On the morning of February 6th, 1952, King George VI was found dead in his bed at Sandringham House, and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, was 51 years old, widowed in the prime of her middle age, stripped overnight of the identity she had built her entire adult life around. She was no longer queen, she was no longer the first lady of the realm.
She retreated from public life, shuttering herself first at Sandringham, and then at Royal Lodge in Windsor, still draped in widow’s weeds, and the prospect of returning to any public role seemed to her unthinkable. Four months later, in June 1952, she was driving through the countryside near the village of May, on the extreme northeastern tip of the Scottish mainland, when something caught her eye through a grove of trees that had been stunted and twisted over decades by the gales off the Pentland Firth, until they grew horizontally, rather than vertically, bent permanently away from the sea, like figures flinching from a slap. Through these contorted branches, a castle was just visible, squat, stone-built, Z-plan towers at each end, a Union flag hanging limp from a pole, standing perhaps 400 yards from the sea, with an unobstructed view across the Firth to the Orkney Islands. It was, according to everyone who saw it
that summer, in a condition of almost theatrical dereliction. No electricity, no running water, no bathrooms, the roof partly blown off in a gale the previous January. Sections of the west wing barely standing. Demolition was under active consideration, and the only realistic recovery from the building was the value of the lead on the roof.
When the Queen Mother heard this, something ignited in her, and the account preserved by the Castle of Mey Trust has her declaring, “Never. It’s part of Scotland’s heritage. I’ll save it.” She visited it, looked at the panoramic view of Orkney from the drawing room window, looked at the gun loops on the ground floor, and the corbeled turrets, and the checkered stonework, and the stunted trees, and the sea.
The castle had been on the market for months. Its owner, Captain Frederick Bouhier-Imbert Terry, who had bought it in 1929, could no longer afford to maintain it, and had been attempting to find a buyer without success. The estate’s farms had already been sold off.
The castle itself was simply an expensive liability with an expensive ruin sitting on it. And demolition was under active consideration. She asked Lady Doris, “Do you think it would suit me?” She is said to have turned and murmured looking at the crumbling towers, “How sad it looks, just like me.” The castle was formally purchased in August 1952 for approximately 100 pounds.
The negotiated price reflecting a near symbolic transaction rather than a market valuation. And some accounts suggest that Imbert Terry offered to give the castle away entirely, and that the figure of 100 pounds was settled on as a matter of propriety on both sides. She bought it in August 1952 for approximately 100 pounds.
For the next 50 years, she came back every summer and every autumn. And every time she crossed its threshold, she was in the only house she had ever personally owned. Today, we walk through the castle the Queen Mother bought after the King died, and the life she built there alone. In June 1952, barely 4 months after the death, the Queen Mother accepted an invitation that turned out to be one of the hinge moments of her life.
She traveled to the extreme northeastern tip of the Scottish mainland to stay with her close friends, Commander Claire Viner and his wife, Lady Doris Viner, at their home called The House of the Northern Gate at Dunnet Head in Caithness. Dunnet Head is the most northerly point on the British mainland, more northerly even than John o’ Groats, which the tourist trail mythology tends to misidentify as the apex.
It is a headland of spectacular austerity. The land drops into the Pentland Firth in vertical cliffs. The lighthouse stands white against the gray sea, and the wind arrives from the north with nothing to slow it. The Queen Mother had known the Viners for years and had visited this stretch of coast before the war.
And something about the extreme north had always answered something in her. She had told people privately that she slept better in Caithness than anywhere else in the world. A statement that seems improbable until you stand on that coast and understand how completely it empties the mind. For a woman fleeing the consequences of a public identity that had just been stripped from her, that emptiness was not desolate. It was merciful.
Within weeks of discovering the castle, she had written to her treasurer, Sir Arthur Penn, in a letter that has since become the most candid document of her emotional state in that first year of widowhood. When I was staying up in Caithness, I passed a dear little castle down by the sea, and when I visited it, I discovered it was going to be sold for nothing, just the value of the lead on the roof.
This seemed so sad that I thought I would buy it and escape there occasionally when life becomes hideous. It might be rather fun to have a small house so far away. The air is lovely, and one looks at Orkney from the drawing room. The only sad thing is that part of the roof was blown off in the great gale last January, and I shall have to put in electric light, of course.
