New Slains Castle

The Hays had held land in eastern Aberdeenshire since the 14th century, and in 1453 Sir William Hay was made first Earl of Erroll by James II. Their seat was then Old Slains Castle, near Collieston. Francis Hay, 9th Earl, lost it: a convert to Roman Catholicism, he joined the Earl of Huntly in the brief rebellion of 1589 and signed the "Spanish Blanks", papers left empty for the terms of Spanish aid to be added later. He was declared a traitor in 1594, and that October James VI ordered Old Slains destroyed.

The earl went abroad, abjured Roman Catholicism in 1597 and regained royal favour. He abandoned the old seat and raised a courtyard and square tower, named Bowness, on a cliff-top east of what is now Cruden Bay, probably around 1600, though the exact date is not known. The wings were extended with a gallery in 1664 and the house renamed New Slains. Its defences leant on the ground: North Sea cliffs, and an abyss to the west serving as a deep impassable moat.

Lady Catherine Carnegie, wife of Gilbert Hay, 11th Earl of Erroll, took part in the rising of 1689, arranging for letters to be smuggled in and out of Edinburgh Castle during that year's siege, some forwarded to her by James VII and II. Viscount Dundee then contrived to have her arrested with a bogus letter announcing an Irish landing in the south-west; the diversion proved pointless. She escaped to France and was made governess to the infant James Francis Edward Stuart.

In 1705 Louis XIV sent the agent Nathaniel Hooke to foment rebellion in Scotland; a fourteen-gun French frigate carried him from Dunkirk to New Slains, where Lady Anne Drummond met him, but the effort was thwarted by the 4th Duke of Hamilton. Hooke returned in 1707, basing himself at the castle while touring Scotland to judge the prospects of a joint French and Jacobite landing; his report was read to Louis XIV at Versailles, and the king authorised the invasion. Between 5,000 and 6,000 men sailed from Dunkirk in 1708 with James Edward Stuart aboard the flagship, only for fifty British ships to chase them out of the Firth of Forth; putting the prince ashore at an Aberdeenshire castle, plausibly this one, was discussed and refused by the French admiral.

Mary Hay, 14th Countess of Erroll, recruited men from Aberdeenshire in the rising of 1745. She died childless in 1758, and the earldom passed to her great-nephew James, Lord Boyd, son of the 4th Earl of Kilmarnock, executed on Tower Hill in 1746.

In 1820 William Hay, 18th Earl of Erroll, married Lady Elizabeth FitzClarence, an illegitimate daughter of King William IV. In the 1830s he commissioned the Aberdeen architect John Smith to remodel the house, and the work of 1836–37 amounted to a virtual rebuilding in Scots Baronial style, its smoother granite facings set against older masonry. Charles Hay, the 20th Earl, spent most of his time in England and let Slains as a high-class summer residence — to Robert Baden-Powell in 1900 and to H. H. Asquith in 1903 and 1908, with Winston Churchill staying two nights as Asquith's guest.

Bram Stoker visited Cruden Bay regularly between 1892 and 1910, and Slains is named in two of his locally set novels, The Watter's Mou' and The Mystery of the Sea. The claim, often seen on the internet, that he took the idea for Dracula on first seeing Slains is a myth: his earliest notes for that book date from 1890, two years before his first visit, and name no particular castle. What is feasible is that Slains gave him a visual palette once he began writing at Cruden Bay in 1895, and that its octagonal hall may be the source of the "small octagonal room lit by a single lamp" into which the Count shows his guest.

In 1916 the 20th Earl sold New Slains, ending more than 300 years of occupation by the family. Lavish spending by his ancestors, the agricultural recession from the 1890s and inheritance taxes had impoverished him. The buyer, Sir John Ellerman of the Ellerman Lines shipping company, never visited it. Put up for sale again in 1922, it went to Percy P. Harvey of London, who disposed of the land while the castle itself stayed unsold; it was afterwards bought by Charles Brand Ltd, a Dundee firm that bought castles for demolition and sold off their masonry and fittings. Demolition went ahead in the summer of 1925, the slates and lead stripped for resale and an advertisement in the Aberdeen Press and Journal of 5 September headed "Demolition of Slains Castle". Plans to restore the shell have been on hold since 2009.