Old Town & Castle Hill

Inverness Castle

A 19th century courthouse reborn as the Inverness Castle Experience.

You're standing on the esplanade above the river, and the bronze figure looking west is Flora MacDonald, who helped Charles Edward Stuart escape to Skye in 1746. Her dog sits on the plinth beside her. The statue went up in 1899. Behind you, the castle is younger than it feels.

Forts have stood on this rock for centuries, and the last of them was blown up after Culloden in 1746. What you see now is red sandstone from the 1830s, built as the sheriff court and county offices. It closed to the public in 2021, and in December 2025 it opened to visitors as the Inverness Castle Experience, after a 47 million pound transformation. Inside, an audio guide leads you through Highland stories, there's an exhibit on Runrig, the band from Skye, and the Tapestries of the Highlands and Islands, stitched by more than 600 people.

Tickets are 20 pounds online, 22 on the day; the gardens, the shop and the Saltire Bistro need no ticket at all. Inverness doesn't throw its buildings away. It keeps them and finds them work.

Inverness Town House

Victorian council chambers, with a unicorn on the cross outside.

The Town House is the Victorian Gothic building on the corner of Castle Street and the High Street, put up between 1878 and 1882. Before you look up at the building, start with the pavement in front of it. That's the Mercat Cross, its shaft probably late 16th century, restored in 1900 and topped by a unicorn carved the same year. A stone is set into its base: Clachnacuddin, the stone of the tubs, where women who had been washing clothes in the river set down their baskets to rest.

The Town House has a stranger claim to fame. On 7 September 1921 the British Cabinet met in this building, the first time it had ever gathered outside London. Lloyd George was on holiday at Gairloch and the King was shooting at Moy, so 16 ministers came to Inverness instead to deal with Ireland. The formula they agreed in that room shaped the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Victorian Market

A covered arcade of 1870, twice rebuilt, now with a food hall.

The market opened on 25 May 1870, designed by William Lawrie, on waste ground between Union Street and Queensgate. The day went badly. A procession set off from the Exchange behind the town officers with their halberds and the town band, which the local paper called funereal; in Inglis Street it met a hearse coming the other way. The bailie declared the market open, the dignitaries walked back to the Town Hall for refreshments, and that was that.

Then came the night of 23 June 1889, when fire took the whole building, gas lighting and timber roof and all, and threatened Academy Street and the Music Hall with it. Only the stone entrance survived, and there's a story that one shopkeeper's dog ran back inside to guard his master's shop. That's why dogs are welcome in the arcade to this day. They rebuilt in iron instead of wood, and the market reopened in 1891 with the Cameron Highlanders' pipe band playing.

The food hall was cut in during a refurbishment in 2022: independent kitchens around shared tables.