Just wanted to mention something I 'discovered' while researching National Trust membership. I did do a search on here but didn't really see anything recent about it, so here goes!
We are going to Scotland in May and are doing some Rabbies tours - one which involves many castle visits. I started looking into admission fees (Rabbies doesn't cover admissions) and noticed most of them were part of the National Trust Scotland (NTS). So I was perusing the NTS page and noticed they had a year membership (monthly if you live in the UK, but only seems to be yearly for those of us elsewhere). Cost was about 100GBP, which when translated to my Canadian dollars is about $170, but it would still save my husband and I about $90 cdn off admissions.
THEN I noticed a link to NT properties in other countries and that you could use your NTS membership in those countries. I see Canada listed there. Oh, interesting, let's click on that and see - and that's when I discovered that Canada also has a NT and lo and behold, I can use my Canadian membership at properties abroad! Even better, the Canadian yearly membership is $70, so $100 less than getting it from the UK.
I didn't do much more research as I was super excited (yes, I get excited easily) but it also looks like the USA has a similar membership, so if you are heading to the UK/Scotland and are going to be visiting NT properties - see if a membership from your home country may offer you greater savings.
Because of this membership, we will now most likely go inside all of the castles - I imagine before we would have skipped some because of the costs. And I can also use it at the tenement museum in Glasgow as well as a few spots in Edinburgh.
I'll prob cross post this in the Scotland forum as well, since I mentioned it in a reply to someone, and they were unaware of the membership available to Canadians.