# Craigmillar Castle

castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

City of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1300 CE

## Story

• The Preston family raised a tower house on a rocky ridge south-east of Edinburgh in the late fourteenth century, and a charter was sealed at Craigmillar by 1425.
• A fifteenth-century curtain with round towers and keyhole gun-holes encloses the tower, and a sixteenth-century outer court holds a chapel and a fishpond shaped as the letter P.
• Mary, Queen of Scots, stayed from 20 November to 7 December 1566, when nobles discussed removing Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.
• John Gilmour of Craigmillar bought the castle in 1660, rebuilt the west range, and the family later left the house for Inch House.
• Excavation has been shallow, but in 2022 a previously unknown stone surface was uncovered beside the north entrance gate.

## Visiting

The castle is open daily from 9.30am to 5pm from 1 April to 30 September. From 1 October to 31 March it is open from 10am to 4pm. Last entry is 30 minutes before closing, and from November to January last entry is 45 minutes before closing. The castle is closed on 25, 26, 27 and 28 December and on 1, 2, 3 and 4 January.
An adult ticket is £7.50 booked online and £8.50 in person. A concession ticket is £6 online and £6.80 in person. A child aged 7 to 15 needs a ticket at £3.50 online and £4 in person. A member is admitted free without a ticket.
A disabled visitor pays the standard ticket price, and proof of disability is not required. Up to two accompanying carers are admitted without a ticket. Assistance dogs are allowed to enter roofed areas. Visitors are not allowed onto parts of the rooftop walkway while conservation work is underway.

## History

Craigmillar Castle stands on a low rocky hill in the south-east of Edinburgh, about three miles from the centre. The Preston family, burgesses of the town, built the tower house in the late fourteenth century, and a charter was sealed there by 1425. A curtain wall with round corner towers and keyhole gun-holes followed in the fifteenth century, and an outer court, a chapel of Saint Thomas Becket, and gardens were added in the sixteenth.

The house was a private lodging and a royal refuge. In 1479 John Stewart, Earl of Mar, brother of James III, was imprisoned and tried there before he died in the Canongate. In September 1517 the child king James V was sent out from plague-struck Edinburgh, and on 8 May 1544 English troops under the Earl of Hertford burned the place during the Rough Wooing. Sir Simon Preston repaired the ranges and made them fit to receive the queen.

Mary, Queen of Scots, stayed on 5 and 6 September 1563, and again from 20 November to 7 December 1566, while she recovered from illness after the birth of James VI. Nobles with her discussed removing her husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. A pact called the Craigmillar Bond is said to have been signed, though no copy survives and some historians doubt it was ever made. Darnley was murdered at Kirk o' Field on 10 February 1567.

After Mary surrendered at Carberry Hill, Preston held her for a night and she was taken on to Lochleven Castle.

The Prestons sold the castle in 1660 to John Gilmour of Craigmillar, who rebuilt the west range as a judge's lodging. The family later moved to Inch House, and by 1775 the castle was a ruin, painted and written about as a romantic fragment. It passed into public care in 1946, or in 1949 by another account. In 2022 a previously unknown stone surface was found near the north entrance when a sign plinth was lifted, and in 2024 the holes left by unauthorised metal detecting were recorded and filled.

