Douglas Castle

The Douglas family built the first castle at Douglas, of either wood or stone, sometime before 1288. In 1307, during the Wars of Scottish Independence, it was captured and garrisoned by the English under Lord Clifford. Sir James Douglas, companion of Robert the Bruce, took his family seat back by storming the castle on Palm Sunday while the garrison were at chapel. He had the garrison killed and thrown into a cellar before burning the building — an episode remembered ever since as "Douglas' larder".

Robert the Bruce rewarded Sir James's loyalty with vast holdings, and in 1357 his nephew Sir William Douglas was created Earl of Douglas. In 1384 Sir James's illegitimate son Archibald became the 3rd Earl, and Douglas Castle was rebuilt as one of the strongholds of the "Black" Douglases. By the 15th century the family's power had come to threaten the Stewart monarchy itself. In 1455 James II led an expedition against the rebellious 9th Earl, defeated his forces at the battle of Arkinholm, sacked Douglas Castle and declared the family's lands and titles forfeit.

The "Red" Douglases, Earls of Angus, had sided with the king against the senior branch of their own family, and it was they who gained the Douglas lands in Lanarkshire. The castle was probably rebuilt soon after 1455, and in June 1574 Regent Morton came to Douglasdale to survey the Earl of Angus's house with a view to repairing it and living there.

In 1703 Archibald Douglas, 3rd Marquess of Douglas, was created Duke of Douglas, with Douglas Castle as his principal seat. The castle was rebuilt around this time as a tower house with an enclosed courtyard and corner tower, but fire destroyed it in 1755 — all except the corner tower.

From 1757 the Duke began an enormous castellated mansion on the site, designed by the Adam brothers — James, John and Robert. Had it been finished, it would have been the largest castle in Scotland; but the Duke died in 1761 and only around half of the design was ever built. The five-storey house, with round towers to the front and square towers behind, stood in an extensive park spanning the valley of the Douglas Water.

The Duke's estate became the prize in a famous and bitter legal battle, the "Douglas Cause", fought between his nephew Archibald James Edward Douglas and the Duke of Hamilton. Douglas eventually won, and was ennobled as Baron Douglas in 1790; the castle then descended through his daughter and granddaughter to the Earls of Home, making it in time the family seat of the Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

In the 1930s Charles Douglas-Home, 13th Earl of Home, allowed coal mining in the park beside the castle in an attempt to relieve desperate local unemployment. The workings caused dangerous subsidence beneath the house, and in 1938 the mansion had to be demolished. Only the three-storey corner tower of the 17th-century castle — once kept as a garden folly — was left standing. Sir Walter Scott had drawn on the site and its early history for his novel Castle Dangerous, a name by which the castle is still sometimes known.