Roslin Castle

The Sinclairs, or St Clares, French in origin, have held Roslin since 1280. The ground they took sits precipitously above a loop of the North Esk, which guards it on three sides; the fourth was dealt with by breaching the rocky promontory on the north to cut a ditch. The family fortified the site in the early 14th century, a few hundred metres from Rosslyn Chapel and close to the ground where the Scots beat an English force at the Battle of Roslin in 1303.

The first castle proper came later, built in either the late 14th or the early 15th century and perhaps begun by Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and Baron of Roslin (c. 1345–1400). His son Henry, 2nd Earl of Orkney (c. 1375–1422), added a rectangular, round-cornered keep at the south-west corner; what survives of it suggests a block of roughly 16 by 12 metres with walls 2.9 metres thick rising to a machicolated parapet. A drawbridge over the artificial ditch led into a pend in the small north range, and so to the courtyard.

Through the 15th century the castle housed a scriptorium. Five St Clair manuscripts, the earliest dating to 1488, are now in the National Library of Scotland, among them the Rosslyn-Hay manuscript, believed to be the earliest surviving work in Scots prose. A domestic fire damaged the castle in 1452, and the story attached to it is that the Earl was in consternation for his valuable manuscripts until his chaplain lowered them to safety from a window.

Far worse came in 1544, when the Earl of Hertford burned Roslin during the War of the Rough Wooing. The keep was almost totally destroyed, leaving one ruined wall standing above a mound formed from the collapse of the other three.

Rebuilding followed in the late 16th century and changed the castle's character. A five-storey east range was driven into the side of the rock, and the gatehouse was rebuilt, this time reached by a permanent stone bridge in place of the drawbridge. The new work was still made to be fought from — gunloops along the south wall, shot-holes on the east — but it was also a house: the main hall keeps a large fireplace carved with the initials WS and JE, for William Sinclair and his wife Jean Edmonstone, and the date 1597.

In 1591 the Laird of Roslin was forfeited and the castle was held by William Leslie on behalf of the Earl of Huntly. The rebel Earl of Bothwell lodged there and left in such haste that he abandoned his coffers, with his clothes and silver plate still in them.

The upper part of the east range was renovated in 1622 with renaissance detail cut into the door and window surrounds; the entrance doorway carries that date and the initials SWS, for Sir William Sinclair. Roslin's punishment was not finished. In 1650 it came under the artillery of General Monck, Cromwell's commander in Scotland, and in 1688 it was damaged again by a Reforming mob.

By the 18th century the structure was dilapidated, though part of the east range has never ceased to be habitable. James Erskine inherited the Rosslyn and Dysart estates in 1789 from his cousin James Paterson St Clair and took the surname St Clair-Erskine; in 1805 he inherited the earldom of Rosslyn, created in 1801 for Alexander Wedderburn, and the estate has been in the Earls' possession since.

The name travelled further than the walls. Richard Hewitt of Cumberland wrote the 18th-century ballad "Roslin Castle", whose words and music were recorded in the first volume of the Scots Musical Museum, and Roslin is one of the places that features in Walter Scott's poem Rosabelle. The east range was restored between 1982 and 1988 by the architects Simpson and Brown, and the 7th Earl of Rosslyn, a descendant of the Sinclairs, lets it as holiday accommodation through the Landmark Trust.