## Photographs

- [en:Craigmillar Castle — Stuart Yeates, from en:Flickr](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Craigmillar_Castle.jpg)
- [This is a photo of listed building number — Gunther Tschuch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Craigmillar_Castle_1.jpg)
- [Vista general del Castillo de Craigmillar, con la muralla y el edificio central del mismo, Este castillo se encuentra cerca de Edimburgo en Escocia. — Albeins](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Castillo_de_Craigmillar.JPG)
- [Craigmillar Castle The castle is a prime example of mediaeval military architecture. This view shows the massive 5-feet thick 'barmkin' wall, built in the 15th — kim traynor](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Craigmillar_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1340353.jpg)
- [Craigmillar Castle. In 1566, following the murder of her court favourite, David Riccio, by a band of assassins including her husband, Darnley, Mary, Queen of — kim traynor](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Craigmillar_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1340358.jpg)
- [Craigmillar Castle This view shows the earliest part of the castle which was an L-shaped tower house built on the edge of a rocky outcrop where a thirty-foot — kim traynor](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Craigmillar_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1340364.jpg)
- [Craigmillar Castle — Thomas Hosmer Shepherd](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/MA%281829%29_p.179_-_Craigmillar_Castle%2C_Edinburgh_-_Thomas_Hosmer_Shepherd.jpg)
- [Persistent URL: digital.lib.muohio.edu/u?/tradecards,4232 Subject (TGM): Coffee industry; Castles & palaces; Cliffs; Costumes; Clothing & dress; Cities & — Miami U. Libraries - Digital Collections](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Arbuckle_Bros._%283093834776%29.jpg)
- [A konyha (The kitchen) — Gyula Péter](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/A_konyha_%28The_kitchen%29_-_panoramio.jpg)
- [A hatalmas tűzhely (The huge fireplace) — Gyula Péter](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/A_hatalmas_t%C5%B1zhely_%28The_huge_fireplace%29_-_panoramio.jpg)

## Sources

- [Craigmillar Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigmillar_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Mary, Queen of Scots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Queen_of_Scots) — Wikipedia
- [Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Stuart,_Lord_Darnley) — Wikipedia
- [James VI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI) — Wikipedia
- [John Gilmour of Craigmillar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmour_of_Craigmillar) — Wikipedia
- [Agnes Sampson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Sampson) — Wikipedia
- [Barbara Napier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Napier) — Wikipedia
- [John Stewart, Earl of Mar (died 1479)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart,_Earl_of_Mar_(died_1479)) — Wikipedia
- [Rough Wooing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_Wooing) — Wikipedia
- [Treaty of Greenwich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Greenwich) — Wikipedia
- [Kirk o' Field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_o%27_Field) — Wikipedia
- [Craigmillar Castle Statement of Significance](https://app-hes-pubs-prod-neu-01.azurewebsites.net/api/file/efe23413-50fc-42c0-94a4-aac300d9e0de) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Craigmillar Castle: history and stories](https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit/all/craigmillar-castle/history-and-stories/) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Craigmillar Castle: plan your visit](https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit/all/craigmillar-castle/plan-your-visit/) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Edinburgh, Craigmillar Castle](https://canmore.org.uk/site/295793/edinburgh-craigmillar-castle) — Canmore
- [Craigmillar Castle: test trenches and excavation, November–December 2010](https://doi.org/10.5284/1028417) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Craigmillar Castle: archaeological monitoring, November 2007](https://doi.org/10.5284/1039172) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Removal and replacement of interpretation signage at Craigmillar Castle](https://doi.org/10.5284/1131057) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Craigmillar Castle damage recording, 2024](https://doi.org/10.5284/1129853) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Craigmillar Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Craigmillar_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Craigmillar Castle 1.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Craigmillar_Castle_1.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castillo de Craigmillar.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castillo_de_Craigmillar.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Craigmillar Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1340353.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Craigmillar_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1340353.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Craigmillar Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1340358.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Craigmillar_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1340358.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Craigmillar Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1340364.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Craigmillar_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1340364.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [MA(1829) p.179 - Craigmillar Castle, Edinburgh - Thomas Hosmer Shepherd.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MA(1829)_p.179_-_Craigmillar_Castle,_Edinburgh_-_Thomas_Hosmer_Shepherd.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arbuckle Bros. (3093834776).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arbuckle_Bros._(3093834776).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A konyha (The kitchen) - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_konyha_(The_kitchen)_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A hatalmas tűzhely (The huge fireplace) - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_hatalmas_t%C5%B1zhely_(The_huge_fireplace)_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Craigmillar Castle is a ruined medieval courtyard castle on a low rocky hill in the south-east of Edinburgh, about three miles from the centre of the city and south of the suburb that took its name. It was a country house for leading burgess families, close enough to the capital for politics and far enough out for rest, and it is one of the best-preserved medieval castles in Scotland. Only the tower house still has its roof. The other ranges stand to the wall-head. The place was lived in for more than three centuries, first by the Prestons and then by the Gilmours, and it was also a royal lodging at moments when the court needed to leave the town.