The grid runs past the door, luckily. Do you think me mad? The phrase when life becomes hideous is as honest an expression of her grief as any she ever committed to paper. The instinct to frame the purchase as escapism rather than reinvention was characteristic. She had not yet decided in June 1952 that she was beginning a new life.
She thought she was finding a hiding place. She had no way of knowing yet that the hiding place would become the most personally meaningful thing she ever built. Her first cousin Margaret Rhodes, who later visited May and understood both its bleakness and its pull, put it simply, it was very flat and desolate, but it was a lifesaver for her.
The castle was built between 1566 and 1572 by George Sinclair, the fourth Earl of Caithness, for his second son William, and it is a Z-plan tower house, a distinctively Scottish fortified form in which a central rectangular block is flanked by two square towers at diagonally opposite corners, creating a layout that allows defenders on the towers to cover all four faces of the main block with flanking fire.
The Z-plan was the dominant form of Scottish tower house construction in the late 16th century, and the Castle of May is one of its most exposed exemplars, built not to impress from a distance as an English manor house might be, but to hold, to survive, to function in a landscape that offered no natural shelter and no room for weakness.
The ground floor bristles with gun loops. The corbeled turrets project from the corners of the towers with that distinctive checkered stonework, and the building stands barely above the surrounding flat ground, relying on its own thick walls rather than any commanding position. The Sinclairs were a violent family in a violent time.
William Sinclair, for whom the castle was built, was killed in 1573 at the family’s other seat, Girnigoe Castle, by his older brother John. John himself had been imprisoned at Girnigoe by their tyrannical father, the fourth Earl, after attempting an escape. And when he was eventually released, or more precisely when his imprisonment became so prolonged that he was found in a state of near starvation, he did not survive long.
The castle passed son, George Sinclair, who founded the collateral family of the Sinclairs of Mey, and whose descendants held the property for the next two and a half centuries. By the early 19th century, the earldom was in financial difficulty. And in 1819, the 12th Earl engaged the Edinburgh architect William Burn, who added a grand entrance porch, a staircase hall with a handsome cast iron balustrade, and a dining room wing extending to the southeast.
Burn also reoriented the castle’s character. Where the original Z plan building had faced aggressively seaward, Burn’s alterations turned the principal frontage southward toward the agricultural land and away from the Pentland Firth, producing a building with a kind of double personality. The raw military exterior of the 16th century now dressed, on one side at least, in the more sociable clothes of the 19th.
In 1889, the 15th Earl of Caithness died at only 30 years old, unmarried and childless, and bequeathed the castle under an unusual condition. It could pass to a friend and neighbor, but only if that friend adopted the name Sinclair. The condition was accepted, the name was changed, and the castle passed out of direct Sinclair descent into a period of more attenuated ownership.
In 1929, it was bought by Captain Frederick Bouhier Imbert-Terry, who replanted shelterbelts of woodland around the building. The same stands of trees bent by decades of gales into their characteristic horizontal posture that the Queen Mother would later glimpse from her car window, but left the structure largely unaltered.
During the Second World War, the castle was requisitioned as an officer’s rest home and then as a billet for coastal defense troops guarding the approaches to Scapa Flow and the Pentland Firth, and the approaches to Scapa Flow were strategically critical. Caithness was thick with military activity during the conflict.
When peace returned, the practical consequences for the castle were characteristic of the post-war period. The estate farms had been sold off to cover costs, windows were missing, sections of the roof had lost their slates, the west wing was in severe danger of collapse, and by 1950, the castle was uninhabitable.
By 1952, it was condemned. Into this condition, into a building that had survived the Sinclair family’s fratricide, two centuries of Caithness winters, and a world war, and was on the point of finally succumbing to simple neglect, the newly widowed Queen Mother walked in the summer of 1952, looked around, and decided it deserved better.
The scale of what the Queen Mother had purchased only became fully apparent once she began the work of making it habitable. There was no electricity. The wiring had been stripped or had failed entirely. There was no running water in the modern sense. There were no bathrooms. The west wing was barely standing, and several rooms in the main block were open to the sky.
Historic Environment Scotland’s retrospective assessment was that the castle had been threatened with demolition, meaning that but for the Queen Mother’s intervention, it would not have survived into the present century. She appointed a local architect, Hugh Macdonald of the Thurso firm Sinclair Macdonald and Son, to oversee the restoration.
