Keith Marischal

In legend the lands of Keith were granted to Marbhachir Chamuis, the Camus Slayer, for his valour at the Battle of Barry in 1010; he is the mythological ancestor of the Keith family. On record, the lands were held in the reign of David I by Simon Fraser of Keith, a Norman who came north with the king and was made Sheriff of Tweeddale. How the ground passed to another Norman, Hervey de Keith, the King's Marischal, is unclear; likely as a dowry. Hervey certainly held Keith at the end of the 12th century, when he raised a church there in obedience to a royal decree, and his progeny took their name from the estate.

Hervey's descendants were made hereditary Marischal of Scotland in 1176. The parish of Humbie was originally divided into Keith Harvey and Keith Hundeby, and these lands formed the major part of the Keith estate until the family were granted the rock of Dunnottar in Aberdeenshire at the close of the 14th century.

The house first surfaces in a legal action of 1489 between the Earl Marischal and William Hog of Vigorshauch: Hog was said to have prevented the Earl entering the house and fortalice at Nether Keith, while the Earl had taken Hog's sheep. The Rough Wooing reached Nether Keith on 31 January 1550, when two barn yards at the Place of Nether Keith were burnt along with houses in the village; the English raiders were chased back to Dunglass. William Keith, 4th Earl Marischal, stayed at Keith Marischal in June 1554 or 1555.

The present house began as an L-plan tower, built before 1589 by George Keith, 5th Earl Marischal, on the remainder of an earlier construction, only just discernible in the massive thickness of the southern ground floor. A barmekin and earthworks survive in the adjoining cattle meadow, pointing to a mediaeval or earlier settlement or castleton.

In August 1589 George Keith stood proxy for James VI at the king's marriage to Anne of Denmark. The tower's roof trusses are reputed to have been made from timber gifted to him by Christian IV of Denmark, and remains of a Scottish Renaissance painted ceiling survive.

James sailed to Norway in November 1589 to collect his bride and returned the following spring. As the royal flotilla entered the Firth of Forth a storm broke over it; the king blamed the tempest on witchcraft, and the North Berwick witch trials followed. Among the leading accused was Agnes Sampson, known as the Wise Wife of Keith, who lived at Nether Keith a quarter of a mile from the house; the coven was reputedly led by Francis Stewart, 1st Earl of Bothwell. The accused were held in the chapel at Keith Marischal the evening before their execution at Dow Syke, a mile to the north. One of the latest witch trials in Scotland was held at Humbie in 1678.

The chapel itself stands ruined across the burn, a scheduled monument in its own right, early Norman Gothic in style and presumed to be the church Hervey de Keith raised by royal decree; a 19th-century plaque on the chancel gable records it. In 1618 the parish of Keith Marischal was merged with Humbie and the chapel ceased to be a parish church, perhaps serving the Keiths privately thereafter. It keeps spiro-form carvings on its ogee window of possible Rosicrucian significance, and the unidentified tombstone of a crusading knight, possibly Sir William Keith, who rode with Sir James Douglas to carry the heart of Robert the Bruce to the Holy Land and, when that mission failed, brought the heart back to Melrose Abbey and Douglas's body to St Bride's Church, Douglas.

The house was sold in the late 17th century to the Earls of Hopetoun. At the Williamite Revolution the Keiths were attainted as Jacobites and the Earl Marischal was coerced into the redistribution of his properties, Keith Marischal included; the Hopes were acquiring the property of Jacobite sympathisers wholesale and amassed massive Lothian estates over the 18th century. It was they who built the quasi-symmetrical west wing that made the place a courtyard house; the east wing is the original tower. The walled garden was added in 1807.

Before 1889 the house passed to the family of Patrick Fraser Tytler, who hired the Edinburgh firm of Peddie and Kinnear to fill in the courtyard, replacing room-to-room passage with corridors, and to baronialise the exterior. The architect Sir Robert Hogg Matthew acquired the property in 1953; since 2016 it has been owned by a branch of the Campbell family. It has been protected as a category B listed building since February 1971.