# Craigievar Castle

castle and museum in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK

Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1626 CE

## Story

• A pink harled tower house between the Dee and the Don, begun by the Mortimers in the later 1500s and finished for William Forbes about 1626.
• The Forbes family, later chiefs of Clan Sempill, kept it until 1962 or 1963, and the upper rooms still have no electric light.
• The great hall carries seventeenth-century plaster of the Nine Worthies, the arms of William Forbes and Margaret Udward, and dates from 1610 to 1626.
• A 1990 dig found the buried barmkin and coins from the 1570s to 1663, and a Baltic oak door lost since 1825 was found in 2019.
• Cement harling was replaced with lime by 2010, and a further limewash campaign ended when the castle reopened on 31 May 2024.

## Visiting

The castle opening hours are for guided tours only, first come, first served, and visitors cannot book in advance. Each tour admits at most 10 people, the tours are given both as running at about 45-minute intervals and as running at about 30-minute intervals, and the last admission is at the posted closing time, when the castle, shop and kiosk close. The castle is closed from 26 October until 25 March 2027, then open Friday to Monday from 10.30 to 16.00 from 26 March to 30 May, open daily from 10.30 to 16.00 from 1 June to 5 September, open Friday to Monday from 10.30 to 16.00 from 6 September to 30 September, and open Friday to Monday from 11.00 to 15.00 from 1 October to 25 October. The grounds are open daily from dawn to dusk throughout the year.
Castle tickets are £18 for an adult, £14 concession, £40.50 for a family, £34.50 for a one-adult family, and £1 for a Young Scot. A ticket that includes a 10 percent donation is £19.80, £15.40, £44.55, or £37.95. Admission is free for members, entry to the grounds and woodland is free, and the car park ticket is £5, free for members. Entry is by stone steps into the castle, with four steps down to the shop and steep spiral stone stairs to the upper floors.
Dogs are allowed to enter the grounds on a short lead near the castle and near livestock. Drone flying is not allowed without prior permission.

## History

Craigievar Castle is a harled L-plan tower house in Leochel-Cushnie, Aberdeenshire, on a hillside between the Dee and the Don. It stands 6 miles south of Alford in one account and four and a half miles southwest of Alford in another. It was the seat of a Forbes branch that later held the chiefship of Clan Sempill, and the pink roughcast, corbelled turrets and single entrance were built for both defence and display.

The Mortimers began the house around 1576, or in the late 1500s, as a simpler tower of about four storeys inside a barmkin. They are credited with the first three floors and with the oak lining of the great hall. How the Forbeses took it over is disputed: a purchase in 1610, a loss at cards, or a Mortimer bankruptcy that left the tower unfinished.

In 1610 John Mortymer and his wife Helen Symmer sold the barony to William Forbes, a second son and Baltic merchant known as Danzig Willie, brother of Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen. He raised the upper floors and the plaster between 1610 and 1626. Completion is given as 1625, as 1626, and as either year, and he is said to have died in 1627.

The hall ceiling carries heroes of the Nine Worthies, including David, Joshua, Hector, Ajax and Alexander the Great, with the arms of William Forbes and his wife Margaret Udward and dates from 1610 to 1626. One account gives the craftsmen as Italians; another as Italian-trained Englishmen who had come from Bromley by Bow. The royal arms over the fireplace are also called the Stuart arms, and rushes were still strewn on the floor in 1842.

An iron yett hangs behind the only door. The kitchen well, now closed, is tied to a story of a drowned fiddler. A secret stair, a withdrawing room dated 1625, and a small room called the Prophet’s Chamber belong to the upper house. The west wall of the courtyard, one round tower, and the carved initials of Sir Thomas Forbes are what remains of a once larger barmkin.

Clan Forbes had spent the sixteenth century in a feud with Clan Gordon, culminating in 1571 at Druminnor, the Battle of Tillieangus, the Battle of Craibstone and the burning at Corgarff. Patrick Forbes, the merchant’s eldest brother, became Bishop of Aberdeen in 1618 and died in 1635. The neighbouring castle of Corse, dated 1581, is described as a model for Craigievar, and the two estates were united in 1681.

The merchant’s son became a baronet of Nova Scotia. The creation is dated 20 April 1630, in the reign of Charles I, who was executed in 1649. That baronet is said to have joined the Covenant, held posts under parliament, and later repented. His son, the Red Sir John, set the motto Doe not waken sleiping dogs on the walls.

The fifth baronet married Sarah Sempill, called the daughter of either the twelfth or the thirteenth Lord Sempill. Their grandson, the eighth baronet, became seventeenth Lord Sempill in 1884 and took the name Sempill in 1885. Craigievar is now the seat of the chief of Clan Sempill.

William Forbes-Sempill, 19th Lord Sempill, born in 1893, was an airman who passed military secrets to Japan and was forced out of the Royal Navy in 1941, during the Second World War. He sold the estate in 1963, a transfer also dated to 1962, and died in 1965. The family had required that the rooms stay without electric light. The lordship passed to his daughter and the baronetcy, after a dispute, to Sir Ewan Forbes.

By the early 1800s the tower was decayed. Sir John Forbes consulted the Aberdeen architect John Smith, who urged him to keep it. Repairs of about 1824 to 1826 reroofed the house, raised towers, replaced the door in 1825, and are tied to the first pink harling, though 1820, 1824 and 1826 are all named. Two portraits by Henry Raeburn remain, with their receipts, and David Young Cameron made a drypoint of the castle in 1908.

