Bob Dylan sells Scottish Highland retreat for £4.25m to whisky makers

The times they are a-changing for the legendary singer as he packs up his Highland home after 17 years.

Folk music hero Bob Dylan has sold his retreat in the Scottish Highlands for more than £4.25 million.

Aultmore House near Nethy Bridge, which sits in 24 acres, was bought by the singer and his brother 17 years ago and went on the market for offers over £3m this summer.

It is understood the singer songwriter, 82, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, had not visited highly-private Aultmore since before the pandemic.

Bob Dylan. Picture: PA

The 16-bedroom mansion, which sits in Cairngorms National Park, has been sold to Angus Dundee Distillers PLC, which includes Tomintoul and Glencadam distilleries in its portfolio.

Tom Stewart-Moore of Knight Frank estate agents, told reporters: “Up until about pre-Covid, Bob and his brother would normally go there for a few weeks a year. Dylan hasn’t visited his Scottish retreat since before the pandemic. Instead, the property was hired out for weddings and holidays.”

Dylan earlier hailed Robert Burns as his greatest creative inspiration with the poet’s A Red, Red Rose named as the lyric or verse that had the greatest impact on his life. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary doctorate for music from St Andrews University.

Aultmore was built in 1911 as a holiday home for businessman Archibald Merrilees, the son of a Scottish merchant who built Russia’s first department store. The property was later used as a World War Two convalescent hospital and a finishing school owned by a New Zealand-born spy who survived imprisonment in Colditz. It also featured in BBC Scotland drama Monarch of the Glen.