A Talent for Absorbing Heiresses Duke of Sutherland At the northernmost tip of Scotland there lies the huge county of Sutherland, covering 1,298,000 acres of windswept, almost treeless highlands. Only Caithness and the Orkneys are more distant. Sutherland is battered by the sea on three sides, and dominated by wild outbursts of rock in the interior. Its inhabitants are descended from hardy Norsemen and rough independent Gaels. It is a forbidding but beautiful place, and it belonged in its entirety, as personal property, to one man in the nineteenth century, an Englishman - the Duke of Sutherland. Now the Duke of Sutherland lives in Roxburghshire and Suffolk, with not an acre in Sutherland. His kinswoman, on the other hand, Elizabeth Countess of Sutherland in her own right, does still own 100,000 acres in the county, while the ancient family seat of Dunrobin Castle belongs to a Charitable Trust. At first glance, it is not easy to see what these two people have to do with each other.