In 1990 excavation found the east barmkin wall, part of the south wall, two drains, postholes, and four coins, from a sixpence of Elizabeth I in the 1570s to a turner of Charles II dated 1663. A sixpence of 1573 is also said to have lain in the south wall. Later trenches in 1998 and 2002 showed rubble, a midden and shallow foundations, and in 2020 the exterior was recorded by drone.

Cement harling was replaced with hot lime between 2007 and 2010, with twenty-three new cannon spouts. A studded oak door found in 2019 was made from Baltic trees felled in 1510 and 1554. Whether it is the original door of 1626 is still treated as speculation in one account and as probable in others. After a further limewash campaign the castle reopened on 31 May 2024.

The tower is said to have inspired Walt Disney’s pink Cinderella castle, a claim confirmed by James Henderson and also told as a belief about photographs. Folklore adds ghosts that the stories do not agree on. Nigel Tranter’s survey of fortified houses, and the unrelated life of Thomas Jamieson Boyd, sit in the written record around the building rather than in its ownership.

## Photographs

- [This is a photo of listed building number — Anais Culot](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Craigievar-Castle.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._03.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._02.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._01.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._05.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._04.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._06.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._07.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._09.jpg)
- [A tour of the tower castle Craigievar. — Holger Uwe Schmitt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._10.jpg)

## Sources

- [Craigievar Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigievar_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Clan Forbes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Forbes) — Wikipedia
- [Clan Sempill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Sempill) — Wikipedia
- [Lord Sempill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Sempill) — Wikipedia
- [Patrick Forbes (bishop of Aberdeen)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Forbes_(bishop_of_Aberdeen)) — Wikipedia
- [Charles I of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [William Forbes-Sempill, 19th Lord Sempill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Forbes-Sempill,_19th_Lord_Sempill) — Wikipedia
- [John Smith (architect)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smith_(architect)) — Wikipedia
- [Henry Raeburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Raeburn) — Wikipedia
- [David Young Cameron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Young_Cameron) — Wikipedia
- [Nigel Tranter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Tranter) — Wikipedia
- [Nine Worthies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Worthies) — Wikipedia
- [Walt Disney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney) — Wikipedia
- [James VI and I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I) — Wikipedia
- [Elizabeth I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I) — Wikipedia
- [Planning your visit, Craigievar Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/craigievar/planning-your-visit) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Craigievar Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/craigievar) — National Trust for Scotland
- [The Great Eight at Craigievar Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/the-great-eight-at-craigievar-castle) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Pink Again project](https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/craigievar/highlights/pink-again-project) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Pink again: Craigievar Castle reopens](https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/pink-again-craigievar-castle-reopens) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Opening the door at Craigievar Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/opening-the-door-at-craigievar-castle) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Craigievar Castle, a Scottish castle full of tales of warriors and ghosts](https://www.countrylife.co.uk/architecture/craigievar-castle-a-scottish-castle-full-of-tales-of-warriors-and-ghosts-218361) — Country Life
- [Discovery and Excavation in Scotland 1990](https://www.archaeologyscotland.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1990.pdf) — Archaeology Scotland
- [Excavations at Craigievar Castle, Aberdeenshire](https://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/psas/article/view/9473) — Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
- [Craigievar Castle in 3D](https://www.aocarchaeology.com/news/craigievar3d) — AOC Archaeology Group
- [Craigievar Castle (LB9229)](https://www.trove.scot/designation/LB9229) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Craigievar Castle, place record](https://www.trove.scot/place/17471) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Castle that inspired Walt Disney set to re-open](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd11lwj3lp5o) — BBC News
- [Craigievar Castle restoration case study](https://www.ltm-group.co.uk/projects/craigievar-castle) — LTM Group
- [Craigievar-Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Craigievar-Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 03.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._03.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 02.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._02.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 05.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._05.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 04.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._04.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 06.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._06.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 07.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._07.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 09.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._09.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [+1626 wurde die Turmburg Craigievar fertiggestellt. 10.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%2B1626_wurde_die_Turmburg_Craigievar_fertiggestellt._10.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Craigievar Castle is a harled tower house in the parish of Leochel-Cushnie, Aberdeenshire, set on a hillside in its own valley between the Dee and the Don. One account places it 6 miles, or 9.7 kilometres, south of Alford. Another places it four and a half miles southwest of Alford. From that height a household could watch an approach and fall back into hill country. The building is a stepped L-plan tower, called seven storeys in several descriptions and five or seven in the legal listing. It was a fortified country house and the seat of a branch of Clan Forbes that later held the chiefship of Clan Sempill. The pink roughcast, the corbelled turrets, the ogee-capped stair towers and the single entrance were meant to be both a defence and a show of rank.

The Mortimer family are the first builders named on the site. Work is said to have begun around 1576, and also in the late 1500s, when the place was a simpler tower of about four storeys with an enclosing wall. That enclosure, a barmkin, would probably have held stables, a smithy and a brewhouse. The Mortimers are said to have built the first three floors, and the oak lining of the great hall is described as their panelling from the late 1570s, one of the few features still credited to them. They are also said, as a belief rather than a proved title, to have held the land from the late 1400s. The project is said to have been beyond their means. One family memory says they lost the castle in a card game that may have been rigged. The Forbes account says the unfinished house was bought with money made in the Baltic trade. A third account says the Mortimers simply ran out of money and the Forbeses finished the work. All three are on record, and they do not agree.

