Loch Leven Castle

A castle may have stood on Castle Island as early as 1257, when the sixteen-year-old Alexander III was brought there by force by his regents. During the First War of Scottish Independence the invading English held it, at a strategically useful point between Edinburgh, Stirling and Perth; the curtain wall may date from that occupation. The Scots recovered it before the end of the 13th century, possibly with William Wallace's forces.

English troops besieged Lochleven in 1301, but Sir John Comyn broke the siege and relieved the garrison the same year, and Robert the Bruce visited in 1313 and 1323. After Bruce's death the English invaded once more, and in 1335 besieged the castle in support of the pretender Edward Balliol. The chronicle of John of Fordun tells how they tried to drown it by damming the loch's outflow; the water rose for a month, until the English captain Sir John de Stirling left to keep the festival of Saint Margaret and the defenders under Alan de Vipont came out by night, broke the dam and flooded the English camp. Later historians have doubted the account.

The five-storey tower house was added in the 14th or early 15th century; Historic Scotland dates it to the 14th, which would place it among the oldest tower houses in Scotland still substantially surviving. In 1390 Robert II granted the castle to Sir Henry Douglas, husband of his niece Marjory, and it stayed in Douglas hands for the next three hundred years.

From the 14th century the island also served as a state prison. Robert II had himself been confined here in 1369, before he came to the throne; Archibald Douglas, 5th Earl of Douglas, was held early in the 15th century; and Patrick Graham, Archbishop of St Andrews, was imprisoned in 1478 and died in captivity there.

Mary had been at Lochleven before she was held there: a week in May 1562 recovering from a fall from her horse, and an interview with the Calvinist preacher John Knox in April 1563. On 15 June 1567, at Carberry Hill, she surrendered to the noblemen who opposed her marriage to the Earl of Bothwell, and on 17 June she was given into William Douglas's custody on the island. For most of her captivity she lived in the Glassin Tower at the south-east corner, and some of Douglas's daughters slept in her bedchamber for extra security.

She fell ill on arrival, which was suspected to be poisoning, and sometime before 24 July miscarried twins conceived with Bothwell; they were hastily buried in the grounds, and she was probably nursed back to health by Agnes Leslie. Only days later she was forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son James, signing the demission on 24 July 1567; she wrote that by then her household had been reduced to two serving women, a cook and a surgeon.

Through the autumn and winter of 1567 Mary recovered and gradually won over her keeper's brother George Douglas, whom a contemporary called "in fantasy of love wythe hir". Earlier attempts failed: once she walked out disguised as the laundress Margaret Aitkin while one of her women took her place, only for the boatman rowing her over the loch to recognise her and turn back; another plan, to scale the seven-foot wall, ended when her lady-in-waiting Jane Kennedy injured herself in practice.

On the night of 2 May 1568 she dressed as a servant, Willie Douglas, a young orphaned relative, stole the keys, and Marie Courcelles let her walk out. She was rowed across to where George Douglas waited with 200 horsemen, and they fled to Niddry Castle in Lothian. Old keys found when the loch was lowered in the 19th century are said to be the ones Willie took.

The island kept taking prisoners: the English Earl of Northumberland, having offended Elizabeth I, was confined here two years before being sent back to England to be executed. Regent Morton retired here in 1578 and spent his time "making the alleys of the garden even". In 1588 Sir William Douglas succeeded to the earldom of Morton and inherited other properties with it, Aberdour Castle in Fife among them, after which Lochleven was used less.

In 1675 Sir William Bruce, royal architect in Scotland, bought the estate from the Douglases, and from 1686 built Kinross House on the shore with the principal axis of house and garden aligned on the distant castle. It was never lived in again, but survived as a "picturesque focus" for his gardens. Ruinous by the 18th century, it was conserved in 1840, given into state care in 1939, and is now managed by Historic Environment Scotland.