Cluny Castle, Aberdeenshire The home of Cosmo and Bronya Linzee Gordon
Never previously described in COUNTRY LIFE, this outstanding Scottish castle is architectural testimony to the exceptional wealth of its creator. John Goodall reports on its history and recent revival
ON Tuesday, April 5, 1830, The Times carried a report on a recent electoral scandal in the notorious rotten boroughs of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, Dorset. Drawing on the ev idence of a court case, it was revealed that a sitting MP, Col John Gordon of Cluny, ‘a man of large landed estate and considerable wealth as well as of considerable ambition’, had secretly supported the campaign of Edward Sugden—later Lord Chancellor—to be returned to Parliament. He had done so in competition with his own brother-in-law and to the detriment of his young nephew’s interest (of whom he was guardian). All this for the hope of a peerage. The report mocked the colonel’s unfulfilled ambition to become ‘Thegn of Cluny’ and quoted a letter in which the disappointed nobleman estimated the cost of his bid at the astonishing sum of £40,000.
The colonel—a predictably staunch opponent of Parliamentary reform—abandoned his political career and used his connections to torpedo the connected court case. His bid for a title, however, was only one element of his determined pursuit of self-aggrandisement. The other was the ongoing remodelling of his Aberdeenshire seat, which had been purchased by his grandfather and namesake several decades earlier. John Gordon Snr is a figure of unknown parentage, first documented in 1740 as an Edinburgh merchant. He was also seemingly a kinsman to Cosmo, 3rd Duke of Gordon, whom he served as a factor, and after whom he named his eldest son. A reputed miser, ‘to whom every shilling he got within his fingers stuck’ (as one anonymous contemporary asserted), he enriched himself in the cheap land market created by the ’45 Jacobite Rising.
Cluny, which had been owned historically by two different branches of the Gordon family, was part of the estate he amassed. In 1753, he petitioned for permission to assume the arms of the Gordons of Cluny, in effect conflating his own ancestry with theirs. At the time, the castle was a 17th-century tower house laid out on a so-called Z-plan; it comprised a central, rectangular block with two towers projecting from it at opposite corners. A surviving inscription suggests that this building was completed in 1604 by Thomas Gordon, a grandson of Alexander Gordon, 3rd Earl of Huntly. It stood on a natural eminence and was surrounded in the 18th century by marsh, probably the remains of an encircling moat. In an exhaustive analysis published i