In 1610 John Mortymer, with the consent of his wife Helen Symmer, sold the lands to a brother of Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen and laird of Corse. The buyer was William Forbes, an Aberdonian merchant, a second son, and the man later called Danzig Willy, Willy the Merchant, or Danzig Willie. The disposition conveyed all and haill the lands and barony of Craigievar, with the mains, the manor place, the tower and fortalice, the houses, biggings, yards and orchards, the corn and waulk mills, and the multures, sequels and knaveships that went with them. The lands marched with Corse, which the seller’s new neighbour already knew as an old Forbes house. William spent about sixteen years on the upper work. He is credited with the floors from the third storey upward, with the plaster, and with the castle as it still reads from the outside. Dates cut with the plaster run from 1610 to 1626. Completion is given as 1625, as 1626, and as 1625 or 1626. He is said to have died in 1627, so that if the house was finished in 1626 he had one year in the completed building. The south front is described as his work between 1610 and 1625 or 1626.

William’s fortune came from trade with the Baltic, and in particular from the port of Danzig, now Gdansk. He was said to have made a goodly pile merchandising there, and to have come home with the money to buy a barony. A portrait of him hangs in the house, but little else is known of his character beyond the building and the initials he left in the plaster. His wife was Margaret Udward. Their arms stand among the heroes on the hall ceiling, and their joined initials appear through the castle with those dates from 1610 to 1626. Above the east window and round the nearest bosses are the lines Lux mea Christus, Post tenebras spero lucem, Deus lumina, and Virtus vivat post funera. The same merchant was not content with a strong tower. The plaster is described as very curious, laid through bedrooms and landings as well as the hall, which is more rooms than most patrons of that craft are said to have commissioned.

Who made the ceilings is told in two ways. One account says he summoned Italian craftsmen who worked along the east coast of Scotland. Another says the men were Italian-trained English craftsmen who had worked up from Bromley by Bow, near London, and that Craigievar is believed to be the farthest north they came. The hall is a hall of heroes. The figures include David Rex with a harp, though on one plaque the name David is lettered in reverse, the mould having been turned out backwards. Josue Dux carries a glaive. Hector of Troy is there, and is described as sadly lacking a neck. Ajax is there. Alexander the Great, spelled in the plaster in the old form Alessauder Magnas, is a favourite and is repeated in other rooms. These men belong to the Nine Worthies, the medieval set of three pagans, three Jews and three Christians first set out in the early fourteenth century: Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus; King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon. The ceiling is also said, more generally, to carry plaster figures of the Nine Worthies and other family emblems. Craigievar, Muchalls and Glamis have been grouped as the three finest plaster ceilings in Scotland, while a later account calls the Craigievar collection the finest seventeenth-century plasterwork in the country. Both judgments are on record.

The hall occupies one arm of the L and has windows on every side. The east window shows only over a carved oak screen, and pipers’ galleries, also called a musicians’ gallery, rest on that screen. They are surmised to have once been joined in the thickness of the wall, until the wall was cut back when the windows were enlarged. That enlargement is described as perhaps the only conspicuous alteration the hall has suffered. The hall is stone-vaulted, with plaster laid on the vault. Over the fireplace, on wood, is rougher work in bold relief: the royal arms, with Scotland quartered twice, the supporters flanked by terminal figures of Adam and Eve. Another description calls the same carving the Stuart arms. The legal listing calls the hall groin-vaulted, with plaster decoration and the original screens passage. As late as 1842 fresh rushes were strewn each day on the boarded floor. Inside the chimney, which is said to rise 80 feet open to the sky, a recess called the salt-box kept salt dry when salt was costly. The hall is wainscoted in oak. Other rooms have later panelling, mostly in native red pine. Box-beds remain. Within living memory of a 1906 visit, some beds had been two-storey bunks against bare stone or hung with painted cotton.

A straight scale-stair rises to the hall. From it a winding stair runs up to the smaller bartizan on the east. The larger bartizan is reached by a short stair from the fifth floor. Another circular stair runs through three storeys in the north-west corner and comes straight into the hall. A secret stair is also described, connecting the high tower to the hall. The withdrawing room is dated 1625 and looks, by one speculation, like a ship’s cabin, a memory of the Baltic trade. Between that room and a very small room called the Prophet’s Chamber, two doors are said to have held offenders and captives for judgment before they were sent to a dungeon, where food was lowered through a trap. The Queen’s Bedroom, servants’ quarters and further plaster ceilings complete the upper house. The kitchen and cellars, only partly underground, are vaulted. A well under the kitchen, now closed, is the subject of a rhyme that a fiddler drowned there and can be heard on a windy day. Behind the single door hangs an iron yett, a gate of interlaced bars with heavy bolts. It is made of inch-square rods bent and woven, it can be closed only from the inside, and a yett of this kind is said to have needed the king’s permission. There is no evidence it was ever used in a defence of this particular house. It was a deterrent. The entrance also had a studded oak door, of which more below.

