Culzean: what do the ledgers tell us?

Country houses are as much storytelling houses as storehouses of great collections. Culzean Castle was built on earlier foundations in the late eighteenth century to designs largely by Robert Adam by the 9th earl of Cassillis who bankrupted himself in the process. It was inherited by a wealthy distant American relative and completed by his son the first marquess of Ailsa. This article describes how the author located and interpreted the estate records to help tell a wholly different narrative than that provided at the time by the National Trust for Scotland which now owns the castle. Its focus is on the use of financial records to set properties, such as Culzean, in the wider context of their surrounding estate and the income that was needed to support them. Financial records and associated rentals are very bulky and little used. As a result they are vulnerable if held on deposit at a time of financial stringency and declining visitor numbers.