Enter the Great Kitchens and you step back into a world where small armies of servants were needed to prepare huge feasts for the royal family and their noble guests.

Situated beneath the Grand Battery, Historic Scotland has returned the surviving areas to how they might have been in the days of King James IV and his queen, Margaret Tudor.

Bustling with activity, they are filled with benches groaning with the best ingredients that could be hunted, netted, grown or bought – including some imported from overseas. Cooks bake bread, fetch drinks and prepare venison, salmon and pastries while children tend the fires – and dogs sniff round the straw-covered floors in hope of finding tasty morsels.