The upper silhouette is the part that later centuries treated as the model of its age. Two-storey angle turrets, a re-entrant tower corbelled out, balustraded flat roofs and ogee-capped stair turrets stand over harled walls. Crow-steps, dormers, chimney stacks and bartizan parapets break the skyline. A bust of a piper on a gable is tied to a story that a mason walking the bartizan parapet fell, was caught by his smock on the piper, and hung there until he was pulled back. Gargoyles and heraldic beasts are sandstone, while the mouldings and parapet are reddish granite. Some sandstone ornaments had already fallen by 1906, including a figure described as hugging his legs, or, by the irreverent, a pair of bottles. Thistles, twisted rope and scale patterns show in the corbelling when the light is hard. The whole tower was harled in a faint shade of the red gravel of the district, close to the colour of the granite mouldings. The pink that visitors now see has been renewed more than once, and the date of the first pink is itself in dispute.

The Forbes who finished Craigievar were not a new name in Aberdeenshire. Clan Forbes is a Lowland clan from that county. The name is probably taken from the lands of Forbes, said to have been in the family’s hands since the time of William the Lion. Legend has the founder Oconachar killing the bears of the Braes of Forbes and taking the land as first occupier. The first person on a surviving charter is Duncan Forbes, who in 1271 or 1272 received a grant from Alexander III of Scotland. A John Forbes appears on a 1306 roll of demands to Edward I of England for forfeited Scottish lands, sought by both a William Comyn and a Robert Chival. A Christian Forbes received a third of Skeith and Ardach from Robert the Bruce in 1326, though doubt remains that he was of this family. John Forbes, styled lord of that ilk, witnessed charters of Thomas, Earl of Mar, in 1358 and 1359, received Edinbanchory and Craiglogy under David II in 1364, was Sheriff of Aberdeen in 1374, and was dead before 20 August 1387. His son, Sir John of the black lip, justiciary and coroner of Aberdeenshire, died in 1406. Younger sons founded the lines of Pitsligo, Tolquhon, Skellater and Inverernan.

Alexander Forbes, first Lord Forbes, fought at the Battle of Harlaw in 1411 for Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, and was raised to the peerage by James I between October 1444 and July 1445. He died in 1448. His son James, the second Lord Forbes, married Egidia, daughter of William Keith, first Earl Marischal. Their sons were William, the third lord; Duncan, ancestor of the Forbeses of Corsindae and Monymusk; and Patrick, ancestor of the baronets of Craigievar, now Lord Sempill, and also of the Earls of Granard. That Patrick is the armour-bearer to James III from whom the Craigievar branch is separately said to spring, under the style Patrick Forbes of Corse. He is not the later bishop of the same title.

The sixteenth century, the century in which the Mortimers began the tower, was the century of the Forbes feud with Clan Gordon. In the 1520s there were murders on both sides. One of the men killed by the Forbeses was Seton of Meldrum, a close connection of the Earl of Huntly, chief of Clan Gordon. The sixth Lord Forbes was heavily implicated. Huntly then drew the Master of Forbes, the sixth lord’s son, into a charge that in 1536 he had conspired to assassinate James V by shooting at him with a cannon. The Master was tried and sentenced to death. Days later the conviction was reversed and the family was restored to favour. The sixth lord himself had been charged with treason in 1536, imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and acquitted. The Reformation sharpened the quarrel. The Gordons remained Catholic and the Forbeses became Protestant. Clan Leslie, Clan Irvine and Clan Seton sided with the Gordons. Clan Keith, Clan Fraser and Clan Crichton sided with the Forbeses. There was also a feud with the burgh of Aberdeen over a yearly tun of wine for the fishings of the Don. In July 1530 Arthur Forbes of Brux attacked the town. The fighting at Greyfriars Place lasted twenty-four hours. The next year the magistrates took law-burrows against several Forbes lairds.

In 1571, about the time a tower at Craigievar was being imagined or begun, twenty Gordons were killed at a banquet in Druminnor Castle, then the chief’s seat. Later that year the feud climaxed at the Battle of Tillieangus and the Battle of Craibstone, and Druminnor was plundered. The Gordons followed with the killing at Corgarff Castle of the Forbeses of Towie. One account says twenty-seven people. Another says the castle was held by twenty-six women, children and servants while the men were away, that Margaret Campbell, wife of Forbes of Towie, refused to surrender and shot one of Adam Gordon of Auchindoun’s men in the knee, and that Gordon then burned the tower with everyone inside. It took two Acts of Parliament to make the clans put down their arms. A fortified house between Dee and Don, finished a generation later by a Forbes merchant, belongs to that world even though no source puts a battle in the Craigievar courtyard.

The bishop who was the merchant’s brother lived through the same years. Patrick Forbes was born on 24 August 1564, the eldest son of Elizabeth Strachan and William Forbes, laird of Corse. He was schooled at Stirling, then at Glasgow and St Andrews, where Andrew Melville influenced him. His father died in 1598 and left him the estate. He preached in a puritan vein but was reluctant to take a parish until, in 1612, he was ordained and became minister of Keith, as the dying minister John Chalmers had asked. His books included An Exquisite Commentarie upon the Revelation of Saint John, of 1613, strongly hostile to the Catholic Church, and A Short Discovery of the Adversarie, of 1614, in which he moderated his view of bishops but still called bishoprics unnecessary. In January 1618 the crown nominated him to succeed Alexander Forbes as Bishop of Aberdeen. He was elected on 24 March, received royal provision on 8 April, and was consecrated on 17 May. He said he took the see out of obedience to the king. Presbyterians who rejected bishops were hostile, but he was respected for piety. As chancellor of the University of Aberdeen he reorganised the training of ministers. His summer house was Tullynessle Tower. He married Lucretia Spens and one of their children was the theologian John Forbes. He died of apoplexy on 28 March 1635 and was buried in St Machar’s Cathedral in Old Aberdeen. The castle his brother was finishing therefore rose while James VI was pressing episcopacy in Scotland, and it was already standing when this bishop died.

