Hopetoun House

Where it sits. Hopetoun House stands on the south shore of the Firth of Forth just west of South Queensferry, at the centre of an estate of parkland, woodland and shoreline that runs for several kilometres along the water. The east front looks out over the firth towards the island of Inchgarvie and, beyond it, the distant cone of North Berwick Law; the Forth bridges are a couple of kilometres to the east and appear through the trees on the approach drive. It is the largest and grandest country house in Scotland still lived in by the family that built it — the Hopes, Earls of Hopetoun and later Marquesses of Linlithgow, who occupy the south wing.

Two architects, one house. The original house was built between 1699 and 1701 to a design by Sir William Bruce, the architect of the Restoration classical style in Scotland, with Tobias Bauchop of Alloa as master mason. The contract was signed in September 1698 by Lady Margaret Hope on behalf of her son Charles, then sixteen. From 1721 William Adam swallowed Bruce's compact villa inside a far more theatrical composition, adding the curved colonnades and flanking pavilions that give the west front its sweep; Adam died in 1748 and his sons John and Robert finished the interiors, the entrance hall dating from 1752. The result is a building in which you can read the shift from late-seventeenth-century restraint to full Georgian display by walking from one room to the next.

What you actually see today. The state apartments are hung with a collection that includes work by Rubens, Rembrandt, van Dyck, Canaletto and Backhuysen, with portraits by Gainsborough, and the Red and Yellow Drawing Rooms retain their eighteenth-century silk damask, gilding and Adam plasterwork. A rooftop viewing platform gives a long prospect over the firth. Outside, the landscape park was laid out from 1725, also by William Adam; the walled garden dates from the late eighteenth century, and an eighteenth-century mound in the grounds turned out on excavation in 1963 to cover the remains of the fifteenth-century Abercorn Castle, the earlier seat on the estate. Red deer graze the park, there are marked walks to the shore, and George IV embarked from here on 29 August 1822 at the end of his celebrated Scottish visit, knighting Henry Raeburn on the way out.

On screen. Hopetoun is Outlander's most versatile location, used across the first three seasons to play Scotland, England and France in turn. It first appears as the Duke of Sandringham's residence, with the Red Drawing Room standing in for his salon; the stable courtyard and the service ranges have been dressed as Parisian streets, and the estate has supplied the exteriors of English country houses in later storylines. Because the building presents four very different faces — a formal west front, a plainer east front, working courtyards and open parkland — a production can shoot several supposedly distinct places without moving the unit. Other credits include the ITV period drama Belgravia in 2020 and, the same year, duty as the exterior of a fictional royal palace in The Princess Switch: Switched Again.

Getting there and timing. The estate is roughly a 25-minute drive from central Edinburgh, signposted from South Queensferry; there is no railway station on the estate, though Dalmeny station is a few kilometres east and the walk in along the shore is pleasant. The house opens from around Easter to late September, while the grounds keep longer hours; the property is heavily used for weddings and corporate events, so it is worth checking that the state rooms are open on the day you plan to come. The ground floor is largely level, but the upper floors are reached by historic staircases.

Making a day of it. Hopetoun sits at the middle of a tight cluster of locations that share the same estate landscape. Midhope Castle, Outlander's Lallybroch, is on Hopetoun land a few minutes away; Blackness Castle is four kilometres west along the coast; Abercorn's early medieval church and its carved stones are between them; and the John Muir Way links the lot on foot. Combining two or three in a single visit turns a house tour into a coherent circuit of the Forth's south shore, and the walking sections are flat, quiet and largely off-road.