Balmoral in the 1850s
Balmoral, as the crow flies, is some 600 miles from London. Before the railways reached the Highlands, the royal couple and their entourage would embark at Woolwich on the new Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert, which had been launched in 1843, and sail up the east coast, followed by a long carriage drive. Balmoral must have seemed secluded, a world apart from the press and smell of London. In the capital, overflowing cesspits had caused cholera to become widespread in the 1840s and culminated in the Great Stink of 1856, when the stench of untreated human effluent in the River Thames was overpowering. Buckingham Palace, built over the culvert-contained Fleet river, did not escape from overflowing drains and a constant stench.
A British Rail poster publicizing the rail line to Deeside, featuring a painting by Kenneth Steel
Queen Victoria and her family pose outside Balmoral, 1896
By the late 1840s the railway line reached as far as Montrose, between Dundee and Aberdeen, and by 1853 Aberdeen itself. A branch line had also been built 16 miles to the West as far as Banchory, and then to Ballater, just five miles from Balmoral, by 1867. In the early days of train travel overnight stops were made for the royal party to sleep at Crewe and again at Perth but with the advent of the Royal Train in the late 1860s they slept on board. Typically the party would leave Windsor Castle after lunch, have tea at Leamington Spa, breakfast the next morning at Perth and be at Balmoral in time for lunch.
With his characteristic vigour Albert set to improving the house and grounds. The immediate landscape was a particular obsession and he enlisted the help of landscape designer James Beattie and painter James Giles. Giles was not only a famous landscape painter of the picturesque and sublime – and an Aberdonian to boot – but also had an extensive practice as a landscape architect working with the owners of Aberdeenshire estates. With these two to help him Albert planted a huge number of trees and attended to the layout of the gardens, including creating new parterres. He redirected roads and created new bridges – Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed one of them, a new bridge of ‘functional elegance’ over the Dee linking Balmoral to the local village of Crathie, in 1857.
But the house was quickly deemed too small for the royal couple, their three children, the Royal Household and 60 attendant servants so the architect of the most recent work to the old house, John Smith of Aberdeen, was commissioned with his son William to once more enlarge the castle.
The first phase of building included new estate buildings and offices and, in due course, a large pre-fabricated corrugated-iron structure to serve as a temporary dining room and ballroom – Albert had been much taken with one he had seen at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Top: Abergeldie Castle, 1900
Above: Victoria and her son Bertie, 1894
In November 1851, a chance presented itself to buy the estate outright. After protracted negotiations Balmoral and its estate of 17,400 acres stretching westward to the summit of Lochnagar was bought for £31,500 (approx. £3 million today), with the neighbouring estates of Birkhall, purchased at the same time for Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (known as Bertie, who would become King Edward VII), and Abergeldie, held on a long lease from the Gordon family.
Abergeldie was besieged during the Jacobite rebellion by John Farquharson of Inverey. When he was defeated at the Pass of Ballater, and the castle relieved, his lands were destroyed, the garrison commander burned everything in a 12-mile radius including up to an estimated 1400 houses. In Victoria’s time Abergeldie Castle was lived in by various members of the royal family, including the future Edward VII (who had abandoned Birkhall as being too small), and Eugenie, ex-Empress of the French. Birkhall is now used by Prince Charles and The Duchess of Cornwall.
In October of the following year, 1852, The Queen and Prince Albert celebrated the purchase of Balmoral with what was to be the first of many cairn-raising ceremonies. Craig Gowan, a prominent position overlooking the house, was selected and the members of the royal family in residence, the household, servants, tenants and their families gathered in a circle to help build the cairn. Victoria wrote in her diary:
‘I placed the first stone, after which Albert laid one, then the children, according to their ages. All the ladies and gentlemen placed one, and then everyone came forward at once, carrying a stone and placing it on the cairn. At last when the cairn, which I think is seven or eight feet high, was nearly completed, Albert climbed up to the top of it, and placed the last stone, after which three cheers were given. This took about an hour during which the piper Angus McKay played, whisky was drunk and merry reels danced on a stone opposite.’
