Ferniehirst Castle

The Ker family built the first castle here around 1470, on the east bank of the Jed Water about a mile and a half south of Jedburgh, in what was then Roxburghshire. For a long period the Kers were Wardens of the Middle and East Marches, and the castle was fought over repeatedly across the sixteenth century.

The turnpike stair in the angle of the tower spirals counter-clockwise and is known as the left-handed staircase, on the reasoning that it would put a right-handed attacker at a disadvantage — though the corbelled stair is apparently more a matter of elegance than of necessity. The story attached to it is that Sir Andrew Kerr, who was left-handed, came home from Flodden in 1513 and had his men learn to fight with their left hands. In Scotland left-handedness has been dubbed "Corrie-fisted" or "Kerr-handed".

In September 1523 an English force came to burn Jedburgh, and Lord Dacre was sent against Ferniehirst with 700 men and artillery. The castle stood "marvellous strongly with a great wood", and the men from Kendal who had to bring the guns up through that wood met strong resistance. The castle was taken in the end.

English forces occupied Ferniehirst in 1547, during the war of the Rough Wooing. They were dislodged in February 1549 by Sir John Ker's clansmen and the Earl of Huntly, reinforced by André de Montalembert and the French auxiliaries of Captain Pierre Longue. The gate was fired; Montalembert d'Essé then brought up more artillery while the soldiers went at the wall with picks and mattocks. The French soldier Jean de Beaugué described the recapture and the fate of the English captain and his garrison, and the aristocrat and priest Alexander Gordon left an eyewitness account of his own.

The recovery did not hold. An English army under the Duke of Rutland took the castle back in June 1549, though by then the war was nearly over.

In August 1568, with Mary, Queen of Scots, exiled in England, her brother Regent Moray heard rumours that she would escape from Bolton Castle and be brought to Ferniehirst. In January 1570 the exiled Countess of Northumberland stayed at the castle, lodged in the tower, with the Earl of Westmorland in the "overmost chamber" above her.

That partisanship was answered. An English raid damaged the castle on 18 April 1570, following Sir Thomas Ker's raid into northern England and intended also to intimidate the supporters of Mary; another English army damaged it again in 1573 on its way to Edinburgh Castle. In 1593 James VI attacked Ferniehirst, the Kers having assisted Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, who had conspired against the king. The building had been undermined, and reconstruction began in 1598.

Ferniehirst stood unused through the 18th century. It was re-roofed and repaired around 1830, with a further major restoration of part of it in 1890, and from 1934 to 1984 it served as a Scottish Youth Hostels Association hostel — a run broken by the Second World War, when it was requisitioned as a billet for troops. It was listed category A on 16 March 1971.

In 1988 Peter Kerr, 12th Marquess of Lothian, carried out major repairs, restoration and alterations that made the castle a private home once more, and it passed to the use of his second son Lord Ralph Kerr, the 14th Marquess of Lothian. The 17th-century Ker Chapel on the property, probably built as a mortuary chapel, was re-roofed in 1938 and given restrained conversion and repair in 1988.