SLAVERY

A Scottish castle reveals the cruelty and riches of the slave trade, telling a stor y usually hidden by the narratives of British heritage

by David Leigh

Every summer, we rent a cottage from a local landowner in the Glens of Angus, a peaceful, largely agricultural district in the foothills of the Grampians. The royal estate at Balmoral, 30 miles away on the other side of the mountains, is probably better known to tourists. We like this obscure part of the world because my wife grew up on a farm here, and so she knows people.

Foraging my way through the beech woods in the usual autumn drizzle, on a hunt for chanterelles, I gaze up the high, bare slopes of the hill of Cat Law and see a romantic vision on the skyline: the derelict battlements of Balintore Castle, a fairytale scene with conical turrets of antique fishtail slate. It is easy to imagine Rapunzel letting down her long hair from its Disneyesque towers.

Its owner, David Johnston, a former video games designer, bought the castle from Angus council for £80,000 and has selflessly dedicated more than a decade of his life to reviving it. The previous owners had abandoned it to dry rot and rats. An over-optimistic Taiwanese developer had proposed to turn it into a casino—but promptly disappeared. Balintore was listed as a Category Aarchitectural treasure (as per the Scottish scheme for listed buildings). Historic Environment Scotland, a government agency, saw it as one of the country’s most outstanding “buildings at risk”. Now paying visitors can pass the night there, experiencing the ruins of a grander age.

Johnston has indeed done his bit to rescue this “shooting lodge”, which was knocked up in 1860 in a mishmash of styles by a fashionable Victorian architect, William Burn, who made a London living catering to the fantasies of the rich. Tartanry was in vogue thanks to Prince Albert’s Balmoral Castle, built not long before that in 1856.

But if only that was the end of this building’s history. As I discovered, Balintore has a less than savoury past. Scratch the surface and the shameful truth of Britain’s wealth, generated by the transatlantic slave trade, emerges. As Johnston wrote in 2015, on his blog chronicling the castle’s restoration, he was “quite badly shaken” when he found out the truth.

Balintore, with its faux-medieval style, was built by David Lyon, a past relative of King Charles through his Scottish grandmother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the late Queen Mother). According to the Gazetteer for Scotland, an encyclopaedia of Scottish geography and history published since 1885, Lyon had “inherited a fortune made by his family through investments in the East India Company”. This discreet mention is misleading: Lyon’s fortune came from Jamaica, not the East Indies—and the source of his riches lay in the darkest underbelly of British history.