In the twelfth century the lands of Craigmillar were granted to the monks of Dunfermline Abbey by David I of Scotland. One account places that grant about 1140. David I, king from 1124 to 1153, spent part of his youth at the English court and, once king, founded burghs and monasteries, pushed Gregorian reform, and settled Anglo-Norman knights on feudal holdings. A gift of land to Dunfermline belongs to that remaking of the kingdom. No building of the later castle is known from those monastic years, and it is not known whether anyone lived on the rock before the tower was raised.

The Preston family, lesser landowners from Preston in East Lothian, came into the district under David II of Scotland. In 1342 they were granted land in the area and held two thirds of the estate. One account names the purchase as the estate of Gorton, near Roslin, acquired by Sir John de Preston. David II had come back from exile in France in 1341, after a childhood interrupted by the Second War of Scottish Independence. He was captured at Neville's Cross in 1346 and ransomed only in 1357. The Preston grant sits in the short spell of his personal rule between return and captivity.

In 1374 Robert II of Scotland gave the remaining lands of Craigmillar to Sir Simon de Preston, who had been sheriff of Midlothian, or of Edinburgh, in the 1360s. Robert II, a grandson of Robert the Bruce, had just become the first king of the House of Stuart in 1371, after David II died childless. Simon acquired Craigmillar from William de Capella and took the style of Gorton and Craigmillar. He had a house in Edinburgh Castle and had watched the building there of David's Tower. His town life and his new country land sat a few miles apart. It is possible that work on a castle began soon after 1374, but the stone evidence is uncertain, and the tower may belong a generation later.

The tower was begun by Simon's son, also Simon Preston, or by his grandson Sir George Preston. It was standing by 1425, when Sir John Preston, described as Simon's great-grandson, sealed a charter at Craigmillar. That is the first written mention of the castle. Sir John died the next year. His son Sir William Preston was lord from 1426 until his death in 1453. The tower is an early Scottish tower house, among the first of that type, and it was the private lodging of the family and their closest guests. The Prestons were not great nobles of the kind who built many fifteenth-century towers. They were leading burgesses of Edinburgh, several times its provosts, and Craigmillar was their villa outside the noise of the High Street. Their town house stood on the High Street opposite the kirk of Saint Giles, on the ground where the City Chambers later rose.

The tower is L-shaped. The main block measures about 15.8 by 11.6 metres, with a south wing, or jamb, of about 8.5 by 3.5 metres. The walls are up to 3.3 metres thick, and a second measurement puts them at almost 3 metres. The building rises about 17 metres to the battlements, or just over 17 metres. It has four storeys. Two stone vaults divide the lower pair of floors from the upper pair, and the upper pair from the roof. The second and fourth storeys are vaulted. The entrance was on the edge of the rock, guarded by a deep cleft that was once crossed by a removable timber deck. When the courtyard wall was built, the cleft was filled in. Above the door are the arms of the Prestons. A stair rises to a guard room in the wing, which would probably have had openings, called murder holes, for dropping missiles on anyone who had forced the door. The ground floor held cellars, once with a timber loft. The dividing wall and the doors at either end are later.

