Glamis Castle

Ninety-one steps up a spiral staircase in the clock tower, and you reach the archive.

Glamis Castle sits beside the village of Glamis in Angus, Scotland, in the broad fertile valley of Strathmore between the Sidlaw Hills to the south and the Grampians to the north, about 20 kilometres inland from the North Sea. It has been home to the Lyon family since the 14th century, though the building you see is largely 17th century, and it remains the home of the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. It is a category A listed building and its grounds are on the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland.

It was the childhood home of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and her second daughter, Princess Margaret, was born here on 21 August 1930.

The estate runs to more than 57 square kilometres, some 14,000 acres, and it is a working one: alongside the parks and gardens it produces lumber and beef. A mile-long avenue is lined with daffodils, two streams cross the ground including the Glamis Burn, and an arboretum above the burn holds trees from all over the world, many rare and several hundred years old.

The detail that makes it real rather than picturesque comes from archivists. When staff from Archive, Records Management and Museum Services at the University of Dundee visited in April 2011, the castle archivist Ingrid Thomson took them up those ninety-one steps and showed them what the collection holds: a Papal Bull from 1575, a menu book from 1666, and material relating to the wedding of Prince Albert and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

That is the castle's real inheritance. Six hundred years of one family keeping their paperwork.