Balmoral Castle (Aberdeenshire)

With a nonchalance that seems at odds with the scale of the breathtaking size of the purchase and of the building. Balmoral’s homepage simply opens with “Balmoral Castle has been the Scottish home of the Royal Family since it was purchased for Queen Victoria by Prince Albert in 1852, having been first leased in 1848.” Steeped in the history of wildlife killing, Balmoral – where Albert, who first imported driven bird shooting into the UK from estates in Germany, came to kill Red Grouse – has long been the go-to place for young royals to be ‘blooded’ after shooting dead a stag (as Harry noted in his autobiography ‘Spare) and taught the ‘pleasure’ of blasting away at wild birds in the uplands. The late Queen, Kate, and ‘the conservationist prince’ William took a very young Prince George to his first grouse shoot near Balmoral in 2018. Even less salubriously, Andrew held a shooting party at what the papers of the time nicknamed  ‘immoral’ in 2021 just days before the court hearing in New York over the sexual assault claims that saw him banished from the ‘Firm’. The internet is littered with tales of blood being spilt by the uber-privileged at Balmoral but a particularly good read (even though it is a few years old now) is “COP 26, the Royal Family and the failures of the Cairngorms National Park” on the parkswatchscotland website which nails the hypocrisy underlying one of the word’s wealthiest families and their claims to be working to save the planet…