Edzell Castle

The first stronghold at Edzell was a timber motte and bailey raised in the 12th century to guard the mouth of Glenesk, a pass leading north into the Highlands; its mound, known as Castlehillock, still stands 300 metres south-west of the present ruin. It was the seat of the Abbott, or Abbe, family and centre of a now-vanished village, before passing to the Stirlings of Glenesk. In 1358 Sir Alexander de Lindsay married the Stirling heiress Katherine Stirling, bringing Edzell to the Lindsay family; his son David was created Earl of Crawford in 1398.

Edzell descended to a junior branch of the Lindsays, and in 1513 it was inherited by David Lindsay, later 9th Earl of Crawford. Around 1520 he abandoned the old motte and built a new tower house and barmkin, or courtyard, on a more sheltered site nearby — a location overlooked by higher ground to the north, suggesting defence was not the primary concern. He became Earl of Crawford in 1542 and, around 1550, extended the tower with a west range containing a new entrance gate and hall.

Mary, Queen of Scots stayed two nights at Edzell in August 1562, during a progress against the rebellious George Gordon, 5th Earl of Huntly, and convened a meeting of the Privy Council there; a room was later remembered as the Queen's chamber. Her son James VI visited twice, in 1580 and again in August 1589, when the Earl of Erroll submitted to him at Edzell and accused the 6th Earl of Huntly of further treason; news of the assassination of Henry III of France reached the castle the following day.

The 9th Earl's son, Sir David Lindsay, was educated in Paris and Cambridge and travelled on the Continent. Passed over for the earldom after his father restored the title to the senior Lindsay line, he was knighted in 1581, became a Lord of Session as Lord Edzell in 1593, and joined the Privy Council in 1598. He extended the castle with a north range and round corner towers, invited German prospectors from Nuremberg to search his land for precious metals, and in 1604 laid out the walled garden — its carvings marking the Union of the Crowns of 1603 — leaving it, and the north range, unfinished at his death in 1610.

Edzell escaped the campaigns of the Marquess of Montrose in the 1640s, though other Lindsay properties were attacked. During the Third English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell's troops took the castle in September 1651 and were quartered there for a month.

The castle's decline began around the time of the 1715 Jacobite rising. The last Lindsay lord of Edzell, another David and a supporter of the exiled James Stuart, sold the heavily indebted estate to the 4th Earl of Panmure, a fellow Jacobite, for £192,502 Scots (£16,042 sterling). Panmure forfeited his lands for taking part in the rising, and the Crown sold Edzell to the York Buildings Company, a London waterworks concern that had branched into buying and reselling forfeited estates and proceeded to "asset strip" the property. In 1746 government troops occupied the castle for the last time, causing further damage.

By 1764 the York Buildings Company was bankrupt, and the castle's remaining contents, including its roofs, were sold to pay its creditors; the avenue of beech trees linking castle and village was felled, and the stripped property was sold to William Maule, Earl Panmure, nephew of the attainted earl. On his death in 1782 it passed to his nephew, George Ramsay, 8th Earl of Dalhousie, whose family appointed a resident caretaker from the 1870s and built him a cottage in 1901 that later became the visitor centre.

The walled garden passed into state care in 1932 and the rest of the castle followed in 1935, when the garden's planting was recreated in the absence of any surviving original plan. Edzell Castle and its garden are now maintained by Historic Environment Scotland and open to the public year-round. The motte and castle are protected as Scheduled Ancient Monuments, the garden is listed on the Inventory of Historic Gardens and Designed Landscapes, and the caretaker's cottage is a Category B listed building.