The older castle of Corse, three miles or five kilometres north-west of Lumphanan and now a ruin, is part of the same story. William Forbes of Corse, the bishop’s father, is said to have been plundered by Highland caterans and to have vowed that if God spared him he would build a house at which thieves would have to knock. The house bears the date 1581 and is described as a probable model for Craigievar. A local tale has the mason, finished, washing his hands in the burn and saying that another tippence would have left him well off. In 1681 the lands of Craigievar and Corse were united under the merchant’s grandson. A later laird is said to have taken the slates off Corse to roof his stables at Fintray. Corse afterwards passed to a younger branch and was left beyond repair.

William the merchant was succeeded by his son. One account says that son was made a baronet of Nova Scotia in 1630. Another says the Forbes baronetcy of Craigievar, in the county of Aberdeen, was created in the Baronetage of Nova Scotia on 20 April 1630 for a William Forbes, and that this William was a descendant of the Honourable Patrick Forbes, third son of the second Lord Forbes, and nephew of the first baronet of a creation of 1628. If the merchant died in 1627, the 1630 patent belongs to the son, who was also a William. Charles I of England was the king who granted it. Charles was born on 19 November 1600, the second son of James VI and I, and he reigned in England, Scotland and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution on 30 January 1649. He believed in the divine right of kings, quarrelled with the English Parliament over taxes and prerogative, married the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France, and backed high-church practice. His attempt to bring the Church of Scotland toward those practices led to the Bishops’ Wars and strengthened the Covenanters. From 1642 he fought the English and Scottish parliaments. Defeated in 1645, he surrendered to a Scottish force, was given to the English parliament, escaped briefly in 1647, was tried, and was beheaded. The monarchy was abolished and then restored in 1660 in his son Charles II.

The Craigievar baronet is said to have been caught in that crisis. A 1906 retelling says he rashly engaged in the cause of the Covenant, was called a main covenanter and Cragyvar that famous man, and sometimes that famous oppressor. He held posts under parliament, then repented, and is said to have died broken-hearted because his own party stripped him of the goods he meant to carry back to his king. The words are a later characterisation, not a court record transcribed here, but they are the account that ties this house to the Covenant. Other Forbes lairds took other sides in the same wars. Sir Alexander Forbes of Tolquhon, whose castle had been a Forbes house since 1420, commanded cavalry in the Scots army at Worcester, and when the king’s horse was shot he mounted Charles II on his own, put a buff coat and a bloody scarf on him, and saw him off the field. The chief of the wider clan in that century, Alexander, tenth Lord Forbes, had been a lieutenant general under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War, then held a commission against risings in Ireland, and died in Stockholm on 20 April 1672.

The merchant’s grandson is known as the Red Sir John. His initials stand with the motto Doe not waken sleiping dogs. From him comes the saying, I’m a Craigievar man, wha dour meddle wi’ me. He is described as a man of great energy who did much to retrieve the fortunes of the house. On the arched door of the one surviving round tower of the courtyard are the carved initials of Sir Thomas Forbes, named as William Forbes’s son. The sources do not say that Sir Thomas and the Red Sir John are the same man, so both names stand. The courtyard those initials marked was once a full defence. Sir Andrew Leith Hay wrote in 1847 of a paved court in front, enclosing stables and offices, inside a strong thick wall with ramparts and flanking turrets. Only one portion remained, with trees rooted in the masonry. By 1906 sycamore, ash and a gean, a wild cherry, still grew on the west wall, and ivy covered the scar of a kitchen chimney that had stood outside the main block. Steps still led through the old gateway, with recesses in the wall for outlook and shot. The legal listing records the west wall of the barmkin, with what may be a brewhouse at the north end and a conical-roofed tower at the south end. Another account says the court had four round towers and that only one remains, and that the rest of the wall and the buildings inside it were removed in the 1800s. Craigievar is still described as one of the few castles in Aberdeenshire to keep any of its enclosure.

Not every Craigievar laird is remembered only for a feud. An Alexander, born in 1700, is called a child of ardent spirit who by the age of twelve had written poems read with admiration. The fourth baronet sat for Aberdeenshire in the House of Commons. The fifth baronet married the Honourable Sarah Sempill. One account calls her the eldest daughter of Hugh Sempill, twelfth Lord Sempill. Another calls her the eldest daughter of the thirteenth Lord Sempill. Their grandson, the eighth baronet, succeeded in 1884 as seventeenth Lord Sempill. In 1885 he took, by royal licence, the additional surname Sempill. Clan Sempill is a Lowland clan whose name is recorded in Renfrewshire from the twelfth century. In 1246 Robert de Sempill witnessed a charter to Paisley Abbey. In the Wars of Independence his sons Robert and Thomas supported Robert the Bruce and were rewarded with lands at Largs and half of Longniddry. Sir Thomas Sempill fell for James III at the Battle of Sauchieburn in June 1488. His son John was made Lord Sempill under James IV, founded the collegiate church of Lochwinnoch in 1505, rebuilt Castle Sempill, and was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513.

