Scottish Castles Association Archive

Welcome to the Scottish Castles Association Archive — a unique resource for exploring the rich and varied history and architecture of Scotland’s castles, towers and fortified houses. This new website is currently being developed to provide information on, and access to, the archive – with further content to be added in 2026.

As an independent charity (SC029654), we encourage the protection, preservation, restoration, research, study and appreciation of Scottish castles, tower houses and manor houses and their furnishings, settings, gardens and designed landscapes. We bring together everyone who loves castles, sharing expertise and resources through our events, publications, forums and our online archive. Find out more at scotlandscastles.org

The Scottish Castles Association Archive spans more than seven decades of dedicated photography and recording of Scottish Castles through professional and volunteer involvement, capturing the evolving landscape of Scotland’s royal and lordly architectural history from the twelfth century onwards. The collection includes handwritten field reports, architectural sketches, annotated maps, correspondence, newsletters, and thousands of photographs and slides. The materials reflect the diversity of contributors and their personal interests, and the wide range of conditions in which Scottish castles are found—from carefully restored properties to ruined sites and archaeological remains. Some sections of the photograph and slide collections also have a strongly regional emphasis in their content, reflecting the ‘home area’ of the photographers or the foci of their specialist interests. The archive is currently divided into six main sub-collections with further additions expected.

The administrative papers of the Scottish Castles Association since its inception. 

The collection bequeathed by the late Nicholas Quentin Bogdan (1947–2002), archaeologist and architectural historian and his brother Robert Andrew Bogdan (1950-2023), medieval historian and geographer, contains comprehensive personal archives of Scottish Castles. Much of Nicholas Bogdan’s work was carried out in partnership with Ian B.D. Bryce (c1950-2001). Bryce, author of A Chronology of the Castles of Scotland, 1100-1685, was an author, historian, marine engineer and taxi driver. His meticulous research supported many of the SCA collections including the Bogdan and the Rourke collections. The Bogdan collections include archaeological survey records, research notes, press cuttings, postcards, leaflets, guidebooks, and photographic material. 

Professor Richard Fawcett (1946-2023) was the pre-eminent architectural historian of medieval Scotland for over 40 years. From 1974, he worked in the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments of what was then the Scottish Development Department, ultimately being promoted to Principal Inspector with its successor body, Historic Scotland, from which he retired in 2006. He followed that retirement with a second career as Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews. Apart from his academic books on religious buildings and Scottish architecture, Fawcett wrote numerous guidebooks on Scottish Castles, abbeys and churches for Historic Scotland / Historic Environment Scotland. This collection contains many of these guidebooks in addition to his own personal collection of guide literature from throughout Great Britain, Ireland and western Europe. 

This collection contains the photographic archives of the late Peter and Margaret Rourke, amateur photographers from Perth of some note who recorded and photographed castles and fortified houses in Scotland over 25 years resulting in an extensive collection of photographs of castles, retained as slides, with some of them indexed and digitised onto VHS videos and CDs. Aberdeen University also hold an additional collection of Rourke’s work (GB 0231 MS 3498). 

Geraldine Simpson (1921-2010) was an amateur photographer with a passion for Scottish castles, and great-great-granddaughter of Robert Pringle, founder of the Hawick knitwear company, Pringles. Born in Edinburgh, raised in Hawick, but settled for most of her life in Aberdeenshire and the Mearns, she and her husband Maurice Simpson lived first at Fetteresso outside Stonehaven in what is now Aberdeenshire. They moved in 1954 to Muchalls Castle, between Stonehaven and Aberdeen, where they saved its priceless seventeenth-century plaster ceilings. It was there that she met castles historian Nigel Tranter, who encouraged her to pursue her interest in castles and their architecture. From the 1960s to 1990s, she toured Scotland photographing castles, including many that rarely feature in other collections. Her slides, which were curated after her death by long-time friend and occasional driver, Andrew Kerr, and held by him at Braemar Castle (where the originals are houses), form one of the largest digitised components in the SCA catalogue.

Dr Alastair Maxwell-Irving (1935-2024) was an engineer and amateur archaeologist with a lifelong interest in castles. He was the author of The Border Towers of Scotland: Their History and Architecture – The West March (2000) and The Border Towers of Scotland 2: Their Evolution and Architecture (2014). He bequeathed his life-long work on Scottish border towers to the SCA. His collection includes large, printed photographs and photo albums, research material, historical surveys and excavation notes and reports, CDs, slides and photo negatives. They also include his beautiful original hand-drawn plans and drawings for his Border Towers of Scotland books. 

The SCA Archive is currently being processed and catalogued by the University of Stirling Archives. A searchable online catalogue is available allowing users to explore the collection by castle name, region, contributor, or document type. Digitised content from the archive will be made available to view via the online catalogue. The physical archives can be consulted in our archives reading room.