Kinloch Castle

The names of a few great houses come up time and again when conservation specialists get talking.  One such is Kinloch Castle on the Isle of Rum (built 1897-1900, Category-A).  Play-house of unimaginably wealthy and eccentric industrialists, the Bullough’s (mass manufacturers of spinning and weaving machinery during Britain’s imperial century), and finished, furnished and equipped as befitted the most ambitious of Edwardian society hosts … the first house ever built to have electric light, its gardens made fertile with soil imported from Ayrshire.  The island became George Bullough’s sporting retreat and the castle his party-piece.  Seasonal guests included relatives, royalty, stalkers and showgirls – shipped to-and-fro by his private steam-yacht ‘Rhouma’.  During its short-lived heyday its hothouses were so opulent they sustained a population of hummingbirds, with alligators lurking in pools beneath.  The outbreak of WW1 brought the end of the party, the modernisation of industry, the democratisation of technology and the dissipation of wealth.  After George’s death in 1937 the island was hardly visited and in 1957 his widow disposed of it to The Nature Conservancy, with contents intact – monogrammed hair-brushes left on dressing-tables, monogrammed cutlery on the sideboard, taxidermy around every corner, paintings undisturbed on every wall – to be used as a National Nature Reserve.