On the second floor is the hall, with a kitchen in the wing beside it. A kitchen next to the hall is unusual. Many fifteenth-century towers, Crichton among them, had no such kitchen on the hall floor. The hall has a large carved fireplace of about 1500 and once had a timber ceiling, probably painted. Coloured chevrons survive on the stone corbels that carried that ceiling. A drawing of about 1840 shows more colour on the soffit of the east window, so the whole hall may have been bright, though the paint need not be as old as the walls. The date of the tower is argued from this fireplace and from other details. The fireplace has been compared with one at Borthwick Castle of the 1430s. The shafts and bases under the lintel have also been compared with a late fourteenth-century fireplace in the lord's hall at Doune Castle. A timber deck over the entrance vestibule has a parallel in David's Tower at Edinburgh Castle, and a fireplace at Neidpath Castle is securely of the later fourteenth century. Informed guesses therefore run from the late fourteenth century to the late fifteenth, and one assessment prefers the middle of that range. The official account of the building places the original tower in the late 1300s.

Other oddities point the same two ways. The spiral stair in the wing changes direction part of the way up. Above the hall is a windowless, unheated room in the vault, unlikely to have been a lord's chamber, and its use is unknown. The lord's bedroom, the only original private room, sits above the kitchen. The stair goes on to the parapet walk around a stone-flagged roof. In the sixteenth century a further storey, a single chamber, was added on the wing. The old kitchen beside the hall was turned into a bedroom: a smaller fireplace was set into the great hearth, and the windows were enlarged. A larger kitchen was built in the east range. Two timber balconies, or viewing galleries, once projected from the tower, one south over the garden and one east across the Lothians toward the Firth of Forth.

Sir William Preston is the Preston most often named with the next phase of building. He had travelled in France, and the courtyard wall is thought to draw on what he saw there. He also brought home a reliquary holding an arm bone of Saint Giles, patron of Edinburgh, bought in France about 1450, and he gave it to the high kirk of Saint Giles with no conditions. Saint Giles was a Greek hermit in France, probably in the seventh century, whose cult spread along the pilgrimage roads. When William died in 1453 the burgesses of Edinburgh buried him in the Lady Aisle and, the next year, began the Preston Aisle beside it, a chantry in his honour. The aisle is still there. The curtain around the tower has been dated anywhere from 1427 to the early sixteenth century. The year 1427 was once read on the armorial stone over the entrance, a reading now thought highly questionable, and a later date in the fifteenth century is preferred. The inverted-keyhole gun-holes are of a form that did not appear in Scotland until about 1450. Some of them were cut through older vertical slits, as at the gun-hole over the door of Smailholm Tower, and some appear to be original. If the wall really were of 1427 it would be Scotland's oldest artillery fortification, about twenty years older than the artillery work at Threave Castle. On balance a date in the first half of the fifteenth century is plausible, and the wall may have been planned with the tower and built as soon as the tower was finished. It was not a full artillery fort. There is no gatehouse and no barbican. Buildings were meant to stand against its inner face from the start, perhaps including an outer hall. Its job was to screen and dignify the court in which the tower stood.

The curtain encloses a court about 10 metres across. The wall is up to 1.8 metres thick, and the outside measures about 40 by 27 metres. Round towers project at the four corners. A postern sits at the foot of the south-east tower. The towers carry keyhole gun-holes, meant for show as well as defence. The main gate is a round arch in the north wall, with the Preston arms and, above them, the royal arms of Scotland. A machicolated parapet runs the whole circuit on a double row of corbels, so that missiles could be dropped and a walk could reach every stretch of wall. The closest dated Scottish parallel for such machicolation is the Douglas Tower at Bothwell Castle, built for Archibald, 4th Earl of Douglas, who was killed in 1424. On the inner face, traces of windows suggest a south range that has gone. There is no well. A stone trough passes through the curtain so that water could be brought in. The lost outer hall may have stood where the seventeenth-century west range now stands.

