Culloden Battlefield Visitor Centre
Inverness-shire, Scotland

Gareth Hoskins Architects won an international competition in 2004 to design the National Trust for Scotland’s new visitor centre for Culloden Battlefield, the site of the last battle to be fought on mainland Britain.

The new visitor centre is designed for up to 250,000 visitors a year, housing interpretation of the battle along with educational/ conference facilities, a 240 cover café/ restaurant, a shop and staff/ ancillary accommodation. The centre is defined by a wave-form roof and a long wall that passes through the building and out into the landscape. Visitors can take an interpretive journey through the exhibition culminating in a view of the site from the planted roof or enter the battlefield via a portal between a gently sloping berm, and a memorial wall for the fallen. The heavily insulated building is clad with local larch, Caithness stone and site-salvaged stone, and is heated by a biomass boiler supplied from local forests. The project was built during Scotland’s Year of Highland Culture in 2007 and officially opened on 16 April 2008, the anniversary of the battle.