Scottish Culture

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, the Romantic poet Lord Byron spent much of his childhood in Royal Deeside, most famously inspiring his poem Lachin y Gair, or Dark Lochnagar. The Lord Byron room evokes the flamboyant complexity of this early celebrity, from wallpaper patterned with thistles and daffodils to a custom writing desk and dandy’s coat.

The first Jacobite rising began in Braemar in 1715. Later, ‘Colonel’ Anne McIntosh of Clan Farquharson supported Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, and Flora MacDonald famously helped him escape after the Battle of Culloden. The Jacobite emblem of the white rose appears throughout the Jacobite Risings room, alongside a framed fragment of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tartan.

The natural world was a central source of creative inspiration throughout the Victorian period. The Zoology room is dedicated to the Scottish naturalist and ornithologist William MacGillivray, who was professor of natural history at Marischal College in Aberdeen in the early-19th century. A pattern of tigers and cranes decorates the walls, in addition to watercolours and prints of birds and animals.

Allan Ramsay was an eminent portrait artist of the Enlightenment period, whose many famous subjects included Queen Charlotte and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Sylvan wallpaper by Morris & Co. forms the backdrop for portraits of the artist in the Allan Ramsay room, while windows look out onto the equally idyllic setting of the Fife Arms garden, designed by Jinny Blom.

Flora MacDonald was a supporter of the Jacobite cause and aided the Bonnie Prince’s escape after the Battle of Culloden. Immortalised in popular culture as a Jacobite figurehead, she was painted several times by Allan Ramsay and her daring rescue is the subject of the Skye Boat Song. In the Flora MacDonald room, elegant blue latticed wallpaper is joined by portraits of MacDonald and antique furnishings.

The Architecture & Design room takes its inspiration from the architect Alexander Marshall Mackenzie, who remodelled the original Fife Arms building and was also commissioned to design the nearby Mar Lodge in 1895. The room is filled with architectural motifs and has a ceiling adorned with a collection of antlers that recalls, on a smaller scale, the epic assembly in the Stag Ballroom at Mar Lodge.

In the late 18th century, the work of several travel and picaresque writers inspired interest in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Chief among them were James Boswell, who wrote The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with his great friend Samuel Johnson, and the writer and naturalist Thomas Pennant. The Travel Literature room celebrates these writers, with grand landscapes by artists of the Scottish School on the walls and a portrait of Boswell hanging above the bed.

The Astronomy room takes its inspiration from the 19th-century astronomer and physicist Johann von Lamont, who was born in a hamlet near Braemar. He was to become the director of the Bogenhausen Observatory in Munich and has craters on both the Moon and Mars named after him. The Astronomy room is an interplanetary experience with Sixties and Op Art influences, decorated with contemporary paintings of the night sky and a knitted orrery.

The Explorer room offers an adventure into Africa through a Scottish lens, inspired by the explorer and writer James Bruce from Stirlingshire. Bruce is best known for his 1770 expedition in Ethiopia to find the source of the Blue Nile, a journey he recorded in a five-volume opus. Statuary, baskets and ephemera are set against the blooms of a ‘Palampore’ wallpaper, based on a design from 1730.

Born in a village to the east of Braemar, the fiddler James Scott Skinner became one of Scotland’s most famous performers during the Victorian period. Initially part of a travelling orchestra, he became a dance master in the royal household at Balmoral. The Highland Music & Dance room has a theatrical energy inspired by Skinner, curated around the centrepiece of a headboard that is a fan of twenty violins.

Dr Elsie Inglis is one of Scotland’s greatest medical pioneers and suffragists, best known for her work during the First World War. Born in the Himalayan foothills of India, her family returned to Scotland in the 1870s where she enrolled at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women. In the Elsie Inglis room, antique apothecary bottles are juxtaposed with floral embroidery and framed X-ray images.

Both a soldier and a military engineer, General Gerorge Wade built thirty bridges in the Highlands in the early-18th century. The finely designed Bridges room adopts an architectural theme, with its Pugin-esque headboard and collage of forty-eight set squares arranged upon the ceiling. Framed period photographs depict local bridges, while the bedside lampshades have survey maps hidden on the inside.

Princess Frances Dolgorouki, affectionately known as Fanny, was married to Prince Alexis Dolgorouki. The daughter of a wealthy businessman from Aberdeen, she took a lease on nearby Braemar Castle after her marriage in 1898, where she hosted many lavish society dinners over the next 25 years. This opulent room channels the character of the Dolgoroukis and is rich in colour and pattern.

Celebrated every September in Braemar and loyally attended by the royal family since 1848, the Royal Highland Games and annual Gathering have origins stretching back to the 11th century. The Royal Highland Games room explores this rich provenance through pictures and photographs that celebrate local competitors and artworks inspired by the spectacle of the occasion.