“Do you think me mad?” So asked the Queen Mother in a letter to her treasurer, Sir Arthur Penn. Queen Elizabeth was on a trip to Caithness in 1952, just a short walk from John O’Groats, when she came across a rundown little castle by the sea. Gale force winds have blown the roof from Barrogill Castle and the 16th-century stately was about to be sold for tuppence. "This seemed so sad that I thought I would buy it & escape there occasionally when life becomes hideous!” the Queen Mother told Penn. “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!”

Nearly a century later, and the manor—rechristened by Elizabeth with its original name, the Castle of Mey—has passed through the royal family, becoming a staple of King Ch

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