And this was the first of many decisions that made the Castle of Mey different from every other royal residence. She did not summon London professionals. She engaged the regional firm, used local contractors, drew on local knowledge, and Macdonald was exactly what the project required.
Someone who understood Caithness construction, Caithness stone, Caithness weather, and the particular engineering challenges of working on a building that had been allowed to deteriorate for years. By 1953, the main body of the house, the central block and the two towers, had been made weather tight and habitable, with plastering and painting work continuing through 1954, and the west wing was not fully repaired until 1960.
Queen Elizabeth II funded a substantial portion of the renovation costs, covering in particular the installation of the bathrooms and the new electrical system. And this was both practical support and an act of filial love. Mother and daughter were genuinely close. Their relationship deepened rather than strained by the reversal of their official positions, and the Queen’s funding of Mey’s restoration was a concrete expression of her understanding of what the castle meant to her mother’s recovery. In 1954, the Queen Mother commissioned interior designs from the London decorating firm Lenygon and Morant, whose proposals were characteristically grand. A gothicized stair hall, Chinese wallpaper with bamboo battens in the dining room, and a range of treatments that would have given the castle the polished finish of a well-appointed London residence transported north. The Queen Mother accepted almost none of it. She scaled back their proposals at
every stage, consistently substituting the simpler option for the more elaborate one. And this was not parsimony, but a deliberate aesthetic and emotional choice. She wanted the castle to feel different from her formal life, not like an extension of it. She had palaces for formality. This was something else, a place where she could, as she had told Sir Arthur Penn, escape when life became hideous.
The resulting interiors reflected a sensibility that visitors who expected royal grandeur found both surprising and disarming. Lennigone and Morant’s chintz furnishings appeared in some rooms, lending warmth and domesticity. But alongside them, the spaces were filled with items of purely sentimental, rather than monetary value.
Portraits of the previous Sinclair owners, and the kind of modest watercolors and cheap prints that a person accumulates because they like them, rather than because they cost money. She also restored the castle’s original name, regarding Barrogill Castle, the 19th century Victorianization, with something close to contempt, and changed it back to the Castle of May, as one of her first acts of ownership.
The resulting interiors were a revelation to visitors who expected royal grandeur and encountered instead something more idiosyncratic and more alive. Alongside Georgian dining room chairs and a genuine 16th century tapestry in the drawing room, the spaces were filled with modest watercolors, cheap prints, and items of purely sentimental, rather than monetary value.
Uh portraits of the previous Sinclair owners hung on the walls, and prominently displayed alongside them were portraits of prize Aberdeen Angus bulls from the herd she would establish on the estate, Cattle whose genealogies she tracked with the same attention she brought to racing form and who occupied wall space as full family members.
In the drawing room, a collection of fluffy toys and tourist memorabilia began accumulating almost immediately. Many of them gifts from house guests who had taken day trips to the Orkney Islands and returned with the most comically useless thing they could find as part of a running joke that delighted the Queen Mother and had the useful social effect of making nervous visitors laugh.
A gnome became permanently entangled in the baroque curls of a George the Third pier glass over the drawing room fireplace and stayed there for decades because she liked it there. His presence made the room immediately less frightening for first-time visitors who laughed at the gnome and thereby broke the ice and this was entirely intentional.
The Queen Mother understood atmosphere the way a stage director understands and she arranged the room’s contents so that the room itself performed a function. Her study was the room that came closest to autobiography. On the desk photographs of King George the Sixth occupied a central and permanent position.
Two of him alone and one of the two of them together with Princess Elizabeth. She did not redecorate around them or move them to peripheral positions as time passed. They were present at every one of her visits for the remaining 50 years of her life. This was not morbidity, it was continuity, the quiet insistence of a woman who had loved deeply and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Above the dining room window, she commissioned her stone cipher carved in local sandstone and at the front door she installed a pair of lamps. On the exterior cannons were positioned at the entrance. Every small decision was a signature, the mark of an owner who was not merely occupying a building, but conversing with it.
Perhaps the most extraordinary act of will in the entire Castle of Mey story is the garden, because the garden was a project of continuous personal effort over nearly five decades against conditions that should have made it impossible. The castle sits on a gently north sloping plateau, barely 400 yards from the Pentland Firth shoreline.
