Inside Balmoral Castle

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles made the decision to open Balmoral Castle up to the public for exclusive guided tours. Tickets for these tours went up for sale last year and were completely sold out the same day. Back in January when more dates and times were announced I made sure to get in quickly and booked four tickets as a special treat and early birthday present for myself. It is my birthday this year ☺️

Tickets are not cheap at £110 each and Ben was not convinced it would be worthwhile but he nevertheless agreed and today we four drove to Balmoral for our tour. All the remaining tickets for this year are sold out but I suspect more will become available again next year.

One bonus of getting inside castle tour tickets is you get to drive across the bridge and through the castle gates and right up to the gift shop to park rather than parking across the river in the main tourist carpark with all the plebs. It is a lovely walk from the main tourist carpark so it’s not necessarily a bad thing but we appreciated having the car nearby as we could leave bags and coats in there while we did the tour.

You get to see seven rooms on the ground floor. The castle is still lived in as a home by the royal family every August so understandably you can’t go upstairs and peer inside their bedrooms, as much as I would have liked to. You also can’t take photos so you’ll just have to imagine from my description what it’s like.

The first room is a very grand and almost medieval-looking entrance hallway with a bronze statue of King Malcolm III of Scotland in one corner, an 11th-century king who killed Macbeth. At first I wondered why there’d be a statue of King Malcolm here but then one reason became immediately obvious: King Malcolm’s daughter was Matilda and she married King Henry I of England from whom the current royal family are descended. This adds legitimacy to King Charles as monarch of Scotland as well as England. The other reason is that Victoria and Albert were apparently big fans of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The room – indeed all the rooms we saw – are filled with Edwin Landseer’s paintings. Landseer is best known for painting Monarch of the Glen. There was also a marble bust of Queen Victoria. The BBC were allowed to take some photos and you can see the statue of King Malcolm III on their website.

The next room is the main hallway and I immediately noticed the wallpaper which was textured with wool. The guide told us William Morris was commissioned by Queen Victoria to make this wallpaper. It has the initials VRI repeated throughout along with the thistle which is the flower of Scotland. The initials stand for Victoria Regina Imperatrix. Regina is Latin for Queen and Imperatrix is Latin for Empress. At that time Victoria was Empress of India. The royal family today no longer use the title Imperator/Imperatrix.

I took a photo of the wallpaper which is in the cafe but it’s obviously not the same as it’s just a modern printed version. The original William Morris in the castle uses wool for the gold pattern giving it a 3D look. But you get the general idea.

The hallway has a very lifelike statue of Prince Albert, made not long after he died, which swivels because Victoria wanted Albert to look at her from every angle as she walked up and down the stairs. She loved him very much and never really got over his death.

The next room is the formal dining hall where many British Prime Ministers will have dined when visiting the royal family at Balmoral. The walls again are festooned with Landseer paintings and Landseer art also appears on the crockery. The crockery is used at meal times and evidently the kitchen staff line the sink with rubber to avoid breakages.

The next room is a former chapel, now the page’s office. It’s quite small and was used as a chapel by the family before the church at Crathie was built. The next room is an informal dining room with a smaller table. It contains some fascinating crockery, decorated with photographs of the Victorian royal family. It was the first time anyone in the UK had managed to put photographs onto crockery.

The room after the dining room was my favourite because it’s one most people will be familiar with and it was the warmest and most welcoming. It’s the main lounge where Queen Elizabeth II was photographed two days before her death in September 2022.

King Charles has since replaced the upholstery on the sofas to match exactly what Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had in their time: Stewart dress tartan in pink. It was really nice. The carpets have also been replaced with a green Stewart hunting tartan. Otherwise the room hasn’t changed much. There’s another famous painting by Landseer in this room of Eos, the much-loved greyhound of Prince Albert. There’s a reproduction of it in the cafe and I took a photo of that:

The last room was the library which may also look familiar and King Charles has been photographed here numerous times. As a more literary space it contains a bust of Robert Burns and another of Sir Walter Scott.

The tour lasted an hour so there is a lot I’m missing. Overall it was excellent and I highly recommend it if you’re into this kind of thing. Ben and the kids thoroughly enjoyed it too. There were some interesting snippets of information too such as that the castle is kept at 5C as a minimum over winter when no one is there. It doesn’t have central heating or double glazing. Only one fireplace is ever used which is the one in the main lounge where Queen Elizabeth II was photographed above. They use electric heaters to heat the space with power from their own hydro generation.

Just outside the main entrance is the first stone laid by Queen Victoria when construction began in 1853.

And here are some random photos of us on the estate.

The ballroom.

There are lots of walks you can do on the estate. It’s a beautiful place to visit even if you’re not doing a tour as the gardens and walks are lovely.

There’s also a café where we had lunch and a gift shop. The café I have to say was disappointing but I have very high standards. There weren’t many vegan options and one of them – a tofu sandwich – sounded nice but was on WHITE BREAD! How could they?? Why do people eat that rubbish? So I had the pea soup which was watery and salty. But oh well, we can’t have everything and the rest of the day was perfect. They should hire the chef from Crathes Castle which has a much better café.

King Charles is a very keen gardener and you can see this when you walk around the grounds. He’s done a lot of planting and continues the tradition started by Prince Albert of planting lots of trees. Indeed when Victoria and Albert first bought the site the hill side behind was bare. It is now a magnificent forest.