Northern Walled Garden, Dunbeath Castle

The Northern Walled Garden at Dunbeath Castle is a late 16th and early 17th century structure, likely incorporating earlier fabric, significantly altered and extended around 1881 by D & J Bryce. The garden buildings are constructed with harled walls and ashlar margins and dressings.

The symmetrical northeast front has two storeys and an attic, arranged in five bays, with long, angled bartizans featuring bellcast conical roofs. A later 19th-century round-headed doorpiece features a cable-moulded hoodmould, terminating with a simulated knot flanked by shot holes. First-floor bowed stair turrets project, supported by decorative corbelled bases and capped with square gabled structures. Regular window placement is evident, including smaller third-floor windows and three ornate pedimented dormers breaking the wallhead. The Sinclair family crest, incorporating the Sinclair and Innes crests and the motto "Via crucis, via lucis, patientia vinco" is set in a panel within the right stair turret.

A square tower rises at the northeast angle, topped with a corbelled and crenellated parapet above the ridge line. Extensive, asymmetrical two-storey and attic additions are present to the southeast, including an angled window, a turret, pedimented dormers, and a first-floor oriel at the northeast. The windows generally feature 12 panes of glass. The building has margined end, ridge, and wallhead stacks, crowsteps, and slate roofs.

A substantial crenellated retaining terrace wall forms a U-shaped enclosure around the castle, defining the peninsular site, and includes occasional bartizans and round terminal piers.

Two walled gardens flank the approach drive, each enclosed by coped rubble walls. The southern garden incorporates various reused stone carvings, including a 17th-century chimney piece.

Within the north walled garden stands a single-storey, five-bay former laundry building constructed of rubble with tooled dressings. It features a central door with a semi-circular fanlight, paired round-headed windows in the outer bays, paired windows in the east gable, multi-pane glazing, round dormer vents, corniced end stacks, and a slate roof.

The site was formerly the seat of the Sinclairs of Dunbeath.