The Firth is one of the roughest and most powerful bodies of water in the northern hemisphere, and the winds that come across it from the north arrive with nothing between them and the Norwegian coast to soften them. Those winds do far more than affect comfort. They physically uproot plants, strip soil, carry salt spray inland, and create growing conditions that botanical orthodoxy deems incompatible with most temperate climate garden plants.
The documented claim that winds off the Firth have been known to lift cabbages out of the ground and throw them 20 yards is not hyperbole. It is the lived reality of gardening at this latitude. The castle had one natural advantage that the Queen Mother recognized and built around. The Great Wall of Mey, an ancient stone wall that extends east and west from the building, reaching heights of up to 15 ft in places, and creates on the protected south side a microclimate substantially warmer and calmer than the surrounding landscape. This wall became the spine of everything she created, and to the west of the castle, she developed a 2-acre walled garden, adding further internal hedges as windbreaks within the outer enclosure. She also created what became known as the Shell Garden, an intimate space closer to the castle walls, planted with her most beloved flowers, pansies, primulas, carnations, and most
particularly the Albertine rose. The Albertine, a rambler bred in France in 1921, salmon pink, intensely fragrant, vigorous enough to climb stone walls and survive wind if given adequate shelter, was one of the great loves of her horticultural life. She had grown it at Royal Lodge in Windsor and at Glamis, and she nurtured it into abundance along the protected walls at May, where it flowered every summer in quantities that visitors found genuinely startling given the surrounding landscape.
Outside the shell garden, the kitchen garden grew vegetables specifically chosen for salt wind resistance. The growing season was short, the conditions extreme, but the walled garden produced real food, a working kitchen garden, not a decorative one. The Queen Mother had been a serious gardener her entire life, a practitioner rather than a patron of gardens, and what she brought to May was expertise.
Decades of practical knowledge about plants, soil, drainage, shelter, and the specific patience required to garden in difficult conditions. She had grown up partly at Glamis Castle in Angus, where the gardens were and remain among the finest in Scotland. As Duchess of York in the 1920s, she had taken a largely derelict garden at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park and transformed it over years of personal labor into something considerable.
At Sandringham, she had worked on the formal gardens, and at Clarence House, the garden she created was personally tended. In 1958, she extended her hold on the May landscape by purchasing Longoe Farm, a cliff-top working farm linked to the castle by a track running along the Pentland Firth shore.
Situated on one of the most exposed and northerly working farms on the British mainland, it was here that she established her pedigree Aberdeen Angus cattle herd and her connection to the breed was not manufactured. The Aberdeen Angus had been bred in northeast Scotland since the early 19th century and the Bowes-Lyon family’s Glamis estates lay within that territory.
She understood these cattle from childhood and came to May with an existing appreciation of what a well-bred Aberdeen Angus animal should look like and perform like. And at May, she became a serious competitive breeder showing animals at agricultural shows, entering the sale ring, and tracking bloodlines with the same sustained attention she brought to her racing interests.
The prize bull portraits that hung in the dining room alongside the Sinclair ancestors were not whimsical decoration but records of genuine achievement. The herd also had a practical function. It helped the estate generate income, making the farm financially self-sustaining, and reducing the burden on the trust that the Queen Mother knew would eventually inherit responsibility for the property.
From 1955 onwards, the year the major restoration work was sufficiently complete to make the castle genuinely comfortable, the Castle of May became one of the two fixed poles of the Queen Mother’s annual calendar alongside the more public fixture of Ascot. Every August, she traveled to May and stayed for approximately 3 weeks and every October she returned for approximately 10 days.
The August visit aligned with the local season, the May Highland Games, the farm’s summer productivity, the long northern evenings that made outdoor life feasible even at this latitude. The October visit was something quieter and more private. The castle emptied of summer visitors, the garden stripped by autumn, the sea turned a darker gray.
Life at May was organized around informality in a way that no other royal residence permitted. Princess Margaret, who visited regularly but maintained what was diplomatically described as a mixed relationship with the physical experience, famously referred to it as “Mummy’s drafty castle.
” An affectionate exasperation that captured the gap between the castle’s emotional significance and its physical comfort. The wind found every window frame, the heating, while adequate by Caithness standards, was not adequate by palace standards. And none of this troubled the Queen Mother in the slightest. She had chosen this place precisely because it was not a palace.
The house party style she maintained was loose and convivial. She invited the people she genuinely enjoyed, rather than those who served protocol, and she expected her guests to find their own amusement during the days while she herself would be in the garden or walking the farm, or attending to correspondence from the study.
