THE DUCHESS of Fife, chatelaine of the magnificent 15th-century Kinnaird Castle in Angus, confesses in a wonderfully down-to-earth, non-Duchessy way that her husband has “fantastically kitsch taste” when it comes to Christmas. He goes “overboard with decorations: last year he put up a huge, light-filled, blow-up Santa in front of the castle, and he always throws tinsel around absolutely everything, including the stags’ heads on our walls. Our bear gets a tinsel crown.”
Caroline, as she prefers to be known, “just loves Christmas”. This is just as well as, like many castle owners, she and her husband have opened up their home to paying guests in increasing recognition that these fortified structures, once used to keep people out, can now pay for their ‘keep’ (excuse the pun) by letting people in, especially around Christmas.
“Big houses and Christmas go well together,” explains Angus Gordon Lennox. His family home, Gordon Castle, was at one stage a mighty 173 metres long and one of the biggest castles in Scotland, before death duties and dry rot diminished its stature to the fine, still incredibly romantic Georgian-fronted structure it is now. “Who wouldn’t want to be in a castle for Christmas?” he asks.
