Page Places: The Boleskine House

 After finding success with Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page found his boathouse on the Thames to be a bit limiting. In search for a new place to hang his hat he settled on a large quite infamous home high above Loch Ness in Scotland. This new home was named Boleskine House.

Boleskine House was originally built in the late 18th Century by Archibald Fraser as a hunting lodge on land that was acquired from the church. The first of many dubious legends that would surround the abode involved the site it was built upon. It is rumored that the house sits on land that used to be occupied by a church that was burned down with all of the parishioners trapped inside. This is of course something of a legend and has never been confirmed.

In 1899, Boleskine House was bought from the Fraser family by renowned occultist Aleistar Crowley. Crowley was a self-proclaimed magician, and was considered by many people at the time to be the most evil man in the world. There are many stories swirling out in the ether about Aleistar Crowley including instances of human sacrifices, and devil worship. Once such tale involves a butcher who chopped off his own hand after reading a spell in reverse that was written on a piece of paper and given to him by the magician. Of course this is apocryphal and has never been verified.

 

Crowley described the house thusly, "The house is a long low building. I set apart the south-western half for my work. The largest room has a bow window and here I made my door and constructed the terrace and lodge. Inside the room I set up my oratory proper. This was a wooden structure, lined in part with the big mirrors which I brought from London." Crowley owned the home from 1899 until 1913. He eventually left England for Sicily to start a commune. He would pass away in 1947 destitute and racked with various ills from years of alcohol abuse and drugs.

Aleistar Crowley

Jimmy Page was a noted Crowley disciple and in 1971, when on the search for a new home, his eye immediately settled on his former residence in Scotland. Right after moving in, Page relayed in an interview in 1975 the strange vibes that he picked up from inside the home. While it was in his possession the house included an entrance hall, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a drawing room, dining room, family room, kitchen, utility room, and the cellars. The total size of the grounds equaled out to about 47 acres.

When Jimmy purchased Boleskine House it was in less than stellar condition as Malcolm Dent, Jimmy's hired caretaker would later relate, "It was a wreck, it had been more or less abandoned. There'd been at least one fire there, parts of the building were missing and it had been badly patched up. The grounds, which at one time had been very nicely laid out were gone to hell so the main task I took on was getting them into some sort of shape." He later remarked on the views seen from the house, ""All the main rooms look out across the loch and you're 300 feet up so you have some dramatic views."

"Strange things have happened in that house that had nothing to do with Crowley. The bad vibes were already there. A man was beheaded there and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down. I haven't actually heard it, but a friend of mine, who is extremely straight and doesn't know anything about anything like that at all, heard it. He thought it was the cats bungling about. I wasn't there at the time, but he told the help, "Why don't you let the cats out at night? They make a terrible racket, rolling about in the halls." And they said, 'The cats are locked in a room every night." Then they told him the story of the house. So that sort of thing was there before Crowley got there. Of course, after Crowley there have been suicides, people carted off to mental hospitals.."

In 1975, Led Zeppelin released their concert film The Song Remains the Same. Each band member was allowed to film their own fantasy sequence for the movie, and Jimmy chose Boleskine House as the site of his. In the scene Jimmy climbs the cliff-side above his home until he reached the top and was faced with the Hermit from the inside sleeve of Led Zeppelin IV who turned out to be an aged version of himself.

Ultimately, Jimmy never spent more than six months of his life living in Boleskine House and eventually sold it in 1991 to Ronald MacGillivray who owned it until his death in 2002. Today it is privately owned and trespassing is very much discouraged. Just this past year in October 2011, Malcolm Dent, the home's caretaker while it was in Jimmy's possession sadly passed away. He would later say of his employer, "Jimmy Page caught me at a time in my life when I wasn't doing a great deal and asked me to come up and run the place. I never did establish why he fixed on me...I knew Jimmy had some weird interests, but that was about it.”