Inside the 'Drambuie' mansion

A beautiful baronial mansion in Edinburgh has sold for £4 million. Hillwood House, on Corstorphine Hill, was built in 1872 for the family behind the Drambuie whisky liqueur.

It boasts nine bedrooms, a cinema room, a library, a gym, and even its own turret - and the sale offers a rare look inside.

The property offers plenty of entertaining space, from the grand entrance hallway with its sweeping wooden staircase and chandelier to the many sitting rooms.

In total there are more than 13,750 square feet of space, so there's room for a modern dining room for eight people, and a more traditional one with a heavy carved table seating 14. It also features seven acres of gardens - plus a tennis court - if the entertaining spills over outdoors.

Upstairs, many of the sumptuous bedrooms come with an en-suite, and the master bedroom has a dressing room for good measure. Many of them also have a great view over the gardens and the city beyond.
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The history

The house was home to the MacKinnon family, who owned Drambuie for a century - until September last year when they sold it to the makers of Glenfiddich.

Legend has it that the drink was first created in 1745 for Bonnie Prince Charlie while he was in Scotland trying to overthrow the monarchy. Apparently when Captain John MacKinnon sheltered the prince in Skye after his defeat at Culloden in 1746, his reward was the recipe for the drink.

The recipe then passed down the generations until it was first made for sale in a single Skye hotel in 1873. Patrons called it 'an dram buidheach' which means 'the drink that satisfies', and over time it was shortened to Drambuie.

Twenty years later it was patented, and when Malcolm MacKinnon started working in the wines and spirits business in Edinburgh, he produced the first bottles in 1909. By then ownership of the recipe had passed to the Ross family, but in 1914 Mackinnon bought it, and the family owned the brand for the next 100 years.

Much of the success of the brand internationally was due to prohibition in the US, where it was smuggled in and mixed with raw alcohol in speakeasies in order to make the rough alcohol taste better. This was when the 'rusty nail' cocktail was born, and the international fame of the liqueur was ensured.

The Daily Mail claims that the property sale is the biggest in Scotland since the crash - taking the crown from a Aberdeen mansion which sold for £3 million last year. However, according to STV, house prices have still not recovered to the level they were at when the bottom fell out of the market - so the Edinburgh home is a long way shy of the record for the most expensive home ever sold in Scotland - which went to Seton Castle in Longniddry, which sold for £5 million in 2007.

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