Over the following decades a rash of cairns spread over the hills behind the house celebrating, commemorating or memorializing individuals and events.
The Balmoral Cairns
Eleven stone cairns commemorating important events in the domestic annals of the royal family are clustered on the summits of various hills on the Balmoral estate (with one on the neighbouring Birkhall estate) and a visitors’ trail links those closest together. Victoria and Albert’s inspiration for the cairns may have come from previous owners of Balmoral, the Jacobite Farquharsons, whose remembrance cairn, Cairnaquheen (‘Cam na Cuimhne’ or ‘cairn of remembrance’ was the old war cry of the Farquharsons), stands by the riverside about a mile or so above Balmoral. The cairn acted as a tally – as each member of the clan went off to war he added a stone to the pile. If he returned, he removed one; the stones still left were a poignant reminder of those killed or missing.
After Victoria and Albert’s first cairn, the Purchase Cairn, was built in 1852, others followed to mark the marriages of their children, and what a diverse clan they commemorate. Nine children produced 40 grandchildren, including two kings, five queens and a member of the Reichstag representing the Nazi Party. The history surrounding these cairns is complex but fascinating – showing the interwoven nature of the royal families of Europe and the broad scattering of Victoria and Albert’s progeny.
THE PRINCESS ROYAL
The Princess Royal’s Cairn marks the marriage of Victoria and Albert’s eldest child, Princess Victoria, to the Crown Prince of Prussia, later German Kaiser Friedrich III, at St James’s Palace in 1858. The belligerent Kaiser Wilhelm II, Britain’s enemy in the First World War, was their eldest son. Their seventh child, Sophie, married Constantine I and became Queen of Greece.
ALBERT EDWARD
Albert Edward’s Cairn of 1863, celebrating the future King Edward VII’s marriage to Alexandra, Princess of Denmark, is on the Birkhall estate. Their second son became George V. In 1889 their eldest daughter Louise married MacDuff, the 6th Earl of Fife (created Duke on his marriage) who was a great-grandson of William IV by his mistress Mrs Jordan and who owned over a quarter of a million acres of land in the vicinity of Balmoral and neighbouring counties. Somewhat typically of any ambitious mother of the time, Victoria wrote, ‘It is a very brilliant marriage in a wordly point of view as he is immensely rich.’
PRINCESS ALICE
Princess Alice’s Cairn marks her marriage to Prince Louis of Hesse at Osborne House in 1862 shortly after the death of her father, Prince Albert. Queen Victoria, in deep mourning, wrote to her eldest daughter that the ceremony had been ‘more of a funeral than a wedding’. Of their seven children their daughter and sixth child, Alexandra, became the most famous when, as Tsarina of Russia, she was killed with her husband Tsar Nicholas II after the Russian Revolution.
The Purchase Cairn, erected in 1852 to commemorate the purchase of the Balmoral Estate by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
PRINCE ALBERT
Prince Albert’s Cairn, unlike the others a large pyramid of faced stone, was erected by Queen Victoria as one of his many memorials. An inset panel reads: ‘To the Beloved Memory of Prince Albert, the Great and Good Prince Consort, Erected by his Broken-hearted Widow, VICTORIA. R. 21st August 1862’ (Albert had died the previous December). The initials of the royal children are carved on individual stones on
the north-east face.
PRINCESS LOUISE
Princess Louise’s Cairn was built in 1871 to mark her marriage to the Marquess of Lorne, later the 9th Duke of Argyll. This was not a success as the Marquess, it was said, ‘preferred guardsmen’. He was later Governor-General of Canada.
PRINCE ALFRED
Alone of all the children, Prince Alfred appears to have no cairn: no one quite knows why, although he married the Grand Duchess Marie Fedorovna of Russia in 1874 in St Petersburg. He served in the Royal Navy throughout his career, becoming Admiral of the Fleet in 1893, and succeeded his Uncle Ernest (Prince Albert’s brother) as Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha the same year.
