North Cadboll House
North Cadboll House is a Jacobean farm house dating from 1610 and altered in each of the three centuries thereafter. An earlier monastic house attached to Cadboll Castle when it was a home of the pre-Reformation Bishop of Moray, Ross and Caithness is believed to have existed on the site.
Following the Reformation, Cadboll Castle and estates were sold to a branch of the Sinclair family and in 1610, Cadboll Castle was partially demolished and the stone used to build among other buildings the present day Cadboll House (now known as Glenmorangie House) situated a few yards from the castle and North Cadboll House situated half a mile to the north over the hill rising at the back of the castle.
The existing house originally consisted of a ground floor building with 2 rooms and a central hall, the walls of which are up to 2 feet 6 inches (75cms) thick when it was built in 1610. The first floor of the present house was added in the 18th century with the kitchen and rear wing added in the 19th century. The present owner carried out extensive renovation and rebuilding work in the late 20th century, replacing the original north wing of the house and combining the former ground floor hall and sitting room in the original part of the house to create the present large, central dining room.
The Farm and Lands of North Cadboll was an estate extending to 102 acres which until 1917 formed part of the larger Cadboll estate. A working farm, the house and gardens were first separated from the working part of the farm in 1980 with the outbuildings forming 3 sides of the courtyard and the paddock behind them taken out of the farm in 1989. Finally a further acre of gardens was separated from the farm in 2006. North Cadboll House now sits in approximately 2.5 acres of mature gardens and lawns at the centre of the former North Cadboll estate. Access is by means of the 0.5 mile unsurfaced farm road from the B9165 Fearn to Portmahomack road approximately 0.5 miles east of the Balmuchy Crossroads.
Although situated in the Easter Ross Peninsula, North Cadboll was in fact the western boundary of part of the former County of Cromarty centred round the Parish of Tarbat within which the main community is the village of Portmahomack. Although subsumed into the “new” county of Ross and Cromarty in the mid-nineteenth century, North Cadboll remains the most westerly part of the Parish of Tarbat.
