Syndicated headlines make it sound as if Rose Leslie’s family is selling its Aberdeenshire castle for $1.54m, which would be a neat trick for a house a lender repossessed in 2018 and sold to a Wirral couple for £650,000.
The castle Rose Leslie grew up in is for sale, and on that much the internet is right. Everything after that needs correcting. Late October brought a wave of pickups pricing her “ancestral home” in dollars and casting the Leslies as an old family quietly loosening its grip on an old house.
Lickleyhead Castle left the Leslies in 2019, when a lender sold it after winning a repossession decree at Aberdeen Sheriff Court the previous September. The people with the keys now arrived from Merseyside, and the price history they inherited is a far better story than the one doing the rounds.
Who owns Lickleyhead Castle now?
Mark and Cathy Davies, a couple from Wirral, bought the castle in 2019 and turned it into a luxury holiday let and events venue, according to the Press and Journal, whose 29 July report frames the current sale around them. By 2022, The National reported, their son James and his parents were renting out rooms to guests.
Savills put the property on the market in July. Rightmove shows the listing added on 23 July 2026, and what is being sold is a business as much as a home: a self-catering unit with a rateable value of £9,900 from 1 April 2026, on the strength of planning permission granted in 2021 to change its use from dwelling house to short-term let accommodation.
When the sale went through, the Press and Journal reported in January 2020 that the new owners were not keen to make much of the celebrity connection. The connection has since made plenty of itself without their help.
How did the Leslies come to lose it?
Slowly, then in a sheriff court. The castle’s own heritage page traces the Leslie line at Lickleyhead to a Hungarian, Bartholf, with the land coming to the family by marriage in the 13th century and staying for the best part of two centuries. It drifted out of Leslie hands and drifted back in the 1920s, through what the same page calls a Mexican connection: the owner, Maria Luz de Landa, married William Leslie. Their descendant Rose lived at the castle as a child, until she was ten, according to The National.
By 2013 the family had moved to Wardhill Castle, a few miles off, and was using Lickleyhead for weddings and functions. The selling agents that year described it as “surplus to their requirements” and asked about £1.3m. Nobody bit, and in 2016 the family, still the owners, listed it on Airbnb.
Then the lender took its turn. The Daily Record reported that in September 2018 Together Commercial Finance was granted a decree for repossession at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, having asked the court to find Rose’s father, Sebastian Leslie, in default for failing to comply with calling-up notices. He did not attend, and sent an email confirming he had no objection. The lender advertised the castle at offers over £700,000, and property records showed it sold for £650,000, as the Press and Journal reported. That was half what the family had wanted six years earlier.
Families measure castles in centuries; lenders measure them in calling-up notices.
Was this where Rose Leslie married Kit Harington?
No, and the confusion is understandable. Leslie, who played Ygritte in Game of Thrones before leaving the cast in 2014, married Kit Harington on 23 June 2018 at Rayne Church, a short drive from both castles. The reception was at Wardhill, outside which fans gathered at what the Associated Press called the “900-year-old Wardhill Castle”. Gulf News later wrote that the couple married at Leslie’s ancestral castle, which is true of Wardhill and has been read, ever since, as true of Lickleyhead.
Wardhill is the working family seat. Rose’s brother William and his wife Sarah took over the estate in 2014 and opened it for private hire, the Press and Journal reported. Two castles in one parish is a lot of roof for one family, and the one with the wedding photographs is not the one with the estate agent’s board.
What does £1.15m actually buy?
An L-shaped tower house in Premnay, near Insch, with eight bedrooms and eight bathrooms, five of them en suite. Savills gives the floor area as 5,554 sq ft, or 516 sq m. Outside are about 11 acres, a walled garden, two driveways and a former ice house, the last a reminder that someone once had to think hard about keeping the butter cold in Aberdeenshire. It is listed Grade A, Scotland’s top tier.
Nobody can quite agree on its age. The Press and Journal dates the core to 1580, with 17th- and 18th-century additions giving it the L. Savills headlines it as a 17th-century castle. The National put the building at 1499, and the Daily Record in 2018 thought 1560. That spread covers roughly the reigns of four Scottish monarchs, which is generous even by the standards of country-house folklore.
The agent, Fiona Gormley, goes for the lungs rather than the masonry:
“an invitation to slow down, breathe deeply, and embrace the extraordinary beauty of rural Scotland” (Savills)
Vacant possession is given on completion, so the holiday guests go with the vendors. Whoever buys it can decide whether to keep the bookings coming or close the drawbridge.
Where did the $1.54m come from?
From a calculator. Savills prices the castle in sterling, at offers over £1,150,000, and Mansion Global’s video post on the story converted that to “£1.15 million (US$1.54 million)”. The dollar figure is a media conversion, and it is the number now attached to Rose Leslie’s name across a run of syndicated pages, some of which carry stray paragraphs about American football.
The timing deserves a raised eyebrow too. The listing dates from late July and the Press and Journal reported it within a week. What arrived in October was the echo, three months on, travelling with a famous name attached and the ownership history left behind somewhere around Inverness.
A famous former occupant is the one fixture that never leaves with the furniture, as other grand addresses keep proving. Lickleyhead has been Rose Leslie’s childhood home for the purposes of a headline far longer than it was her childhood home in fact.
Is it a good price?
The Press and Journal called the new ask almost double the 2019 price. The arithmetic says about 77 per cent above £650,000, which makes it a generous “almost”, though a rise of that size on a listed castle in seven years would cheer most owners. It is an asking price, and as of the July listing nothing showed a sale agreed.
The terms are pure Scotland. Offers must be submitted in Scottish legal form, a closing date is intended, and the seller keeps the right to strike a deal with a single party before then. A buyer with a fondness for Westeros and quick lawyers may never need to wait for the closing date at all.
Look at the 2013 figure and the whole saga turns over. Even at offers over £1,150,000, Lickleyhead is about £150,000 cheaper than the price the Leslies hoped to get thirteen years ago.