In 1479 the castle was a royal prison. John Stewart, Earl of Mar, a younger brother of James III of Scotland, was held there. John was born at Stirling Castle, probably in 1457, a son of James II and Mary of Guelders. He was Earl of Mar before 23 June 1459, after a dispute with Thomas, Lord Erskine, over the earldom. His father was killed by an exploding cannon in 1460, and James III, a boy, became king. James III's reign was unpopular. He was criticised for grand foreign schemes, for debasing the coinage, for favourites, and for a quarrel with his own family that broke into rebellion. John himself is thinly recorded. One historian called him no more than a name. His household moved from Stirling to Falkland in 1463. Parliament discussed a marriage for him in 1466. He was tutored at Doune Castle, received his estates in 1471, and sat in parliament in 1476 and 1479. He kept a town house in Aberdeen and was drawn into local feuds. After parliament in Edinburgh in March 1479 he fell under his brother's suspicion and was arrested later that year. He may have been imprisoned at Craigmillar on the king's orders, perhaps in the wake of the fall of their brother Alexander, Duke of Albany. Two contemporary chronicles say he was arrested for witchcraft and linked with supposed witches. One account says he was accused of practising witchcraft against the king. He was tried at Craigmillar and then taken to a house in the Canongate, where he died soon afterwards, possibly in December 1479. He never married and left no known children. The manner of that death is told in more than one way. One account, following John Lesley and later writers, says he was killed in his bath, in the course of bloodletting. Another says that Sir Simon Preston, who had charge of him, had him taken to the Canongate house and there had his throat cut. Both accounts leave the death as a killing in Edinburgh after a short imprisonment at Craigmillar, and both leave the king as the man who ordered the confinement.

Craigmillar was made a free barony in 1511, under James IV. The outer courtyard is often placed around that time, perhaps by another Simon Preston, who died in 1520, had succeeded in 1478, and was a member of parliament for Edinburgh in 1487. The dating of the outer wall, the chapel, and the gardens is still unsettled. One account puts the outer walls in the early or middle sixteenth century. Another puts the outer court and gardens in the later sixteenth century. The family chapel is first recorded in 1523. It has been dated about 1520 and, by a later authority, further into the century. It was dedicated to Saint Thomas Becket. It is a two-celled building with crow-stepped gables, a straight-headed two-light window in the south wall of the nave, and an empty niche over the door. It is a rare free-standing domestic chapel, and it stands unusually close to the house. Most castle chapels sat further off. It is now a roofless burial aisle, still used by the Gilmour family.

In September 1517, during plague in Edinburgh, the child king James V was moved to Craigmillar for safety. James V, born on 10 April 1512, had become king on 9 September 1513 at seventeen months, after his father James IV was killed at Flodden. His minority was governed first by his mother, Margaret Tudor, and then by John Stewart, Duke of Albany. His French guardian, Antoine d'Arces, sieur de la Bastie, a French nobleman in the Scottish government, had new locks made for the king's chamber and for the two iron gates, and a stable built for the king's mule. De la Bastie was killed on 17 September 1517. James V's own rule began only in 1528, when he escaped the custody of his stepfather, Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus. He founded the College of Justice in 1532, married Madeleine of Valois and then Mary of Guise, and died on 14 December 1542 after the defeat at Solway Moss. His only surviving legitimate child, Mary, Queen of Scots, was six days old.

Mary, Queen of Scots, was born on 8 December 1542 at Linlithgow Palace, the daughter of James V and Mary of Guise. Mary of Guise, a French noblewoman of the House of Guise, was queen from 1538 and later regent, from 1554 until her death in 1560. Henry VIII, king of England, wanted the infant queen married to his son Edward, Prince of Wales, born on 12 October 1537. The Treaty of Greenwich, signed on 1 July 1543, offered peace and that marriage, with Mary to be taken to England after the age of ten, while Scotland kept its own laws. The Earl of Arran ratified it in August. The Parliament of Scotland rejected it on 11 December 1543. Henry VIII then made war, later called the Rough Wooing, or the Eight Years' War, from December 1543 to March 1551. He meant to break the old alliance with France, to weaken Scotland, and to force the marriage. He told his commanders to burn Edinburgh so as to leave a memory of vengeance.

