If you have always had Abbotsford envy, here's where you can retire to write your own Waverley novels, or perhaps commentaries on Shakespeare's tragedies. Blackcraig Castle is a romantic Scots Baronial mansion on the River Ardle between Pitlochry and Blairgowrie in Perthshire, that big county right in the center of Scotland.
The exterior is too theatrically perfect to be authentic, and the interior looks suspiciously Victorian, but the original castle was a 16th century tower house and was the seat of
the Barony of Balmachreuchie. The tower was extended and renovated in
about 1856 by Patrick Allan-Fraser, who also added a gatehouse. At least the woodwork hasn't all been painted white, as is too often the case nowadays. (It will look so much brighter! says the decorator from London. It will look so much colder! says I.)
Some of the property will require refurbishment; doesn't it always? You'll have three reception rooms, ten bedrooms, two bathrooms and a shower room - an imbalance you'll probably want to correct unless, as I would do, you turn most of the bedrooms into library extensions. There's an observatory room with parapet, which sounds like the perfect place to crank out your historical fiction; two
courtyards, walled garden with turreted garden house, and a folly. (Your mother always wanted a folly.) Your grounds are fields and woodlands amounting to about 30.5 acres, with trout fishing on the Ardle or perhaps a tributary.
If the house is too young to be haunted you can always borrow local ghosts, or perhaps witches: Perthshire is the location of Birnam Wood and high Dunsinane, where Macbeth met his gory end; though locally it's pronounced DunSIN'n, which cocks up Shakespeare's scansion...
Guide Price £600,000
http://www.ckdgalbraith.co.uk/property/PER130006/Ballintuim
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