Balfour Castle, designed by the famous Victorian architect David Bryce, is located on Shapinsay, one of the Orkney Islands, not many miles off the north east coast of the Scottish mainland. It is relatively easy to get to such a remote location - commercial flights come from Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen and Glasgow or chartered private planes can take you direct to the airport just outside Kirkwall on the Orkney mainland. A helicopter can land on the front lawn. You will be met by our minibus and taken the few miles to the waterfront at Kirkwall where our boat will take you to the island of Shapinsay in about twenty minutes. Alternatively, regular ferries run from mainland Scotland arriving at any one of the three ports on Orkney Mainland - St Mary's Hope, Stromness or Kirkwall.
The Castle sleeps 18 guests and has a magnificent drawing room, a large formal dining room, a cosy library, a morning room for informal dining room, a billiard room, modern kitchen, a private chapel, golf room and cinema. Jean-Baptiste Bady is at the helm of the kitchen at Balfour Castle. Previously Jean-Baptiste was head chef at Kinnaird estate in Perthshire, where he was named Scottish chef of the year 2009 at the Scottish hotel awards.
Despite its rural location Balfour Castle offers a huge array of different activities including walking, trout fishing, tennis, seal watching, sightseeing, paintball, horseriding, golf room (This room houses a state of the art golf simulator which offers the choice of 56 different courses to play on and can accommodate up to eight players at a time. It is also possible to practice driving on the range, putting on the green or to hold a 'closest to the pin' competition), diving, cooking lessons, clay pigeon shooting, cinema/tv and games (An automatic change of screen in the golf room turns this facility into a cinema, TV and games room (There is a library of films available on DVD and Blueray. Satellite HD TV channels are provided as are Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii), boat trips, bird watching, billiards room, biking and archery.
Balfour Castle sits within a planned landscape which incorporates many earlier elements. The design also uses ideas which were then modern such as the ha-ha walls - a means of keeping cattle out of the formal gardens without the use of fencing. Magnificent views south toward the main island and the Orkney capital, Kirkwall were thus retained.The old sunken gardens sit just to the west of the main house - below the library and conservatory. These were maintained until the second world war but then fell into disrepair. Currently planted with conifer this area will gradually be restored over the coming years. A change in planting style and higher walls of very different construction mark the oldest part of the gardens - those associated with the mansion of Sound burnt down in 1746. These pre-dated the Balfours' time in Shapinsay. Buchanan's Gate is a surviving portion of the old house which has been incorporated into the western wall. It marks the boundary of the gardens and the start of the Estate's farmland.
