Hawthornden Castle

Hawthornden stands on a rocky promontory on the south bank of the River North Esk in Midlothian, a mile east of Roslin and just downstream from Roslin Castle. It was a property of the Abernethy family from the 13th century and passed to the Douglases in the 14th.

The earliest parts of the castle date from the 15th century: a large three-storey tower at the south-east corner of a roughly triangular courtyard some 24 metres long and 12 metres at its widest, and the courtyard's south curtain wall. Beneath the tower is a rib-vaulted pit prison, and a well at the west end of the courtyard supplied the castle's water. Windows in the south curtain wall show that a range of buildings once stood along it, all of them now gone.

In 1540 John Douglas sold trees from Hawthornden wood to James V as timber for his ships. The castle was sacked twice by the Earl of Hertford, in 1544 and again in 1547, during the Rough Wooing.

The castle was later sold to Sir John Drummond, one of King James VI's ushers. His son, the poet Sir William Drummond of Hawthornden, was born here and afterwards extended the place: the L-shaped north range is his work, dated 1638, and probably replaced earlier buildings on that side of the courtyard. The English poet Ben Jonson visited him at Hawthornden in 1618, and in the following century Dr Johnson came too.

The north range rises three storeys to an attic and was originally harled; a 16th-century wall containing the entrance links it to the tower. The renaissance-style doorway is of later date, as is the iron knocker bearing the initials of the poet's son, Sir William Drummond, and his wife Dame Barbara Scott. Three gunports surround the doorway and a fourth is set in the tower. In 1795 Dr William Abernethy Drummond, Bishop of Edinburgh, installed the arms of the Abernethy family above a door. The bishop also added a memorial to his ancestors Sir William Drummond and Sir Lawrence Abernethy of Hawthornden. The house was much altered over the years, including a major modernisation in the mid-19th century, and a single-storey range added to the west in the late 18th or early 19th century was the last addition to the castle.

A number of man-made caves run into the cliffs beneath the castle, and they have been in use for much longer than the castle above them. One serves as a doocot with 370 compartments; another nearby is known as Wallace's Cave, after William Wallace. Tradition has it that King Robert the Bruce and Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie once found shelter in the caves.

The Drummond dynasty held Hawthornden until the early 1970s. When the last Drummond died the castle was left to the butler, then sold to Douglas Adamson, a well known and respected fine art and antiques dealer from Edinburgh, whose family turned it back into a home and opened the house to the public. The Adamsons lived there until Douglas Adamson died in the mid-1980s.

The castle was then sold to Drue Heinz, widow of H. J. Heinz II. The architects Simpson and Brown carried out a restoration in the 1980s, and Heinz, a patron of the arts, made the house a place for writers to live and work quietly, the Hawthornden Literary Retreat. A later renovation installed a library in the basement of the ruined tower, and restoration work has drawn on reclaimed stone from the demolished Caledonian Railway station in Edinburgh. The castle and its caves were listed as a category A building in January 1971.