Traquair House

Traquair is claimed to be the oldest continually inhabited house in Scotland, though no part of the present building can be dated with certainty before the 15th century. It stands on the site of a hunting seat used by Scottish kings from the 12th century; Alexander I was the first to stay and hunt there, when it was a remote "castle" surrounded by forest. The death of Alexander III in 1286 broke the peace of the Borders, and Traquair became a link in the chain of defences guarding the Tweed Valley against English invasion. Over the following two centuries its ownership passed repeatedly between English and Scottish control.

Traquair is not strictly a castle but a fortified mansion, built before the Scottish Baronial style and possibly one of its influences.

In the 1460s James III granted the estate to Dr William Rogers, an eminent musician and royal favourite. Rogers held the lands for upwards of nine years before selling them in 1478, for an insignificant sum, to the Earl of Buchan. In 1491 the Earl gifted the estate to his illegitimate son, James Stuart, who became 1st Laird of Traquair. Stuart obtained letters of legitimation and married the heiress of the Rutherfords, gaining the estates of Rutherford and Wells in Roxburghshire, and was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. Traquair remained the seat of the Earls of Traquair for the next four centuries.

Mary, Queen of Scots, visited Traquair in August 1566, and James VI came on 9 March 1602. Ale had already been brewed at Traquair during Mary's reign, and in 1739 a 200-gallon copper was installed in the brew house beneath the chapel; the brewery was revived in 1965 by Peter Maxwell Stuart, 20th Laird, using 18th-century equipment, with some of its oak fermenting tuns over 200 years old.

The Bear Gates at the main entrance were installed by the fifth Earl, Charles Stuart, in 1738, with masonry by John Burns and ironwork by Daniel Aitken; the stone bears atop them were carved in 1745. RCAHMS records that the gates were sealed in 1796 on the death of the Countess of Traquair, the 7th Earl vowing to keep them closed. A more romantic but impossible version holds that the Earl sealed them after Charles Edward Stuart passed through in 1745, swearing they would not reopen until a Stuart king returned.

In 1875 Traquair passed to a cousin of the Stuart earls, Henry Constable Maxwell, a direct descendant through the female line. The house remains a category A listed building, in the ownership of Peter D'Arcy Joseph Maxwell-Stuart, 20th of Traquair.