On 8 May 1544 an English army under Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, later 1st Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of Edward VI, sacked Edinburgh and came to Craigmillar. The castle was surrendered. One account says Hertford promised to keep it without damage. Another says the English horsemen spoiled and burned the castle and place of Craigmillar, and that they burned and destroyed the house. The claim of total destruction was an exaggeration, because the tower survived, but the damage was real enough to explain later rebuilding. Sir Simon Preston was taken prisoner. Hertford's campaign was the first of the war. After Henry VIII died in 1547, Somerset continued it and won at Pinkie, then fell from power in 1549. In 1548 the child queen was betrothed to the Dauphin Francis and sent to France. Sir Simon Preston went with her, attended her wedding in 1558, and returned with her in 1561. He repaired Craigmillar, remodelling the domestic ranges in the courtyard. He was Lord Provost of Edinburgh for several terms and a loyal supporter of the queen, who put him on her Privy Council. One account gives his death in 1569.

The east range was rebuilt in the sixteenth century and tied to the tower by a new broad spiral stair. The work has been linked to the damage of 1544 and to a change in how a lord's rooms were planned. At Stirling Castle, in 1538 to 1540, the royal lodging was laid out as a sequence of rooms on one level: a guard hall, a presence chamber, and a bedchamber. Craigmillar seems to have kept the tower hall as the outer room of such an apartment and placed the two more private rooms in the east range, reached through a new opening in the tower's east wall. The precise plan is hard to read because the range is ruined. The south-east block, against the tower, has two chambers on the first floor. Below them are cellars that held a bakehouse and a possible prison. A corridor runs from the tower to large vaulted kitchens, also reached by a straight stair from the court. Over the door to the east range the Preston arms appear again, held up by monkeys. Under the kitchens are vaulted cellars, and a postern through the curtain is blocked. A long gallery occupied the second floor. Only its lower walls remain. New doors were also broken through from the hall to the side ranges, and the hall windows were enlarged. The direction of the house was from stacked rooms toward rooms arranged side by side.

Mary, Queen of Scots, stayed at Craigmillar twice after she came home in August 1561, a Catholic queen in a Protestant kingdom. She had been queen of France from 1559 until Francis II died in December 1560. On her return she accepted the religious settlement she found, and she kept as advisers her half-brother James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, and William Maitland of Lethington. Moray, born about 1531, was an illegitimate son of James V. He was sometimes her supporter and later regent for her son, from 1567 until he was shot in 1570, the first head of a government to be killed with a firearm. Maitland, born in 1525, was a politician and reformer, the eldest son of the poet Richard Maitland, and he served her as secretary of state until his death on 9 June 1573. On 5 and 6 September 1563 she was at Craigmillar with Moray and Maitland and gave audience to the English ambassador Thomas Randolph, who warned her about the European marriages then being discussed for her.

Her second stay ran from 20 November to 7 December 1566. The year had already broken her. On 9 March her secretary David Rizzio, an Italian courtier, was murdered at her table. Her husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, joined the killers. Rizzio was stabbed many times, traditionally fifty-seven wounds, while Mary was held at the point of a weapon. Darnley, born in 1546 at Temple Newsam in Yorkshire, was the son of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, and Margaret Douglas, a granddaughter of Henry VII of England. He had a claim of his own to the English throne. His father had been forfeited for siding with the English in the Rough Wooing and lived in exile until 1564. Mary married Darnley on 29 July 1565. On 19 June 1566 their only child, the future James VI, was born at Edinburgh Castle after a long labour, and the boy was at once Duke of Rothesay. In October Mary nearly died of an illness at Jedburgh. She came to Craigmillar still unwell. The French ambassador Philibert du Croc, a courtier of the House of Guise who served in Scotland in 1566 and 1567, reported her depression. After about a week she fell seriously ill again and was heard to repeat that she could wish to be dead. She gave audience to Jean, Count de Brienne, a diplomat from Savoy who had come for the baptism of Prince James. Tradition puts her bed in the old kitchen inside the tower. It is more likely that she used a set of rooms in the newer east range.