Evenings gathered the party together with a full-hearted enthusiasm that several accounts describe as entirely unlike the careful formality of court entertaining. Scottish reels were danced, songs were sung, and the entertainments were genuinely raucous. She threw parties that lasted until 2:00 in the morning and then rose early to walk the grounds before breakfast, and she was, by temperament, a woman who found the energy for pleasure renewable rather than finite.
And Caithness seemed to replenish it faster than anywhere. Her personality at May was an undiluted version of the personality that made her the most popular senior royal of the 20th century. She was formidably charming, not in the practiced manner of official duty, but in the natural manner of someone who was genuinely interested in the people she met, and had the gift of making each of them feel, briefly, as though they were the most interesting person in the room.
She was also with those she trusted entirely unguarded. The picnics deserve their own paragraph. The Queen Mother did not picnic in the genteel sense of a rug and a hamper on a clement afternoon, but in the full Caithness sense, outdoors regardless of weather, on the clifftops or in the shelter of a headland, with proper food and proper drink and proper conversation, the wind battering the wicker furniture and the haar rolling in off the firth.
The purchase of the Castle of Mey is inseparable from the broader story of one of history’s most extraordinary transformations of widowhood into purposeful life. George VI died on February 6th, 1952, and he was 56, and his wife had been queen consort for 15 years, the role into which she had poured every ounce of her capabilities and from which she had drawn her entire public identity.
Before her marriage in 1923, she had been Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, a Scottish aristocrat’s daughter of no particular political consequence, and it was the marriage and the extraordinary chain of circumstances that made her husband king that made her who she was. She had worn the identity of queen consort so completely that she had inhabited it, inventing much of its modern template as she went.
The warmth during the Blitz, the refusal to evacuate the children from London, the tours of bombed East End streets in her pale coat and pearls. It was Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister, who broke the spell of her withdrawal, visiting her personally, making the case for return, and persuading her that her grief, however valid, could not be allowed to become permanent withdrawal.
What happened next was one of the more quietly astonishing second acts in modern public life. Once she re-engaged, the Queen Mother did not return to duty cautiously or tentatively, but with a ferocity that surprised even those closest to her. She accumulated a portfolio of patronages and appointments that eventually numbered well over 300 organizations.
She served as Chancellor of the University of London. She delivered speeches, opened buildings, attended race meetings, first nights, agricultural shows, and regimental dinners with equal enthusiasm and with the same quality of attention. The quality that made every person she spoke to feel for the duration of the exchange that they were the only person in the room.
She became Warden of the Cinque Ports, that ancient medieval title carried by Wellington, Pitt, and Churchill before her, from 1978 until her death, the first woman to hold it. In the immediate aftermath of the King’s death, Britain found itself in a constitutional curiosity. There were briefly three living queens, Queen Elizabeth II having acceded at 25, Queen Mary, widow of George V, still alive and formidably present, and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, occupying the peculiar middle position, widowed monarch’s wife, mother of the reigning sovereign, neither retired from public life nor holding any formal constitutional role. The title she adopted, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, was partly her own design. Both Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary had been informally called the Queen Mother during their respective widowhoods, but the formulation had never been a
formal styling, and she chose it for the practical reason of avoiding confusion, both she and her daughter being named Elizabeth. But the title suited her perfectly. She traveled internationally on behalf of the Crown to an extent that her schedule sometimes more closely resembled an active monarch’s than a retired one’s.
She drank gin and Dubonnet with three ice cubes and a slice of lemon as her daily ritual. A preference that passed into national mythology. She backed racehorses with informed passion rather than social habit and had a loudspeaker system installed at Clarence House so that racing commentary could reach her wherever she was in the building.
She ran up a 7 million pound overdraft at Coutts Bank, the woman who bought a castle for 100 pounds. Having no difficulty maintaining a lifestyle on a scale that required a 7 million pound credit facility. She reportedly once signed a check for 4 million pounds that her account could not cover. And she appears to have regarded this as less a crisis than an administrative inconvenience.
Through all of it, the Castle of Mey served as the one place that was irrefutably, legally, exclusively hers. The only property she ever personally owned. Every other home she occupied in her 50 years of widowhood, Clarence House in London, Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, the Birkhall wing of the Balmoral estate, came with the institutional apparatus of royal occupancy.
