The lands of Kilravock first appear in record as the property of the Boscoe family. The Bissetts came next by marriage in the 12th century, and in the 13th century the lands passed to Hugh II de Ros - the family that would Anglicise its name to Rose and hold the estate for the next seven hundred years. In 1293 John Balliol, briefly king of Scotland under English suzerainty, created the Roses Barons of Kilravock. The original castle was built in 1460 under licence from the Lord of the Isles, the powerful Gaelic magnate who effectively ruled the western Highlands as an independent kingdom. The tower house went up in stone - massive walls, narrow windows, the practical architecture of a region where private feuds could turn into private wars without warning. A square stair tower and a south range were added in the 17th century. The north and west sides of the surrounding quadrangle came later still. The Roses extended their home in step with the centuries' notions of comfort, but the original keep remains the heart of the building.

Mary Queen of Scots was received at Kilravock in 1562. She was twenty years old, recently widowed, and progressing through the north of her kingdom in a determined effort to assert royal authority over the Highland chiefs. The visit was a moment of formal courtesy in what was, for Mary, a fraught and politically complicated tour. Six years later, in February 1568, a blacksmith called George Robertson of Elgin made a new iron yett - the heavy iron grille that secures the doorway of a Scottish tower house - for the great tower at Kilravock. Yetts were both decorative and functional: a properly made yett could turn a determined assault back from the door. The 1568 yett may still hang at Kilravock; it is the kind of practical detail that gives a tower house its character. By that date Mary herself had been forced to abdicate, was a prisoner in England, and would never return to Scotland. The yett outlasted the queen who had sat at dinner in the house it secured.

The 18th century brought the castle's most famous succession of guests. In April 1746, Prince Charles Edward Stuart was entertained at Kilravock four days before the Battle of Culloden. The Roses, like much of the Highland gentry, had complicated loyalties: a clan tradition with sympathies that ran in both directions. The Prince's army was already running on rumour and exhaustion. Days later, the battle ended in a slaughter of the Jacobite force on the moor at Culloden, just a few miles to the west. The Duke of Cumberland - the king's son, the Hanoverian commander, the man who would earn the name 'Butcher' for his treatment of the defeated - visited Kilravock shortly after the battle. The Roses entertained him too. Forty-one years later, in September 1787, Robert Burns came to the castle on his Highland tour. He wrote nothing memorable about the visit; he had less to say about a thirteenth-generation laird than about a barmaid or a field mouse. But he came.

The Roses held Kilravock for more than seven hundred years. In 1984 the family transferred the castle to a charitable Christian Trust, ending the unbroken line of clan ownership. Anna Elizabeth Emily Guillemard Rose, 25th of Kilravock and Chief of Clan Rose, died at Nairn on 9 December 2012 aged 88. The Lord Lyon - the heraldic officer who governs such matters in Scotland - recognised her nephew David Hugh Heriot Baird Rose as Chief of Clan Rose and 26th Baron of Kilravock in June 2013. The chiefly title continues; the castle has another purpose. It is a category A listed building, a 15th-century tower house with later additions, the home for centuries of a family that hosted a queen, a prince, a duke who became a byword for cruelty, and a poet who wrote about mice. The walls remember all of it.