Scone Palace

Scone was from at least the 9th century the crowning-place of the Kings of Scots. Kenneth MacAlpin, traditionally reckoned the first King of Scots, along with Macbeth, Robert the Bruce and Charles II, numbers among the 42 kings inaugurated there, and it was held that no man had a right to reign as king of Scots unless he had first been crowned at Scone upon the Stone of Scone. The ceremony took place on the mound called Caislean Credi, the Hill of Credulity, which survives as the Moot Hill. Tradition gives the mound a second name, Boot Hill, from a practice by which nobles swore fealty carrying the earth of their own lands in their foot-bindings, so that the king made his oaths standing symbolically upon the whole of his kingdom.

The first hard evidence for the place is a charter of 906, the year King Constantine II summoned an assembly there. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba records that Constantine and Bishop Cellach met at the Hill of Belief near the royal city of Scone and pledged that the laws and disciplines of the faith, and the laws of churches and gospels, should be kept pariter cum Scottis. Scone thereafter served the Kingdom of Alba as coronation site, assembly place, royal residence and hunting ground. Robert II is thought to have spent most of his life there, and was buried in the abbey, though his grave has never been located.

The monastery at Scone had its status formalised by the charter of King Alexander I, and from 1114 to 1559 it ranked among Scotland's major religious houses. A representation of the church on the abbey's seal, together with surviving architectural fragments, shows a Romanesque building with a central tower crowned by a spire. Between 1284 and 1402 the abbey, sometimes called the Palace of the Abbots, often housed the Parliament of Scotland. Alexander II and Alexander III, both crowned at Scone, ruled between 1214 and 1286.

The abbey's greatest treasure was the Stone of Scone. When Edward I of England carried the Stone off to Westminster Abbey in 1296, the Coronation Chair that still stands there was made specially to fit over it. Robert the Bruce was crowned at Scone in 1306, and the last coronation was that of Charles II, who accepted the Scottish crown in 1651. The Stone is now in Perth Museum.

In 1559, in the early days of the Reformation, a mob from Dundee whipped up by the reformer John Knox came to Scone and largely destroyed an abbey that had stood for more than four hundred years. The stone cross that had marked the Moot Hill through the Middle Ages disappeared at about the same time, probably in the same wrecking. What survived was reconstituted in 1581 as a secular lordship within the parish of Scone.

In 1580 the abbey estates were granted to Lord Ruthven, later Earl of Gowrie, who held lands around what is now Huntingtower Castle; the Ruthvens rebuilt the old abbot's palace as a grand residence. In 1600 James VI charged the family with treason, and their Scone estates passed to Sir David Murray of Gospetrie, one of the king's most loyal followers and afterwards Lord Scone. By 1604 the palace was the seat of the Murrays of Scone, a branch of the Murrays of Tullibardine whose original seat was Balvaird Castle in Fife. That line produced William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench from 1756 until 1788.

In 1802 David William Murray, 3rd Earl of Mansfield, commissioned the architect William Atkinson to extend and recast the late 16th-century Palace of Scone. The brief was to update the old house while keeping the character of the medieval Gothic abbey buildings it had been raised upon; the result was built in red sandstone with a castellated roof, and the bulk of the work was finished by 1807. In 1808 the Earl set the cost at some £60,000, with more still to come, and judged that the place more than answered expectation, giving the family a handsome and agreeable residence. John Claudius Loudon took on the landscaping, and further work followed in 1842 to make Scone ready for the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.