Old Tulliallan Castle

A fortification stood at Tulliallan, the Gaelic tulach-aluinn or beautiful knoll, some time before 1304, the year in which Edward I of England ordered it strengthened. The position was a strategic one, close to the main ferry over the Forth, and the king's order for the walls of Tolyalwyn would presumably have taken in the D-shaped moat and the outer rampart that made the site strong against an attack across the marshy ground around it. That marsh was not drained until the eighteenth century, and the moat was filled from the Firth of Forth, which in those days reached further inland than it does now.

There would have been buildings inside the enclosure, but the castle whose ruin survives was probably raised later, by the Douglases: an L-shaped block of two storeys in ashlar masonry, its main entrance set in a tower at the south-western corner and reached by a drawbridge. The house was extended in the fifteenth century, and a major reconstruction seems to have been carried out in the late sixteenth.

The castle passed into the ownership of William Douglas, 1st Earl of Douglas, who died in 1384. In 1402 Archibald Douglas, 4th Earl of Douglas, gifted the Tulliallan estate to the Edmiston family, and in 1456 a royal charter confirmed the gift to Sir James Edmiston, a great-grandson of King Robert II. It reached the Blackadders by marriage: Patrick Blackader, grandson of Cuthbert Blackader of Blackader Castle in Berwickshire, married Sir James's daughter Elizabeth, who brought Tulliallan with her as her dowry. The Blackadder lairds of Tulliallan, a branch of the Blackadder border clan, wielded considerable power through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

A noted member of the family was Robert Blackadder, brother of Patrick Blackadder, Laird of Tulliallan. He was Bishop of Aberdeen, then Bishop of Glasgow from 1484 and, in 1492, the first Archbishop of Glasgow, and he added the crypt and aisle that carry his name in Glasgow Cathedral. In 1488 he sided with the rebel nobles who defeated and killed King James III at the Battle of Sauchieburn. He died in 1508, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

In March 1531 one of the lairds of Tulliallan, Sir John Blackadder, was beheaded for the murder of James Inglis, Abbot of Culross, in a dispute over land. His brother Patrick succeeded him at Tulliallan and revived the family's quarrel with the Homes over the Blackadder lands around Allanton in Berwickshire. Patrick was murdered in an ambush near Edinburgh, on his way to meet the Homes and try to settle their differences, and after that the Blackadders made no further attempt to recover their ancestral estates.

William Blackadder was among the supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots at the Battle of Carberry Hill on 15 June 1567. He was arrested soon afterwards and hanged that June, and his brother was hanged in September.

The last Blackadder to own Tulliallan was Sir John, born in 1596 and created a knight baronet of Nova Scotia by King Charles I on 18 July 1626. His estate, with its lime works, salt pans and other enterprises, yielded 36,000 merks a year, which was not enough to satisfy his expensive habits, and he ran up debts far beyond his ability to pay. When his effects were seized he fled to the continent; in 1642 he seems to have been in the French service, and he died in America in 1651.

His wife, Elizabeth Graham, daughter of the Earl of Menteith, had an annuity of 360 merks and lived on at Tulliallan until 1662. Sir John's son Alexander could not free the estate from the burden of debt his father had contracted. The Court of Session ordered a judicial sale. The covenanting preacher John Blackadder, who lived from 1622 to 1685, was legally the heir to the Blackadder baronetcy but never claimed the title. In 1700 the estate was bought by Colonel John Erskine, son of David Erskine, 4th Lord Cardross.

The last occupant of the old castle was Colonel Erskine, known locally as the Black Colonel, who died in the 1790s. George Elphinstone, 1st Viscount Keith, bought the estate in 1799 and built the present Tulliallan Castle about half a mile to the south-east as his family residence, the work finished in 1820. The roof of the old castle was removed and the building was left to crumble into ruin.

A bronze kettle was dug out of those ruins, about 8.5 inches across and 5 inches high. Legend has it that the kettle once hung from one of the bosses of the castle roof, filled with gold, and that for as long as it hung there the castle would stand and the Blackadders of Tulliallan would prosper. In 1885 the old castle, though ruined, was still described as an imposing-looking edifice.

The parish had originally covered only the barony of Tulliallan; in 1673 it was extended to take in the barony of Kincardine and the lands of Lurg, Sands and Kellywood, formerly part of neighbouring Culross. For many years Culross and Tulliallan together formed an exclave of Perthshire on the boundaries of Clackmannanshire and Fife, until both were transferred to Fife on the recommendations of the boundary commission appointed under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889. The house Lord Keith built passed to the Mitchell family in 1924, served as the headquarters of the Polish Armed Forces in the West during the Second World War, and has been home to the Scottish Police College since 1954, as well as the temporary headquarters of Police Scotland when that force was created in 2013. The old castle it replaced has been a scheduled monument since 30 April 1920.