The nobles with her included Moray, Maitland, the Earl of Huntly, Archibald Campbell, 5th Earl of Argyll, and James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell. Argyll, born in 1532 or 1537, was one of the leading politicians of her reign and of the early reign of James VI, and he died on 12 September 1573. George Gordon, 5th Earl of Huntly, who died on 19 October 1576, was Lord Chancellor and later a principal conspirator on her side in the civil war. Bothwell, born about 1534, would become her third husband. They talked of removing Darnley, by divorce or by other means. One account says they met in Argyll's bedchamber, continued in Bothwell's room, and then spoke with Mary in her own chamber about a divorce. A pact called the Craigmillar Bond is said to have been signed by Maitland and by the earls of Bothwell, Argyll, and Huntly. No copy survives. One account says the bond set out their intent to remove Darnley, that Mary was unhappy in the marriage but was not part of the conspiracy, and that she was probably unaware of a plot to kill him. Another account says that most historians now doubt the bond was ever made. What is not in doubt is the sequence that followed. It was at first intended that Darnley would lodge at Craigmillar when he came back to Edinburgh. He chose instead the house at Kirk o' Field, the old collegiate church of St Mary in the Fields, just inside the Flodden Wall, where the Old College of the university now stands. He was murdered there on 10 February 1567. The house was blown up and his body was found in the garden. Bothwell was widely blamed, was acquitted in April 1567, and married Mary in May. The marriage split the country.

On 15 June 1567 the opposing lords faced Mary and Bothwell at the Battle of Carberry Hill, a few miles east of Edinburgh. There was little fighting. Bothwell escaped. Mary surrendered. Sir Simon Preston, her host and provost, became her jailer for the first night. He took her to his town house on the High Street and the next day she was delivered to Lochleven Castle, on an island in Loch Leven, where she was forced to abdicate on 24 July 1567 in favour of her son James VI, then thirteen months old. She escaped in May 1568, was defeated at Langside, and fled to England. She was beheaded at Fotheringhay on 8 February 1587. Bothwell fled toward Norway, was arrested, and died a prisoner in Denmark on 14 April 1578. The Marian civil war, from 1568 to 1573, was fought between the queen's party and the men who ruled for James VI. Edinburgh Castle, held in her name, surrendered only after an English intervention in May 1573.

Craigmillar stayed inside that war. On 2 June 1571 Captain Melville and two of his soldiers, fighting for Mary, were killed in the grounds when a barrel of gunpowder exploded. In 1572 Regent Mar used the castle as a base while he besieged Edinburgh Castle, and stables were built for a company of light horsemen. James VI himself later came as a guest of Sir David Preston. James VI had been raised a Protestant, against his mother's Catholicism. Regents governed until his minority was declared over in 1578, and he took real control of government in 1583. In 1589 he was waiting to marry Anne of Denmark, the second daughter of Frederick II of Denmark and Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, born on 12 December 1574. One account dates the marriage to 20 August 1589. The castle accounts place him, in September or in October of that year, at Seton Palace and then at Craigmillar, still waiting because contrary winds had delayed her voyage, and deciding there to sail to Norway to meet her. A contemporary letter pictured him waiting as a lover passing the time in longing. He did go. In the spring of 1590 he returned from Copenhagen. Storms on that voyage were later blamed on witchcraft, first in Denmark and then in Scotland.