The third Lord Sempill, Robert, called the Great Lord Sempill, was taken at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh in 1547, backed Mary of Guise, then turned to the party of James VI after Darnley’s death, fought Mary at Carberry Hill, signed the warrant that sent her to Loch Leven, and led the vanguard of Regent Moray at the Battle of Langside in 1568. The fourth lord attended the baptism of Prince Henry at Stirling in 1594 and was James VI’s ambassador to Spain, then lost office because he would not renounce Catholicism. The sixth lord backed the royalists in the Civil War and was fined under the Commonwealth. The eighth lord, the first of the title to sit in parliament since Mary’s reign, died in 1684 and was succeeded by his sister Anne, wife of Robert Abercromby, who in 1685 was created Lord Glassford for life. A charter of 1688 settled the lordship on her daughters. The male line of the original lords had ended. Her younger son, the twelfth lord, Hew or Hugh Sempill, commanded the left wing of the government army at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In 1712 the exiled James Francis Edward Stuart had recognised a different Robert Sempill as Lord Sempill of Dykehead in the Jacobite peerage. British authorities never recognised that claim.

The fifteenth lord died unmarried in 1835. His sister Maria and her husband Edward Chandler took the name Sempill in 1853 and had no children. The title then came to her cousin Sir William Forbes, eighth baronet of Craigievar, grandson of Sarah Sempill, as seventeenth Lord Sempill. Craigievar Castle is the present seat of the chief of Clan Sempill. The eighteenth lord sat in the House of Lords as a Scottish representative peer from 1910 to 1934. His son was William Forbes-Sempill, 19th Lord Sempill, born William Francis Forbes-Sempill on 24 September 1893. He was known as Master of Sempill before he succeeded in 1934 to the lordship and the Craigievar baronetcy. Educated at Eton, he flew in the Royal Flying Corps and then served in the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Air Force during the First World War. In 1921 he led an official military mission to Japan to show British aircraft, and he went on helping the Imperial Japanese Navy build its air service. In the 1920s he began passing military secrets to the Japanese. British intelligence uncovered the activity. He was not prosecuted and remained in public life. He was a Scottish representative peer from 1935 until 1963, when Scottish peers as a body received seats in the House of Lords. In 1941, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan’s declaration of war on the United States and the British Empire, he was found still passing secret material to Tokyo and was forced to retire from the Royal Navy. He died on 30 December 1965. He had one daughter. The lordship and the baronetcy then divided. The barony passed to his daughter Ann, twentieth Lady Sempill. The baronetcy could pass only to a male heir. After a two-year dispute, his younger sibling, who had changed legal gender from female to male in 1952, succeeded as Sir Ewan Forbes, eleventh baronet. On Sir Ewan’s death in 1991 the cousin who had challenged that succession, Sir John Alexander Cumnock Forbes, became twelfth baronet. Ann had married and divorced Eric Holt, then married Stuart Whitemore Chant, who in 1966 took the surname Sempill by decree of the Lord Lyon. Her eldest son by that marriage succeeded in 1995 as twenty-first Lord Sempill. As named in the clan record he is James William Stuart Whitmore Sempill.

Before that twentieth-century parting of titles, the house itself nearly came down. By the early 1800s the tower had fallen into decay. Sir John Forbes thought of demolition and asked John Smith, the Aberdeen city architect. Smith told him the tower was one of the finest specimens in the country of the age and style in which it was built. Smith was born in Aberdeen in 1781, son of the builder William Smith, and he died on 22 July 1852. He trained as a mason, studied in London, and in 1805 began a career that made him, in 1807, the first official city architect of Aberdeen. With Archibald Simpson he shaped the granite streets that gave the city the names Granite City and Silver City. From the 1830s his country houses and churches leaned to a Tudor Gothic manner, and he was nicknamed Tudor Johnny. His work at Craigievar was a repair, not a new design. Roof repairs are dated about 1826, with a timber base covered in slates. A specification of that time calls for a complete new roof of best Memel timber, covered with Fondland slates fixed with copper nails, and for lead ridges in place of stone and slate. The towers were altered and raised, and a new entrance door was put in, later restored to the original entrance. Almost the whole top floor was rebuilt. Windows, external harling and pointing were replaced. Smith is thought likely to have designed the gardener’s cottage as well. The work is also described as lasting two years.

The pink colour is dated differently. One account says Sir John Forbes introduced it in 1824. Another ties it to Smith’s makeover of 1826, meant to match the granite mouldings. A third speaks of the harling of a refurbishment in 1820 as the shade later restored. The entrance door is said to have been replaced in 1825. These years sit beside one another because the sources do not collapse them into a single season. The original roof covering is thought to have been stone slabs. By 1906 the harling was already a faint red, and the sandstone ornaments were weathering off.

In that same late century and the start of the next, artists recorded the house and the family. Two original portraits by Henry Raeburn hang in the castle, with their original receipts. Henry Raeburn, born on 4 March 1756 and dead on 8 July 1823, was a Scottish portrait painter who worked in Edinburgh, taught himself oils after miniatures, and on 29 August 1822 was knighted during the visit of George IV and made the king’s limner for Scotland. He painted directly from life, without preliminary sketches. The receipts in the house are the evidence that these two canvases were his, not a guess from style alone. In 1908 David Young Cameron made a drypoint of the castle. David Young Cameron, later Sir David Young Cameron, was born on 28 June 1865 and died on 16 September 1945. He was a Scottish painter and, with greater success, an etcher of townscape and landscape, a leading figure in the last decades of the Etching Revival, known for drypoints of Scottish churches and bare hills and for architectural sets. The 1908 print belongs to the years when he was turning from etching toward painting and toward Scottish landscape. A further name that appears among the people attached to this record, Thomas Jamieson Boyd, is not a laird of Craigievar. He was born on 22 February 1818, became a partner in the Edinburgh firm of Oliver and Boyd, was Lord Provost of Edinburgh from 1877 to 1882, was knighted by Queen Victoria on 25 August 1881, and died on 22 August 1902. Nothing in his life places him in this tower.

