Scone was a royal and religious center before the present palace existed. Scottish kings were inaugurated there on the Stone of Scone, or Stone of Destiny, within a ceremonial landscape associated with the ancient kingdom of the Scots. Alexander I founded an Augustinian priory at Scone in 1114, later raised to abbey status. Monks, royal officials, nobles, pilgrims, tenants, and craftspeople gathered around the abbey, which kept records, managed estates, hosted assemblies, and provided the sacred setting for coronations.

The Stone symbolized kingship and claims to legitimate rule. In 1296 Edward I of England seized it during his invasion of Scotland and carried it to Westminster Abbey, where it was placed beneath the coronation chair. Scottish kings continued to be inaugurated at Scone without the original stone, and Robert the Bruce was crowned there in 1306. The site remained important to the monarchy and parliament, even as warfare and political change repeatedly affected the abbey and surrounding settlement.

During the Reformation, a Protestant crowd attacked Scone Abbey in 1559, damaging buildings and ending its monastic life. The estates passed through secular hands and ultimately to the Murray family, whose members later became earls of Mansfield. Charles II was crowned at Scone in 1651, the last Scottish coronation held there, amid war among royalist, Covenanter, and parliamentary forces. The medieval abbey gradually disappeared, leaving archaeological remains and place-memory rather than a complete monastic complex.

The Murrays developed a country house on the estate and commissioned the present palace in the early nineteenth century. Architect William Atkinson remodeled it in a Gothic style that evoked the site's medieval royal associations. State rooms, collections, family apartments, service areas, gardens, and parkland formed a working aristocratic estate. Moot Hill and a replica coronation stone helped focus the landscape's older history, even though the palace itself was not the building in which medieval kings had been crowned.

The Murray family continues to occupy Scone Palace while opening major parts of the house and grounds to the public. The Stone of Destiny was returned from Westminster to Scotland in 1996 and remains a national object whose custody and meaning continue to evolve. Conservation at Scone must join a living house, designed landscape, archaeology, and traditions of kingship. The site's significance lies in continuity of place rather than continuity of fabric: monastery, coronation ground, secular estate, Gothic palace, and heritage attraction occupy overlapping versions of Scotland's political memory.