[3] He therefore felt it best to arrange for the church property of his bishopric to pass into his family's hands to preserve some of the important privileges that he enjoyed as bishop.

[3] This affair was probably part of a wider political intrigue and the rival claims of the King's and Queen's parties, known as the Marian civil war, which ended with the 'pacification' of Perth in 1573.

[9] On 31 October 1578, James VI gave the "castell, hous and place of the channonrie" to Henry Stewart, 3rd Lord Methven.

The Chanonry had been given to Alexander Hepburn (d. 1578), the successor to John Lesley, Bishop of Ross, who shared Queen Mary's exile.

[10] In July 1589 James VI arrived at the Chanonry in person, where "he slew ane great hairt, and wes weill bancketted and ressavit by the barronis and gentilmen in the way.

[12][13] One of these documents is a letter dated 1572 from Andrew Munro of Milntown to the Regent of Scotland complaining that Colin Mackenzie of Kintail had "slew thre servandis of myne and left thre deidlie woundit brunt and distroyit my cornis hous and barnis in the channorie...".

[4] Another letter, dated 8 July 1572, from a Richard Mader who was acting as a messenger, endorses an assurance to the king from the Munros and Mackenzies.

[5] Sir Robert Gordon (1580–1656) writes of the feud between the Munros and Mackenzies in his book A Genealogical History of the Earldom of Sutherland: Clancheinzie grudgening, they bought the inheitance therof from Buquhayn, and thervpon they besieged the castle of the channonrie, which the Monroes defended and keipt for the space of thrie yeirs, with the great slaughter on either syd, until it was delyvered to the Clancheinzie, by the act of pacification.

And this wes the ground beginning of the fead and hartburning, which, to this day remaynes betuein the Clancheinzie and Munrois.

[6] The result was that the castle was handed over to Walter Urquhart of Cromartie who was brother-in-law to Mackenzie and that Mackenzie was not to seek possession of it for twenty days in which time Munro of Foulis obliged Munro of Milntown that he should not make any attempt on the property and that he should only address the Regent Morton and the Lords on the matter.

[18] In 1649, after the Siege of Inverness (1649), the leader of the Scottish Parliamentary army, David Leslie, Lord Newark, left a garrison in the castle.

[19] A 17th-century poem by the Brahan Seer concerning Chanonry Castle predicted that: "The day will come when, full of the Mackenzies, it will fall with a fearful crash.

Nearby, built into the outside wall of an extremely old house is a stone known as a "Dormer Pediment", which shows a coat of arms and the initials CBS, which stand for Countess Barbara of Seaforth.