Mey was different in kind. She had chosen it herself, paid for it herself, supervised every decision of its restoration, designed its garden from the ground up, stocked its farm with her own chosen breed of cattle, and entertained whoever she wished within its walls without reference to protocol or precedent. The relationship the Queen Mother built with the community of Caithness over nearly 50 years was neither calculated nor performative.
And the evidence for its authenticity lies not in grand gestures, but in the specific repeated personal texture of how she engaged with the place and its people. She was not Scottish in the Caithness sense. She was a Borders aristocrat by origin, an Angus Highlander by association with Glamis, and a Southern Englishwoman by the weight of her adult life’s geography.
Caithness was chosen territory rather than ancestral territory, and the Caithness people seem to have understood and valued that distinction. She had come there voluntarily in grief and had stayed voluntarily in love with the landscape for the rest of her life. She attended Canisbay Parish Church, the Church of Scotland Kirk, 3 miles from John O’Groats, during every visit to the castle, not the Church of England of her formal religious life, but the local Scottish Presbyterian congregation worshipping in the manner of the place. She went because it was the church of the community she had joined, not because it was the denomination of her title. And the local people who attended that Kirk alongside her, farmers, fishermen, the families of Canisbay, encountered their Queen Mother not in a receiving line, but in a pew. King Charles III now attends the same church during his August visits. A particular story captures the quality of these relationships.
On one occasion, a young local man named Alex, described as musical, was among a group the Queen Mother encountered during her stay. And on learning of his gift, she asked him directly with characteristic warmth and without the slightest condescension to bring his guitar along when he next visited. He did, and he played for her, and this is the behavior of someone who genuinely liked music and genuinely liked people, and made no particular distinction between those two facts.
In 1970, the community of Mey and Canisbay organized a local gathering to celebrate her 70th birthday, which fell on August 4th, and the event proved so successful that it became an annual fixture, the Mey Highland Games held on the first Saturday of August at John o’ Groats. The Queen Mother attended as patron for the remaining three decades of her life, and her presence was not the stiff ceremonial attendance of a figurehead, but the genuine participation of someone who knew many of the local people personally, followed the competitions with real interest, and contributed to the atmosphere in the way that a well-loved regular rather than a visiting dignitary does. When she died in 2002, the games did not stop, and they are still held. Her formal commitment to the community was expressed through the trust she established in 1996, which included among its explicit objectives the undertaking of projects for the benefit of the local community.
In practical terms, this meant free access to the castle grounds for local schoolchildren, employment of local workers on the farm and in the castle, and a sustained investment in the agricultural economy of Caithness through the Aberdeen Angus herd and the Cheviot sheep flock that the trust maintained.
Dozens of such encounters accumulated over 50 years of visits, leaving in their wake a community that understood itself as genuinely known by the woman who came back every August for half a century. Visitors who tour the Castle of Mey today encounter something unusual in the world of British heritage properties, rooms that feel less like a carefully curated museum exhibit than a suspended moment in a deeply personal life.
The Castle has been preserved largely as the Queen Mother left it, the official line being that the interiors remain just as she left them. And the effect for a visitor attuned to what they are looking at is intimate in a way that palaces cannot achieve. The tour moves through the front hall, the library, the equerry’s room, the drawing room, the dining room, the butler’s pantry, and the kitchen.
In the front hall, on a mirror stand near the entrance, the seashells sit exactly where the Queen Mother placed them after her frequent walks along the beach. Collected by hand, carried back, set down without being curated or arranged for display. She walked to the shore regularly during her Caithness visits, alone or with a companion, and brought back whatever caught her eye.
And the shells on the stand are the physical residue of those walks. Small, personal, and completely unceremonious. They tell you within seconds of entering that this was not a house managed for grandeur. The drawing room, which one review describes with the entirely apt phrase comfortable and homely, was originally part of the castle’s great hall, and the Queen Mother made it the social heart of the house.
Its contents a taxonomy of her character. A 16th-century tapestry on one wall, alongside modest watercolors, and presentation pictures of negligible monetary value. The George the III pier glass with its permanent gnome, the accumulated fluffy toys and Orkney knickknacks of 50 years of house parties. The equerry’s room deserves mention as a room that speaks to the castle’s dual reality.
