that the 17th Lord Forbes and his son Walter, 18th Lord Forbes (1798–1868), invested heavily in estate improvements, including reforestation, new steadings, and modernized field systems.

Castle Forbes was also the center of the community’s spiritual life, an echo of the Culdees before the twelfth century and later the Augustinian priory of Monymusk. Since 1638, the Keig Old Kirk brought together the laird’s family, tenants, and members of the village within the castle's own policies just 350 metres southwest of the castle. A new kirk was built closer to the village in 1835, and the old kirk was abandoned. Now roofless, the kirk remains as a final resting place for many villagers and Lords Forbes, including James, 15th Lord Forbes, and James, 16th Lord Forbes.

The twentieth century brought Castle Forbes into the modern world while testing the family's ability to maintain the estate in an era of economic transformation.

Atholl Laurence Cunyngham, 21st Lord Forbes (1882—1953), married Lady Mabel Anson (1882–1972) in 1914 and inherited Castle Forbes when he succeeded to the title in 1916. During the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, the government used the castle as an auxiliary hospital for convalescing servicemen. This was common among large Scottish country houses during the conflict, when their scale and relative remoteness made them well-suited for medical recovery. While his parents lived at Castle Forbes, Nigel Ivan, 22nd Lord Forbes (1918–2013) lived at Harthill, Whitehouse. In 1950, he founded the Harthill Farms Partnership, which managed roughly 2,000 acres.

When his father died in 1953, he maintained his headquarters at Harthill and his mother, Dowager Lady Forbes, remained at Castle Forbes. Lord Forbes divided the Great Hall into a smaller dining room and a more comfortable sitting room.

After she died in March 1972, the family leased out the castle. One tenant was Texas-born Carol Costello, who planned to turn the estate into a tourist venue targeting American oilmen and top business executives who would arrive by helicopter. The helipad never appeared.

In 1973, Nigel Ivan, Lord Forbes, gifted the Castle Forbes estate to his eldest son, Malcolm, then the Master of Forbes. He oversaw the continued leasing of the estate until ready to take charge himself. The Master of Forbes and his wife Jinny, Lady Forbes, undertook extensive renovations of the castle beginning in 1990.

They demolished the old kitchen block at the rear of the castle, leaving the fireplaces visible beneath the encroaching greenery. In the enlarged courtyard, the stone blocks formed a circular planter. The stones were also used to rebuild the main entrance.

In addition to renovating the main house, Lady Forbes converted a former dairy building into what became one of the smallest and most exclusive private family perfumeries in the world. In 1996, she began working with perfumery expert and family friend Andrew French to use pure essential oils and other natural ingredients to create luxury fragrances and grooming products. While the old dairy barn is no longer used as a perfumery testing lab, the Castle Forbes range of men's grooming products has since gained an international reputation for quality.

The Estate has also branched out into other ventures, including a fully sustainable natural burial ground on Cothiemuir Hill, where the Neolithic stone circle has stood for some 4,500 years. More than a century and a half after the old kirk fell silent, Castle Forbes once again offers a resting place to those connected with it — echoing, in its own quiet way, the role the kirkyard once served. The site threads the ancient and the contemporary into a single continuous landscape.

Castle Forbes is more than a nineteenth‑century mansion, it is the architectural expression of a lineage that has adapted to every era of Scottish history. From its origins at Putachie to its role as the modern seat of the chiefship, the house embodies the transformation of the Forbes family from medieval lairds to modern custodians of heritage. Its granite walls, baronial towers, and sweeping landscapes tell a story of continuity, reinvention, and enduring identity. In Castle Forbes, the past is not merely preserved—it is lived, honored, and carried forward into the future.

---

Excerpted from Forbes: A Story of Stone by B. R. Forbes, copyright 2026.