The royal family’s Scottish retreat at Balmoral has become something of a must-see tourist destination for visitors to the Highlands. Families pay £35 at the old gatehouse before walking down a pine tree-lined avenue towards the castle, which is now open to the public again for the first time since the queen’s death there last September.
The three-storey granite house, with its decorative turrets and circular towers, is still almost all shuttered. Just the small ballroom is open to view, displaying an exhibition of Windsor family photographs: the queen in tweed skirts; Prince Philip in open-necked shirts and rolled up sleeves; the young princes Charles, Andrew and Edward, and Princess Anne with ponies; and a picture gallery of the queen at Braemar’s Highland Games.
Although Balmoral was where the queen held the last official meeting of her reign, appointing Liz Truss as prime minister in her study two days before she died, the castle was primarily a private holiday retreat for the Windsors. And the annual family trip was quite an enterprise. It took a troop of soldiers several weeks to transport the queen’s much-loved corgis and labradors, and her horses to the estate, Robert Lacey recounts in his biography of the queen.
The estate has been expanded since it was acquired in 1852 by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Today it takes in several neighbouring estates, including a grouse moor 8 miles west at Delnadamph, acquired by the queen in the 1970s.
Cost of the crown is an investigation into royal wealth and finances. The series, published ahead of the coronation of King Charles III, is seeking to overcome centuries of secrecy to better understand how the royal family is funded, the extent to which individual members have profited from their public roles, and the dubious origins of some of their wealth. The Guardian believes it is in the public interest to clarify what can legitimately be called private wealth, what belongs to the British people, and what, as so often is the case, straddles the two.
It means Charles has inherited 21,725 hectares (53,680 acres) that stretch from the broad waters of the River Dee deep into the Cairngorms, making the king one of Scotland’s largest landowners.
Souvenirs and safaris
Mindful of the cost of running such a vast estate, in recent years the family have embraced the tens of thousands of tourists who visit each year during its short summer season, in a move to monetise the assets.
In a courtyard behind the castle are a cafe and the mews gift shop, selling Balmoral-branded malt whisky for £56.95 or a “limited edition” gin to celebrate the queen’s platinum jubilee for £100. Tweed handbags sell for £115; there are displays of royal biscuit tins and jams; and for golfers about to use the estate’s nine-hole course, golf balls carrying a crown motif go for £13 each.
For the more adventurous, there are “expedition tours” by Land Rover deep into the hills south of the castle for a fixed fee of £330 for up to six people. These twice-daily safaris, which take visitors up to Lochnagar, a 1,155-metre (3,789ft) mountain made famous by the king’s children’s book The Old Man of Lochnagar, are almost sold out for 2023.
The Guardian has identified 81 residential properties on the estate. A palace spokesperson said 90% of these were let to Balmoral employees, pensioners and local families. But nine are self-catering holiday lets, with a three-bedroom cottage costing nearly £2,000 for a week-long stay in peak season. Holidaymakers can also fish for salmon and sea trout in the Dee for up £100 a day, or stalk or shoot female red deer each summer.
Government data shows Balmoral has received more than £1m in subsidies over the last 20 years, chiefly to sustain the estate’s extensive forests and woodland projects, which have received £598,000 since 2001. Balmoral was recently awarded £250,000 for peatland restoration.
These endeavours are controversial. Some Scottish conservationists argue that forests and peatlands have been damaged by Balmoral’s red deer herds.
A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said the royal family was “proud to support employment in a remote rural area”. Defending the use of public subsidies, they said the estate was heavily involved in conservation, including several landscape-scale habitat restoration projects devoted to woodland, river, peatland and bird conservation. “The estate is eligible for, and receives, grants in the same way as other working estates,” they added.
Unclear future
The castle reputedly has 167 rooms, including 52 bedrooms. For their shorter visits, Charles and Camilla usually head for a smaller, cosier country house several miles east, at Birkhall, which Charles inherited from the queen mother. There is a third country house on the estate, at Craigowan, a lodge used by other members of the royal family and their guests.
But the real value of the estate lies in the land and its sporting rights. These include its extensive forests, most of which are commercial plantations, worth roughly £20m; its hydroelectric dam, which could add roughly £17m; and Delnadamph, which operates as a grouse moor and could be worth about £8m.
In all, the royals’ Highland retreat, including the grouse moor, could be worth about £80m – a valuation that excludes the premium price a buyer might be prepared to pay because of its powerful royal associations.
Valuing a Highland estate is a specialised task that involves assessing the type of land, what it is used for – such as forestry, farming, grouse shooting or deer stalking – and how productive it is. There may also be wind turbines or hydroelectric schemes, which many estates have now introduced.
Every component is measured and evaluated. For a sporting estate in the Highlands, every stag shot adds value, as does the number of grouse; some, like Balmoral, also include the exclusive right to fish for salmon and trout. Recent data suggests about 250 stags are shot at Balmoral each year, which could add an extra £7.5m to the value of the estate.
The Guardian used publicly available information about the three large houses – Balmoral Castle, Birkhall and Craigowan Lodge – and visited the estate to get as much information as possible to aid a valuation. And official information was gathered about the other residential buildings on the estate.
In making valuation assessments, a valuer needs to know whether homes on the estate have sitting tenants or would be empty if the estate were for sale. If a house is tenanted, its value is based largely on its rental income and the type of tenancy. We assumed each house was tenanted.
The task of valuing Scottish estates has become more complicated recently because of a sudden surge in prices being paid by major investors for land that can be forested or has peatland. This can be used to sell carbon credits or get subsidies because it stores CO2. Balmoral has received £250,000 in public funding to protect peatland from the effects of climate change.
On the other hand, rural houses the size of Balmoral Castle, with its 167 rooms, are difficult to sell. And it is relatively remote.
We gave all these details to a specialist, who assessed our work and provided estimated values. We have not included the "royal premium" – the value the estate might have to a hypothetical billionaire who is attracted by the royal provenance – as there are no comparables.
Balmoral’s assets also include a Grade A-listed Georgian townhouse in Edinburgh, which is divided into two flats that may be worth £1.8m. These are let out commercially by the king.
Information about the trust that owns the estate is opaque. The trust was set up during Victoria’s reign to avoid the queen breaking a law that prevented her from personally owning property, and to ensure it could be inherited by her children.
Under a law dating to 1760, property owned by the monarch became part of the crown estate, the government-run property empire, in exchange for an annual government subsidy for working royals called the civil list. Several acts of parliament were passed to allow Victoria to sidestep that legislation so that Balmoral and all of its future acquisitions remained the family’s private property.
The documents setting up the trust remain private. The trust is currently run by two of Scotland’s most prominent hereditary peers, the Earl of Airlie and the Earl of Dalhousie, along with two of the king’s most senior officials, Sir Alan Reid, who chairs the Duchy of Lancaster, the king’s hereditary estate, and Sir Michael Stevens, Reid’s successor as keeper of the privy purse, the palace official in charge of the king’s finances.
A company, Canup Ltd, was set up in 2005 to manage the estate. But as a dormant company, Canup does not publish annual accounts, so it remains impossible to establish how much money Balmoral makes from its various ventures.
One thing is certain: even with the various enterprises, Balmoral is a costly retreat and its future is unclear. There is some speculation that the king may continue using Birkhall as his Highland retreat and convert the castle into a museum.
