When the modern visitor travels down the long avenue at Glamis Castle and first catches sight of the building, they must feel some of the astonished enthusiasm articulated by Daniel Defoe in his A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26).

It was, he wrote ‘one of the finest old built palaces in Scotland, and by far the largest… when you see it at a distance it is so full of turrets and lofty buildings, spires and towers, some plain, others shining with gilded tops, that it looks not like a town, but a city…’ In calling Glamis ‘old built’, Defoe was not, in fact, speaking about the age of the building — although it was ancient in origin — but its style, with its busy outline of high roofs, turrets and crow-step gables, a treatment in complete contrast to the familiar Cl

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