Simon Fraser, Master of Lovat (1726-82) was an army officer and politician. He was the eldest son of Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat and Margaret Grant. He joined his father reluctantly to lead Clan Fraser during the Jacobite Rising of 1745-6 but avoided taking part in the battle of Culloden. Both he and his father were named in the Act of Attainder in 1746. His father was executed in London in 1747. Simon, however, voluntarily surrendered himself and was held at Edinburgh Castle instead. He supported the Government’s political endeavours, at the expense of his own family, and was released in 1747, receiving a full pardon in 1750.

He raised a regiment, the 78th Fraser Highlanders, in the Seven Years’ War and served in North America under General Wolfe, and later in Portugal where he married Katherine, daughter of John Bristow of Quidenham Hall, Norfolk in c.1765. He sat for Inverness-shire 1761-82 and supported Lord North’s administration, becoming a close acquaintance of North’s. He also played an active role in Philip Francis’s campaign against the Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings. He obtained an Act of Parliament in 1774 for the restoration of all the family estates that had been forfeited by his father, subject to the payment of £20,983. He died at his house in Downing Street, London, in 1782, and was succeeded by his half-brother, Archibald, having had no children.

Fraser’s father, Lord Lovat, had inherited his family estate situated on the right bank of the River Beauly in 1699. The estate included Dounie Castle, dating from around the twelfth-century castle, that had sustained several sieges. By the early eighteenth century it comprised a primitive peel-tower. In 1744, Lord Lovat employed William Adam, father of Robert and James Adam, to make designs for a new country house on the estate. Building materials had been shipped to the site in the summer of 1744. However no further progress was made as Lovat jointed the Jacobite rising of 1745 and the castle was sacked by British Government troops after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The land was forfeited to the Government which built a utilitarian structure for the ‘factor’ or estate manager, described as ‘a very plain but commodious building’.

In c.1777 Robert Adam was approached to design a new building to replace this structure. Adam designed an elaborate, V-shaped, castle-style building, with an extended forecourt and moat around the front and sides of the house. The moat is unique in Adam’s portfolio, and it is not clear where the water for the moat would have been channelled from.

Adam’s designs were not executed, and nothing appears to have been carried out by Simon or his brother Archibald who succeeded him in 1782. The estate was inherited by Thomas Fraser of Strichen who commissioned the architect William Burn to make castellated additions to the mid-eighteenth-century utilitarian building in 1839, the name changing to Beaufort Castle. A new castle, possibly incorporating earlier building fabric, was built in 1886 to designs by James Maitland Wardrop.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, p.3; J. Fleming, Robert Adam and his circle in Edinburgh and Rome, 1978, pp. 63-64; A. Rowan, Designs for Castles and Country Villas by Robert & James Adam, 1985, pp. 118-21; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, pp. 22, 138, 145, 150-1, 156-7, 161, 232; E. Haden-Guest, ‘Fraser, Simon (1726-82), of Lovat, Inverness.’, History of Parliament, online [accessed 25 March 2024]; S. Reid, ‘Fraser, Simon, master of Lovat (1726–1782)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008, online [accessed 25 March 2024]

Louisa Catt, 2024