It is, by definition, a working room, the space occupied by whatever member of the Queen Mother’s household was on duty. And its presence reminds visitors that the Castle of Mey, however informal in atmosphere, was always staffed, always organized around royal security and logistics, and always operating within the framework of a household, however modest that household was by royal standards.
The dining room, completed in its final form in 1960, offers the most concentrated example of her aesthetic logic. The portraits of prize Aberdeen Angus bulls hang alongside those of the castle’s previous Sinclair owners, genealogies both human and bovine accorded equivalent wall space and equivalent dignity.
The local architect Hugh Macdonald’s 1959 redesign of the library fireplace, executed in a form quite different from what the London decorators had proposed, is the emblem of a consistent pattern. The local professional’s solution at every point winning out over the London firm’s ambitions. The castle also carries a ghost, that of Lady Fanny Sinclair, a daughter of the fifth Earl, who himself died in 1643, and she is said to appear occasionally in the upper rooms.
The Queen Mother, characteristically, is not recorded as having been troubled by this. In July 1996, the Queen Mother made the most consequential practical decision of her long stewardship. She was 95 years old. She had owned the castle for 44 years, and she was realistic about the future in the particular way that very old people of vigorous constitution sometimes are.
Simultaneously convinced of their own continued vitality and clear-eyed about the arrangements that must be made for what comes after. She established the Queen Elizabeth Castle of Mey Trust, transferred the property and its associated farm to it with an endowment designed to ensure financial viability, and reserved the right to continue using the castle for the remainder of her life.
The trust’s stated objectives were comprehensive: to preserve the castle as a building of historical and architectural interest, to advance public education in history and architecture, to develop the native breeds maintained on the farm, specifically the Aberdeen Angus cattle herd and the North Country Cheviot sheep flock, and to undertake projects for the benefit of the local Caithness community.
Its first president was the Prince of Wales, and the choice was not accidental. Charles’s relationship with his grandmother was one of the most personally important of his life, and one of the stranger consequences of his unusual childhood. Because when Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the throne in 1952, Charles was 3 years old, and the demands of a new reign required his parents’ frequent absence.
During these absences, Charles was largely in the care of the Queen Mother at Royal Lodge. And she was, as the royal biographer Gareth Russell has put it, in some ways a mother figure to Charles just because the Queen became Queen when Charles was so young. She encouraged his sensitivity, his love of music, art, architecture, and the natural world at a stage of his childhood when those tendencies were not invariably welcomed or understood.
She had observed the same temperament in his grandfather, George VI, who had been a shy and anxious man of genuine artistic feeling. And she recognized it with particular tenderness in Charles. Their relationship was also importantly funny. Among the stories that have circulated about the two of them, perhaps the most characteristic is the account of a well-lubricated evening at one of her houses when Charles leaned towards his grandmother and murmured, “Do let’s have another drink.
” The line, and the fact that it apparently required no further argument, captures something essential about what they were to each other. Since her death, Charles, now king, has spent the first week of every August at the Castle of Mey, honoring her birthday on August 4th as he arrives, driving long distances to fish salmon beats on remote rivers, spending afternoons on the deserted island of Stroma, visible from the castle’s upper windows, sitting in the Pentland Firth between the mainland and Orkney, watching birds and making watercolor sketches. He attends the May Highland Games, where he awards the tug-of-war trophy, and worships at Canisbay Kirk. The castle is closed to the public between late July and early August, specifically to accommodate these visits. And when he leaves, it reopens to the 30,000 visitors a year who now make the journey to the northernmost inhabited castle on the British mainland.
When she handed the castle to the trust with Charles as its president, she was making a statement about succession that went beyond the legal transfer of a property. She was saying, in the language of action rather than sentiment, that the spirit of the place, its informality, its northern solitude, its commitment to honest work on the land, would be in competent hands.
The Queen Mother’s last confirmed visit to the Castle of Mey was in the summer of 2001. She was 101 years old, and she made the journey north with the same determination that had characterized every one of her annual visits for the preceding 46 years. She had been suffering intermittent health problems.
She had been using a stick. Her eyesight had declined, and a persistent chest cold had troubled her since the previous Christmas. But she was still attending public engagements. Her final formal engagement was in November 2001, the recommissioning of HMS Ark Royal. After which she largely withdrew to Sandringham, and then to Royal Lodge for the winter.
