House of Monymusk
By B. R. Forbes, Clan Historian & Storyteller
The House of Monymusk emerged from a landscape shaped by centuries of spiritual discipline, long before the Forbes family ever set foot on its soil. The estate’s quiet orderliness echoes the rhythms first established by the monks who settled here five centuries before.
The earliest surviving monument associated with Monymusk is the Monymusk Cross Slab, an eighth-century Pictish granite pillar carved with a large Christian cross and traditional Pictish symbols, including a step, a triple disc, and a double ring. Discovered about 1800 in a field at nearby Nether Mains, it reflects a period when the Picts had embraced Christianity while preserving their distinctive artistic traditions.
Sometime before 1100, a community of Culdees, Scotland's ancient native clergy, settled at Monymusk. Between 1199 and 1207, Gille Críst, Earl of Mar, became their principal patron. He granted the community the churches of St. Andrew at Alford, St. Marnan at Leochel, St. Wolok at Ruthven, and St. Andrew at Invernochty, together with their associated lands and revenues. He also founded a Romanesque church at Monymusk to serve both the parish and the religious community. By 1245, Pope Innocent IV had confirmed the house's possessions, and the former Culdee community had been formally reorganized as a priory of Augustinian canons under the authority of the Bishop of St Andrews rather than the local Bishop of Aberdeen.
Sometime between 1550 and 1555, Duncan Forbes, second son of Duncan Forbes of Corsindae, received authority from Pope Julius III to “set the Mains of Monymusk,” meaning to lease and administer the priory’s home farm and to collect its rents and agricultural revenues. He also provided large loans for the Priory lands of Monymusk. When the Reformation Parliament outlawed the practice of Catholic worship in Scotland, Forbes foreclosed on the mortgage in 1560 and gained the estate by charter.
He built the central tower adjacent to the old Priory, which had burned in 1554. He used stones and beams from the priory to form the core of the house. This keep measured 49 by 46 feet and was at least three stories tall. He crowned the tower with battlements and corbelled angle rounds. The ground floor was vaulted for storage and security. The first-floor hall served as the household's principal chamber. The second-floor windows on the east side were given special architectural attention, their heads elaborately hooded on sculptured corbels. He also included an ogee-headed aumbry, a small wall recess, typically for sacred vessels or valuables.
In 1589, his eldest son and heir, William Forbes, second Laird of Monymusk, obtained a Crown Charter erecting the town and lands of Monymusk into a burgh of barony. His heir, also named William, bought additional land and was created a baronet by Charles I in 1626.
The house was later expanded into an L-plan, with the addition of a north-east wing (60 feet long) and a south wing (43 feet long). This was anchored by a circular south-east tower, very likely one of the surviving corner towers from the estate's original barmekin, or defensive perimeter wall. Both new wings were a single story with an attic.
During the Scottish Civil War between the Covenanters and Royalists, Sir William Forbes, 4th Laird and 2nd Baronet of Monymusk, joined the Covenanter commander Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyll, at Dunnottar Castle in April 1644. He remained in the field when the Royalist leader James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, marched on Monymusk. Montrose, however, spared the estate in recognition of the hospitality shown to him by Sir William’s wife, Jean Burnett of Leys.
The house did not escape a different kind of threat: mounting debt. Sir William’s grandson, Sir William Forbes, 4th Baronet of Monymusk, was declared bankrupt in 1712 and forced to sell the estate to Sir Francis Grant, Lord Cullen. Cullen assigned his son Archibald as the factor, or estate manager, on his 20th birthday in 1716.
Archibald Grant, later Lord Cullen, 2nd Baronet, vastly improved the House of Monymusk and the estate. Using builder Alexander Jaffrey of Kingswells, he transformed the house's silhouette entirely. He removed the original battlements down to the corbel table, added a flat, platformed roof, and inserted a high library with a fine Carolean-style ceiling into the west end of the main block, with two further storeys of bedrooms above the older north-east wing. He rebuilt the south wing as a full three storeys, retaining original woodwork on its first and second floors, and in 1721 added the estate offices, still little altered today.
In 1886, Sir Archibald's great-grandson Robert Grant remodeled the house and undertook improvements to the farm buildings. Architect J. M. Dick Peddie restored the great hall's heraldic emblazoning above the fireplace, added an oriel bay window to the north-east wing, and remodeled the south wing's ground floor with a new porch and bow window. Two years later, a new south-west wing was added, along with a two-story library wing incorporating an older oillet (a narrow defensive window slit) preserved in its north wall.
Today, the Monymusk Estate is owned by Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk and Cullen, 13th Bt. The estate covers about twenty square miles and includes the village of Monymusk, farmland, forestry and House of Monymusk. The Estate lets rental properties, land for grazing, tenant farms, runs a farming operation, and manages a cattle herd.
The House of Monymusk is one of the most revealing mirrors of the Forbes spirit: steady, thoughtful, industrious, and deeply rooted in the land. This estate manager and philosopher values stability, agriculture, and enlightened stewardship. Its evolution from a modest laird’s dwelling to a Georgian model estate reflects the ambitions and disciplined intellect of the Forbes baronets who shaped it. Monymusk stands as a testament to a legacy built on improvement, order, and a deep, enduring relationship with the land itself.
Excerpted from Forbes: A Story of Stone by B. R. Forbes, copyright 2026.
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