Seton Castle

The house stands on the site of Seton Palace, which occupied the lands of Seton and Winton near Longniddry on the Firth of Forth and belonged to the Earls of Winton. The date the palace was first built is uncertain. It was a favoured retreat of Mary, Queen of Scots: she and her second husband, Lord Darnley, spent their honeymoon there, and she came back to it after Darnley's murder. In May 1544, following the burning of Edinburgh, the English army burned the palace.

Historical records describe it as the most magnificent palace in Scotland in the seventeenth century, and both James VI and Charles I were entertained there. It was damaged and burned out again during the Jacobite rising of 1715, and in 1780 it was described as being in ruins. The palace was demolished in 1789.

In the summer of 1789 Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Mackenzie of the 21st Dragoons, eldest son of Alexander Mackenzie of Portmore in Peeblesshire, commissioned Robert Adam to build a new mansion on the site. It was Adam's final project in Scotland. Working drawings were finished by December 1789, the building contract went to Thomas Russell, and construction ran from 12 November 1789 to the summer of 1791.

The remains of the old palace were pulled down and cleared by 1790, apart from the vaulted ground floor, which was left standing; stone from the palace was reused in the new building. John Patterson, Adam's Clerk of Works in Scotland and later a competent architect in his own right, wrote to Adam on 26 April 1790 to report the old building demolished and the ground cleared. What went up in its place was a castellated house in the late-Georgian taste, with shaped towers set about a curved wall enclosing a courtyard entered by a central archway.

Alexander Mackenzie died a young man in 1796, and the Earl of Wemyss acquired the estate; his family held it for more than two centuries, letting the castle for a time to the Stevenson family of Prestonfield House. In 2003, "in a dreadful state", it was sold to the property developer Mary McMillan, who carried out a major restoration and then put it back on the market. The entrepreneur Stephen Leach bought it in 2007, completed further renovation and sold it in 2019, when the house was described as an 18,196-square-foot mansion of seven bedrooms on 13.5 acres, with working stables and a private tavern. David Fam, founder of Dreamr Hotels, bought it in 2022, and the property was advertised for sale again in 2024.

Seton Castle is a category A listed building, listed as Seton House, with its surrounding grounds designated; it has been described as one of the most striking of Robert Adam's late houses in the castle style, and the listing document accords it high value. A report of 1987 recorded that of the palace it replaced, only the walls of the famous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century formal gardens remained. Seton Collegiate Church, immediately adjacent, is in the care of Historic Scotland.