Dornoch, Golf Road

Explorer Tom Dornoch Castle stands beside the cathedral with a tower that has outlived sieges, court cases and school lessons. Today it is a hotel, which means you cannot simply march through somebody's bedroom looking for a bishop; still, the surviving tower and kitchen chimney give the square a stubborn guardian. The hotel's own history traces the site to the bishops of Caithness and says it was probably the palace of St Gilbert, founder of the cathedral in the early thirteenth century. It is careful about the present building: nobody knows when its oldest part was built, though it predates a charter of 1557 and may be late fifteenth century. In that charter Bishop Robert Stewart gave the Earl of Sutherland control of the palace. The bishop intended to protect church property, but the arrangement proved rather less temporary than he imagined. The castle once had three towers around a courtyard. During the siege of 1570, the surviving tower and the cathedral tower held out; the great chimney beside it is another piece of the bishop's palace. Later, the tower became a courthouse and jail, while a new building over the old kitchens served as a schoolhouse. If these walls could speak, they would probably demand a quieter job than explaining homework to a roomful of children. Private ownership began in 1922, and the building became a hotel in 1947. You can book a stay or use the hotel's advertised facilities, but check arrangements directly instead of treating this working hotel as an open castle tour. Stand back, find the tower and chimney, and give that bishop some credit: his palace managed to keep changing jobs without ever handing in its notice.