Kellie Castle

The castle's exact origins are unknown, though they likely lie with the now armigerous Clan Kelly, minor earls and barons. Kellie itself is on record by 1150, named in a charter issued by King David I, and its first known owner was Robert of London, an illegitimate son of King William the Lion. By 1266 it had passed to the Siward family, Northumbrians who had helped King Malcolm Canmore overthrow Macbeth. The Siwards backed England through the wars of independence of 1296–1328, and Sir Richard Siward forfeited his Scottish lands after Bannockburn; his daughter Helena, styled Lady Kellie, kept Kellie itself. None of the buildings they occupied appear to have survived.

In about 1360 Helena assigned Kellie to her kinsman Walter Olifard, or Oliphant, of Aberdalgie, husband of Elizabeth, a daughter of Robert the Bruce. That grant began 250 years of Oliphant occupation lasting until 1613; the lower section of what is now the north-west tower dates from around this time and is said to be haunted.

In 1573 the 4th Lord Oliphant raised a new tower east of the original, believed to have been intended as a jointure-house — a property set aside for a wife after her husband's death — for his wife Margaret. Between 1573 and 1606 the two towers were joined by a range closed at its south-west end by a third tower, producing the T-plan the castle still keeps.

Kellie was bought in 1613 by Sir Thomas Erskine, who had saved the life of King James VI during the Gowrie Conspiracy by killing Sir Alexander Ruthven, and whom the King had made Viscount Fenton in 1606. James stayed at Kellie in 1617 on his only visit to Scotland after the Union of the Crowns, and appointed Erskine Earl of Kellie in 1619. The ceiling of what is now the library, in the 1573 east tower, was probably plastered in anticipation of that visit: it carries the date 1617 and the monogram "T V F" for Thomas Viscount Fenton, and may be the first room in Scotland decorated in plaster in the London style rather than with the painted beams and boarded ceilings then in fashion.

For much of the seventeenth century the castle belonged to the Erskines of Dirleton. Alexander Erskine (1615–1677), the third earl, served as an investigator in the 1666 case of Margaret Guthrie, an accused witch from Carnbee who was imprisoned in the tolbooth at Anstruther Wester in early May of that year.

Methven Erskine, 10th Earl of Kellie, died in 1829 and was succeeded by John Francis Miller Erskine, who abandoned the castle and cleared its contents at a muckle roup — a public auction — in 1830. In 1835 he was confirmed as 26th Earl of Mar and the earldom of Kellie was united with that of Mar. The property then seems to have fallen to James Maitland Hog of Newliston, thereafter titled "of Newliston and Kellie", who made little use of the estate; the castle lay abandoned for many years.

In 1878 Kellie was rented from the Earl of Mar and Kellie by James Lorimer, Regius Professor of Public Law at Edinburgh University. The family took it as a holiday retreat, then made it home, restoring plaster ceilings, painted panelling and furniture; his son, the architect Sir Robert Lorimer, was instrumental in much of that work, added a doocot and garden house from 1900 and remade the garden with his sister Caroline-Louise. The tenancy passed to James's widow Hannah in 1890 and, on her death in 1916, to their son the painter John Henry Lorimer, at which point Robert began on the main house — work Hannah had resisted.

John Henry's death in 1936 emptied the castle again, but in the same year Sir Robert's son, the sculptor Hew Lorimer, and his wife Mary renewed the family tenancy, buying Kellie outright in 1948. Phoebe Anna Traquair had painted the panel above the drawing-room fireplace in 1897, after Botticelli's Primavera, while John Henry lived there; Hew and Mary disliked it and covered it in the late 1940s, taking care not to damage it by using cartridge paper and flour paste. Hew sold the castle with 6.5 hectares of garden to the National Trust for Scotland in 1970 but lived on in part of the east tower until 1990, and the Trust restored the Traquair panel in 1996 following his death.