The Forbes family also owned a large granite house at Fintray, near Inverurie, and for a number of years before the Second World War that house, not Craigievar, was their main home. During the Second World War Fintray House was used as a hospital for wounded Belgian soldiers. Margaret Forbes, sister of the last laird and shown in a portrait painted when she was a girl, kept curling stones at Craigievar. She served as a wing officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the Second World War. It was at first believed she had served in the Air Transport Auxiliary. That was corrected only around the spring of 2022. The Second World War therefore touches this place through a hospital on another family estate, through Margaret’s service, and through the nineteenth lord’s removal from the Royal Navy in 1941, rather than through a battle at the tower.

In 1963 the family sold the Craigievar estate. The seller is named as the nineteenth Lord Sempill. Another account says the castle has been cared for since 1962. The Forbes family are said to have lived here for 350 years until 1963, and also for over 300 years, and a later telling speaks of eight generations and 300 years. The family insisted in 1963 that the interiors not be changed, including the art, the plaster, the panelling, and the absence of electricity for lighting the rooms. No artificial light was ever added on the upper floors, so the contents are still seen in daylight. The gift shop has some electric light. Some members of the family who were raised in the castle before 1963 still visit in the 2020s. Nigel Tranter, the Scottish writer born on 23 November 1909 and dead on 9 January 2000, published The Fortified House in Scotland in five volumes between 1962 and 1971, an attempt to cover 663 primarily domestic castles, and the fourth volume, of 1966, takes in houses of this Aberdeenshire kind. He is part of the written record of the tower, not of its ownership.

What lay under the grass was tested late. In 1990 Moira K. Greig excavated most of the lowest course of the east barmkin wall and part of the south wall, together with two stone drains of the same period and a few postholes. No other trace of internal buildings remained. The finds included pottery and glass from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, pieces of clay pipe, two circular stone gaming pieces, and four coins. The coins were an English silver sixpence of Elizabeth I dated 157 with a queried last digit, the range given as 1573 to 1577; a Scottish billon hardhead of two pence of James VI dated 1588; a Scottish copper penny of James VI dated 1614 or 1623; and a Scottish copper turner of two pence of Charles II dated 1663. A further account says a silver sixpence of Elizabeth I from 1573 was found within the south wall, and takes that as a sign that the wall was built with the castle in the late 1500s. Elizabeth I had been queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until 24 March 1603. James VI had been king of Scotland since 24 July 1567, and from 1603 king of England as well, until his death on 27 March 1625. The coins therefore run from the Mortimer decades through William Forbes’s building years and into the reign of Charles II. The excavation was published on 30 November 1994, with contributions from Colvin Greig, Bill Lindsay, Stewart Thain and Gordon Williamson. The east wall is called sixteenth-century in the 1990 survey of discoveries.

In 1998 a watching brief on a water main, by D. Hind, found modern pottery and glass around the Mains cottages and a linear, charcoal-lined, ditch-like feature four metres east of the old coach building. The pipe did not come close to the castle, and the ground there was not disturbed. In April 2002 two hand-dug trenches, each about 70 centimetres square and 60 centimetres deep, were cut for lightning protection. They showed rubble, possibly from the destroyed barmkin, under a nineteenth-century midden. Between May and June 2002 a trench along the west wall, dug to test the drainage, showed how shallow the foundations are at that point. J. C. Murray recorded that work. In the summer of 2020, while the castle was closed, the whole exterior was recorded in three dimensions by drone photogrammetry, hundreds of overlapping photographs combined into a model, and that model was joined to the older excavation so the missing barmkin could be shown against the standing tower. The same closure prompted an augmented-reality version of the castle.

The building was listed on 15 April 1971, and the same designation is also dated 16 April 1971. It is Category A. A further account says that since 1990 the estate has been a listed building in the care of Aberdeenshire Council, which is a different date and a different authority from the 1971 entry. The designed landscape was entered on the national inventory of gardens on 1 July 1987. Little of any seventeenth-century layout remains. The grounds as they are now date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with ornamental conifers added at the end of the nineteenth century, a rock garden made behind the coach house in the 1930s, and flower borders added later around the castle and in the kitchen garden. By 2013 the castle, the grounds and more than 200 acres, or 81 hectares, of adjoining farmland and woodland had been fifty years in public care, counting from the 1963 sale. In 2019 the site received 24,072 visitors. Around 2013 the castle was open from Easter, or from 1 April if that was earlier, until the end of September. In 2018 it was open between April and June, Friday to Tuesday, for guided tours, while the grounds stayed open all year.

