The Celebrity Traitors filming locations have become almost as talked about as the show’s betrayals themselves, and with good reason: the production has assembled a backdrop that is half Gothic fever dream, half Highland postcard. At its centre sits Ardross Castle, the Scottish Baronial pile around 30 miles north of Inverness that has become one of the most recognisable buildings on British television.
Ardross Castle: the history behind the drama
The castle was built into its current Scottish Baronial form by Sir Alexander Matheson, on a fortune derived from the Jardine Matheson trading concern, according to Castle Collector. The result is everything the phrase implies: dramatic turrets, steeply pitched rooftops, and battlements that manage to look genuinely forbidding even in Scottish drizzle. The estate near the Easter Ross town of Alness sits within more than 100 acres of woodland, gardens, and parkland, much of it pressed into service for the show’s challenges. Loch Glass, where the most recent series had celebrities wading through cold water aboard a pirate ship for their first challenge, forms part of that same dramatic Highlands terrain.
In 1983, the castle was acquired by the McTaggart family, who still own it today. Castle Collector notes that Fiona Mactaggart, a member of the McTaggart family, is a former Labour MP, which gives the estate a political footnote to set alongside its televisual one. The family runs the property through Ardross Castle Enterprises, and its director Loukas Tsarmaklis spoke to the BBC‘s regional press partners about the show’s effect on the wider area. ‘This has put us on the map and helped local B&Bs, tradesmen, taxi drivers, cleaners,’ he said. ‘It was a big operation for this part of the world.’
What it costs to hire the Celebrity Traitors filming location
The castle is not open to the public in the conventional sense, but it is available for exclusive hire when filming is not under way. The figures involved are not modest. Castle Collector reports that hire starts at around £5,500 a night in low season for a small group of approximately 18 guests. Weddings scale up from there: a smaller celebration for around 30 guests begins near £13,840, while a full event for up to 130 guests over two nights begins around £45,000. Corporate bookings are also available. The appetite for all of the above has grown considerably since the show made the castle famous, which is precisely what Tsarmaklis was alluding to when he spoke about the ripple effect through the local economy.
The broader Celebrity Traitors filming locations extend well beyond the castle gates. Just over an hour’s drive away, the Strathspey Railway provides the show’s train sequences: a 10-mile preserved line running from Aviemore north to Broomhill via Boat of Garten, operated largely by volunteers and one of only a handful of such lines to survive the widespread closures of the 1960s. It is, memorably, where Ross and Diane plotted to conceal their mother-and-son relationship from their fellow cast members.
As for where the cast actually sleep: not at the castle. After each day of challenges, roundtables and general paranoia, the celebrities are driven separately to the Courtyard by Marriott near Inverness Airport, returning the following morning to discover what fresh drama breakfast will bring. Fans keen to explore the wider area tend to base themselves in and around Inverness, Fort Augustus, and Cromarty.
The Celebrity Traitors continues on BBC One on Friday 2 October.
