Legendary US singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, advised by Knight Frank, has sold an estate in the Scottish Highlands to whisky producer Angus Dundee Distillers for £4.258 million.
The Nobel Prize-winning musician, whose career launched with his titular first album in 1962, put Aultmore House, a 16-bedroom A-listed stately home, near Nethy Bridge in Cairngorms National Park, on the market seeking in excess of £3 million earlier this year.
Dylan, 82, bought the house with his brother David Zimmerman for £2.2 million in 2006. It has a number of reception rooms, including a music room, 11 bathrooms and a further seven attic bedrooms and is surrounded by 25 acres featuring cottages, a large greenhouse, walled garden, follies, a fountain and a croquet lawn.
It was built between 1911 and 1914 as a holiday home for businessman Archibald Merrilees, who founded Russia's first department store, M&M, in the mid-19th Century.
Knight Frank said the enigmatic singer was selling the home after deeming it "surplus to requirements," and said he and his brother had not visited since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Scottish Highlands are famously dear to Dylan's heart, with the area's most famous bard Robert Burns' 18th century poem "A Red, Red Rose" picked by the Like a Rolling Stone singer as his favourite in a 2008 HMV music campaign.
The song Highlands, a 17-minute reverie that ends his 1997 masterpiece Time out of Mind, begins: "Well my heart's in The Highlands, gentle and fair, Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air, Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow, Well my heart's in The Highlands, I'm gonna go there when I feel good enough to go."
The buyer owns the Tomintoul Distillery in the Cairngorms and Glencadam Distillery in Brechin.
Tom Stewart-Moore, of Knight Frank property agency, said in a statement: "I am pleased to share that Aultmore House, which was launched to the market in July, has now been sold to its new custodians, who will usher this magnificent home into its next chapter."