Damp had become the modern threat to the plaster. Cement harling, and a cement slurry on the granite rubble beneath, held water in the walls. Mould appeared on some of the collection, and the plaster ceilings, fixed to timber, were the greatest worry. From November 2007 until 2009 the castle was closed so that the cement could be replaced with a lime-based harl, meant to match the pink of the 1820 refurbishment. It reopened in April 2010. The cement was taken off by hand. After trials, a light grit blast removed the slurry. Mortar analysis found the old mixes to be feebly hydraulic hot lime, and the new harl was cast by hand with a Scotch harling trowel in hot lime. The limewash was finely ground quicklime coloured with natural earth pigments. Twenty masons and apprentices carved twenty-three new decorative cannon spouts, designed by John Borland. The scaffold was tied to the ground rather than to the walls. The job was given a distinction for craftsmanship and was highly commended for conservation at the Aberdeenshire Design Awards of 2010. A separate study, presented in 2017 by Jorge Otero and Anna Zwagerman, dealt with salt efflorescence that had damaged the plaster ceiling in the nursery.

The early lime campaign did not end the water problem. High-level harling, hard to reach and exposed to Scottish weather, broke down again. Climate predictions of heavier rain made the detailing matter. From about 2022 the castle was closed for roughly eighteen months, also described as nearly two years and as about two years. A scaffold of seven storeys, said in one aside to have measured, if laid end to end, three times the length of Princes Street in Edinburgh, went up inside a bright pink shroud. Masons patched the high harling, repaired masonry, worked on the slate roofs, maintained interior plaster, and conserved the barmkin wall, one of the few of its kind left in Scotland. Discreet changes to the detailing and the slates were made so that rain and snow would leave the walls. More than 13,000 litres of limewash, a special recipe in several coats, were put on the walls. The contractors included Harper and Allan, who kept two or three apprentices on the job and took the last scaffold down in the spring of 2024. Members and supporters paid for the work, including a gift from the United States, and grant funding from Historic Environment Scotland paid for the barmkin conservation. The castle reopened on 31 May 2024. James Henderson, then operations manager at the castle, called it a fairytale castle and a pink beacon. Iain Hawkins, regional director for the north-east, tied the project to care of the building under heavier weather.

While that later campaign was still ahead, a door came back. In early 2019 a volunteer found a heavy studded oak door in an outbuilding, one of the barmkin structures, leaning in poor condition. It had been replaced in 1825 and was thought to be lost. Rising damp from an earth floor had eaten the foot. Humidity and furniture beetle had turned much of the timber spongy. Conservators cleaned it, consolidated the weak wood with an acrylic resin, and put it in a case, with a digital and augmented-reality display, because it was too fragile to hang again. Dendrochronology dated the oak to trees felled in the eastern Baltic in 1510 and in 1554. Lauren Jackson, the conservator who led the work, said the deep studs, large hinges, wide planks and the way the boards were made suggest a late seventeenth-century door, which can sit beside a completion in 1626, but that without more evidence it is still speculation to call it the original door. She also said that when it was made, and when it was fitted, remains a mystery. Another account says the door is thought to have been installed when construction finished in 1626. A third says it was probably the original front door and is more than 400 years old. The Baltic felling dates are at least compatible with a merchant who traded at Danzig, and it has been suggested that he may have chosen the timber himself. That remains a suggestion. Sir Moir Lockhead and Kevin McCormick were present when the door was unveiled in May 2019.

The castle was closed again in 2020 during the pandemic. It reopened in July of that year for the grounds only, for the rest of the season. Inside, small radio-like monitors talk to a control box and switch a heater so that relative humidity stays between 50 and 55 percent, a range in which woodworm are less active. The choice was to manage the air rather than to coat the furniture with chemicals. Among the objects a visitor is shown are three card tables with a curved side, explained either as room for a large stomach or as a way to stop a player dropping cards into his lap. Wooden stocking-driers, cut as a woman’s legs in several sizes, kept the shape of stockings that shrank when washed. Forbes portraits and furnishings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remain, along with the two Raeburns.

Folklore says the castle is haunted by one or more ghosts. The tales do not agree. One speaks of a man murdered in his bed for revenge and thrown from a window. Another speaks of a quieter presence that opens doors without being seen. A guide’s story has the daughter of Red Sir John in love with a Gordon, the young man climbing to the Blue Room, and the father forcing him out of the window to his death, after which footsteps are said to cross that room. A further telling puts either that Gordon or the Red Sir John himself in the blue bedroom. These are stories told about the house. They are not a documented killing.

The tower is widely said to have inspired Walt Disney’s castle motif, and in particular the pink castle of Cinderella. James Henderson confirmed an influence on that pink castle. Another account says it is believed the designs of fairy-tale castles were based on photographs of Craigievar. Walt Disney, born Walter Elias Disney in Chicago on 5 December 1901 and dead of lung cancer on 15 December 1966, made the animated feature Cinderella in 1950 and opened Disneyland in Anaheim in July 1955. The claim about Craigievar is a reputation, a confirmation by the castle’s operations manager, and a belief about photographs. It is not a statement that he visited the tower.

What the building was for is plain enough from the fabric. It was a Forbes house of parade and defence, begun by the Mortimers in the later sixteenth century, bought or otherwise taken in 1610, finished about 1626, and lived in by that family until 1962 or 1963. The political world around it was the Gordon feud, the episcopacy of Patrick Forbes, the reign of Charles I, the Covenant, and much later the Sempill chiefship and the Second World War. The excavation found the barmkin and a handful of coins. The modern campaigns replaced cement with lime, recovered a Baltic oak door, and in 2024 put the pink back on the walls.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/craigievar-castle