PRINCESS HELENA
Princess Helena’s Cairn was built to mark her marriage in 1874 to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein in the Private Chapel at Windsor Castle.
BALLOCHBUIE
The Ballochbuie Cairn was erected in 1878 on Baderonach Hill towards the eastern border of the Ballochbuie forest to mark The Queen’s purchase of about 2500 acres of this ancient forest of Scots pine – many over 400 years old – from the Farquharsons to prevent it being sold to an Aberdeen timber merchant. The inscription reads: ‘Queen Victoria entered into possession of the Ballochbuie 15th May 1878. “The Bonniest Plaid in Scotland.”’ This somewhat enigmatic inscription is thought to be an allusion to a tradition that a Macgregor, perhaps under duress, had sold the forest to a Farquharson for a tartan plaid.
PRINCE ARTHUR
Prince Arthur’s Cairn was erected in 1879 to mark his marriage to Louise of Prussia, the niece of his godfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I. Their eldest child Margaret married Gustaf Adolf, who became King of Sweden long after her death in 1920.
PRINCE LEOPOLD
Prince Leopold’s Cairn celebrates his marriage to Princess Helena of Waldeck, a descendant of George II, in 1882. Prince Leopold was a haemophiliac and died after a fall aged 30. Their two children lived very different lives. Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, devoted herself to charitable works in England. Her brother Charles, after Eton, became Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, fought as a German general in the First World War and subsequently became a member of the Nazi party.
PRINCESS BEATRICE
Princess Beatrice’s Cairn was built to commemorate her marriage to Prince Henry of Battenburg in 1885 at Whippingham Church on the Isle of Wight. As the youngest child, Victoria expected Beatrice to be her constant companion. After she fell in love with Prince Henry, Victoria refused to speak to her for seven months before relenting on the condition that the couple lived with her. Their second child, Victoria, married Alfonso XIII and became Queen of Spain.
JOHN BROWN
John Brown’s Cairn was erected by Victoria after the death of her personal servant, who had been born just a half a mile from Balmoral Castle. Brown’s relationship with the monarch has been the subject of much conjecture and the cairn was later flattened on the orders of Edward VII, who loathed Brown.
Prince Albert’s Cairn, erected in 1862 by his widow Queen Victoria
THE QUEEN
In 2012 the present Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated by the construction of a cairn of 60 stones – one for each year of her reign and collected from 30 different locations around Balmoral – in the neighbouring village of Ballater. The main stone from Inver quarry was carved by local stonemason Gregor Robertson and covered for the unveiling with the Balmoral tartan.
Albert’s development of the royal residence
With the purchase of Balmoral, and a timely bequest, Albert determined that the old house should not just be extended piecemeal but be entirely replaced. The bequest was made by a wealthy miser, John Camden Neild, who had died in August 1852 and left almost the whole of his estate valued at half a million pounds (worth approx. £47 million today) to ‘Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, begging her majesty’s most gracious acceptance of the same for her sole use and benefit’. Victoria commented in her diary: ‘A very handsome fortune had inexplicably been bequeathed to me by a Mr John Camden Neild. He knew I would not squander it.’
John Smith had by now retired so Prince Albert worked with his son William Smith to design a vast, sprawling edifice with a central tower 24 metres (80 feet) high, two courtyards and a host of turrets and gables in the by then slightly old-fashioned Scottish Baronial style and ‘skilfully arranged to command the finest views of the surrounding mountains and of the neighbouring river Dee’. Albert’s preferred method was to make rough sketches from which he expected his architect to create working drawings. The stone, a whitish-grey granite, was quarried from the estate quarries at Glen Gelder. The main reception rooms and apartments were to be in the south-west block and the service functions in that to the northwest. Accommodation was planned for over 120 guests and courtiers plus attendant staff.