Princess Margaret, her younger daughter, the one who had called Mey “Mummy’s drafty castle” with that particular mixture of affection and exasperation, died in the early hours of February 9th, 2002, following a final stroke at the age of 71. She had suffered a series of strokes in preceding years, had burns to her feet from a 1999 bathroom accident, and her health had been deteriorating for some time, but her death was a significant blow to a mother who had already outlived every expectation.
For the Queen Mother, 101 years old and increasingly frail, the loss of the child she had watched grow up was something else again. 7 weeks later, on March 30th, 2002 at 3:15 in the afternoon, the Queen Mother died peacefully in her sleep at Royal Lodge, Windsor, with her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, at her side. She was 101 years old.
She had been widowed for exactly 50 years and 7 weeks. She had lived longer than any previous member of the British Royal Family, and had made of those 50 years of widowhood something that no one in the dark spring of 1952 could reasonably have predicted. A full, purposeful, deeply loved public life anchored at its private center by a small castle at the top of Scotland that she had bought on a whim for the value of its lead.
The castle was open to the public in summer 2002, within months of her death. A purpose-built visitor center opened in 2007. The granary building was converted into luxury bed and breakfast accommodation, and an animal center in the converted stables houses donkeys, goats, rare breed pigs, poultry, and sheep for younger visitors.
In 2019, the Queen Elizabeth Castle of Mey Trust was incorporated into the King’s Foundation, the charitable organization bearing Charles’s name and reflecting his ambitions for sustainable agriculture, traditional craft skills, and community benefit. The castle’s objectives and its operational character have not substantially changed.
Only the institutional framework around them has evolved. Approximately 30,000 visitors a year now make the journey to the northernmost inhabited castle on the British mainland. Netflix’s The Crown introduced the Castle of Mey to a global audience of millions in season 1, episode 8, “Pride and Joy”, in which Victoria Hamilton portrayed the Queen Mother’s grief-driven discovery and impulsive purchase of the castle.
And for viewers with no prior knowledge of the property, the dramatization functioned as a parable about finding purpose in unlikely places. A widow buying a ruin because it looked, she said, like her. The scene resonated well beyond the royalist audience that might have been expected to find it meaningful because its emotional logic is entirely universal.
We all recognize the impulse in a moment of loss to do something irreversible and slightly irrational that announces to ourselves and to the world that we are still here. The temptation in telling the story of the Castle of Mey is to frame it as a grief narrative. The widow who retreated to the top of Scotland and built a monument to loss in the landscape of her desolation.
That reading is available in the surface facts. She was newly widowed when she found it. She bought it because it looked sad like her. She displayed photographs of her dead husband on her desk for 50 years. But the reading misses what is actually the more interesting thing happening. What the Queen Mother did at Mey was not to grieve, it was to build.
She took a condemned building and made it habitable with immediate practical decisiveness. She took a destroyed garden and made it bloom in one of the most hostile growing environments in the British Isles. She took a failing farm and turned it into a competitive Aberdeen Angus operation that funded itself and won prizes.
She established community relationships that lasted half a century, invested in local employment, created the conditions for a Highland games that outlasted her death by decades. She created a ritual calendar, August and October, every year without fail, that gave structure to a life that had, on February 6th, 1952, lost every structure it had been built around.
She was widowed at 51 and lived to 101. The photographs on the study desk are not a monument to absence. They are evidence of a personality that saw no contradiction between loving someone irretrievably and fully inhabiting the life that continued after they were gone. She put George the VI’s photographs on the desk in 1952, and they were still there in 2001.
And in the decades between, she danced Scottish reels until 2:00 in the morning, collected seashells from the Pentland Firth shore and left them on the mirror stand without arranging them, grew Albertine roses in conditions that should have killed them, laughed at the gnome she had put in the pier glass, attended the local kirk, asked a young guitarist to come and play for her, watched her cattle win in the show ring, and made her way every October back to a castle that was, by her daughter’s reckoning, drafty. The Castle of Mey is the clearest physical evidence of who Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother actually was. Not the composed pearled figure on the Buckingham Palace steps during the Blitz. That was a performance of a self, however genuine the underlying character. Here, in 19 acres at the top of Scotland, in the only house she ever personally owned, you can see the thing itself. A woman of extraordinary appetite for life who, in the worst moment of that
life chose to save something broken and make it beautiful and kept choosing it every summer and every autumn for the rest of her 100 years.