Demolition began of the old castle in 1853 (though parts of it continued to provide accommodation for staff until 1856) and on 28 September a formal ceremony marked the laying of the foundation stone of the new building. Even this small ceremony was meticulously planned by Albert. Lytton Strachey, in his biography of Victoria, wrote: ‘With great ceremony, in accordance with a memorandum drawn up by the Prince for the occasion, the foundation-stone …was laid.’ The Prince’s memorandum, which goes on for several pages, choreographs every second of the event:
‘The workmen will be placed in a semicircle at a little distance from the stone, and the women and home servants in an inner semicircle. Her Majesty the Queen, and His Royal Highness the Prince, accompanied by the Royal Children, Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, and attended by Her Majesty’s guests and suite will proceed from the house. Her Majesty, the Prince, and the Royal Family, will stand on the south side of the stone …’
It concludes: ‘The workmen will then leave the dinner-room, and amuse themselves upon the green with Highland games till seven o’clock, when a dance will take place in the ball-room.’
All the household, workmen and staff attended. In a cavity a time capsule – a bottle – was placed containing a parchment signed by the royal family and ‘current coins of the present reign’. The stone was then laid on top and the festivities began – a staff dinner followed by Highland games and a dance for all – following to the letter the strict timetable set down.
It was to be two years before their apartments were ready, although the tower and much else of the new house was still half-finished (a covered wooden passageway connected the new to what remained of the old) and on 7 September 1855 the royal party first stepped into their new home. As they entered, in the Scots tradition, an old shoe was thrown after them for good luck. Victoria wrote in her diary that night: ‘The house is charming; the rooms delightful; the furniture, papers, everything perfection.’ Three days later, at about half-past ten at night, the stationmaster from Banchory, having ridden some 27 miles to do so, delivered two ‘telegraphic despatches’ that had arrived at his station, one for The Queen and one for the Minister in Attendance. They announced the end of the Siege of Sebastopol, the last act of the Crimean War and the final defeat of the Russian Army. Albert in celebration led the household, servants and people of the surrounding villages up to the top of a cairn where a bonfire had been built. This was lit, and a great deal of whisky drunk so that the people were in a ‘great ecstasy’. The Queen was extraordinarily lenient, for one so puritanical in most things, of drunkenness amongst her Highland servants. She said she liked to see them merry.
The marriage of Frederick and Victoria at Balmoral, 1858
Within a week of moving in Prince Frederick of Prussia came to stay and almost immediately asked Victoria and Albert if he could marry Princess Victoria, who was then 14. Permission was granted and on 29 September, on an excursion up a nearby mountain, he presented a piece of white heather to Victoria whilst making ‘an allusion to his hopes and wishes’. This ‘led to a happy conclusion’. They married in 1858, when The Princess was 17. By all accounts, for the 30 years before his death from throat cance
r, it was a happy marriage. They had planned to model their roles as Emperor and Empress on that of Victoria and Albert but they only reigned for three short months before his death. As a liberal he was determined to curb the powers of his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Had he lived the course of German history might have been very different.
‘ALBERT ENJOYS IT SO MUCH! HE IS IN ECSTASIES HERE.’
Queen Victoria
In August 1856, The Queen wrote: ‘on arrival at Balmoral … we found the tower finished as well as the offices, and the poor old house gone!’ Despite incessant horizontal rain, high winds and clouds of midges (a constant refrain in her diaries) Balmoral and its environs enchanted the royal couple, and Queen Victoria constantly waxed lyrical about it: ‘Highlanders in their brilliant and picturesque dresses, the wild notes of the pipes … the beautiful background of mountains, rendered the scene wild and striking in the extreme.’ And also: ‘such magnificent wild rocks, precipices and corries. It had a sublime and solemn effect; so wild, so solitary’. And again, in a fusillade of exclamation marks: ‘Oh! What can equal the beauties of nature! What enjoyment there is in them! Albert enjoys it so much! He is in ecstasies here.’
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