In 1591 Agnes Sampson was accused of putting a charmed wax image in a dovecote at Craigmillar to help her friend Barbara Napier. Agnes Sampson, known as the Wise Wife of Keith, lived at Nether Keith in East Lothian. She was a healer and a midwife, described in her indictment as a poor widow with children, and she was executed on 28 January 1591 during the North Berwick witch trials. Those trials, beginning in 1590, accused people from East Lothian of a gathering in the kirk at North Berwick and grew to implicate more than seventy people, including Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, on a charge of treason. Confessions were taken under torture. Sampson was brought before James VI at Holyrood, denied the charges, and was then shaved and searched for a mark before she confessed. The accusations were tied to the storms that had threatened Anne of Denmark's ships, and to a wax image of the king. Barbara Napier, or Naper, was a woman of good standing in Edinburgh, married first to the bookseller George Ker, who died at La Rochelle in 1576, and then to Archibald Douglas, a burgess. She was accused of consulting witches, including over the illness and death of Archibald Douglas, 8th Earl of Angus, who died at Smeaton on 4 August 1588. James VI intervened in her case. She was found guilty of consulting witches and was not executed. The same trials named an assembly at Acheson's Haven where an image of James VI was passed about. James later wrote Daemonologie, in 1597, on witchcraft and necromancy. Craigmillar's link with witchcraft did not end with that decade. Between 1661 and 1662 Mr John Preston of Haltree sat as a commissioner at several witchcraft trials.

On the death of Sir Robert Preston in 1639 the castle passed to a distant cousin, David Preston of Whitehill. His son sold it out of the family. In 1660 it was bought by John Gilmour of Craigmillar, together with the neighbouring estate of The Inch. Sir John Gilmour of Craigmillar was born in 1605, the son of a Writer to the Signet, and became an advocate on 12 December 1628. In 1641 parliament appointed him to act for the royalist Earl of Montrose, then charged with intrigues against the Marquis of Argyll. He was himself a royalist, and a moderate one. At the Restoration of Charles II he was made Lord President of the Court of Session on 13 February 1661. Charles II, son of the executed Charles I, had been proclaimed king in Scotland in 1649, defeated at Worcester in 1651, and restored in 1660. The Court of Session, the supreme civil court, had not sat through the eleven years of the Interregnum. It resumed in June 1661. Gilmour was also a privy counsellor, a member of parliament for Edinburgh, and a Lord of the Articles. He sided with Lauderdale, the king's minister in Scotland, against the Earl of Middleton, who wanted Episcopacy brought back. After the rising of the Covenanters at Rullion Green in 1666 he refused to vote for the execution of the captured rebels. He resigned the presidency on 22 December 1670 and died on 14 August 1671. His son Alexander was made a baronet in 1678.

Gilmour treated the old curtain as an antiquity worth keeping, not as a defence. In the 1660s he rebuilt the west range inside it as a modern lodging for a senior judge: a dining room and a withdrawing room on the ground floor, with a large carved fireplace, large windows cut through the medieval wall, and plaster ceilings, and four bedrooms above. A kitchen lay to the north and a chamber to the south, with a wine cellar below. A new stair joined the range to the tower. The door has a classical pediment. Above it a twentieth-century plaque, set up by a descendant, carries the arms of Sir John and his wife. He did not keep battlements on the new block, only on the round towers beside it. A letter of 1632 from Sir Robert Kerr to his son, about modernising the House of Ancram, had urged that the battlement be kept because it was the grace of the house and made it look like a castle. Gilmour's large windows show that he did not share that caution about the wall itself. The roof slates arrived in 1661 from Stobo, carried by horses from Peebles. A sundial dated 1660, now at Inch House, may have stood in the west garden, which was probably laid out at the same time so that the new windows looked onto it. The west range is now roofless. Its floors have gone and the big windows are blocked.

In 1687 a Presbyterian chapel for the congregation of Liberton was made in the outer courtyard, perhaps by converting an earlier barn. The Gilmours did not stay. One account says they left in the early eighteenth century for Inch House, just west of the castle. Another puts the move in the later eighteenth century. It was claimed that two of the laird's daughters went on living in the castle after the rest of the family had gone. In 1761 the castle was advertised to let. By 1775 it was a ruin, and the antiquary and poet John Pinkerton wrote Craigmillar Castle: an Elegy. One account dates the poem's publication to 1776. The poem pictured the queen's chamber as a place where she bathed in wine, and then as a refuge for a dove. That is a romantic image, not a record of how she lived. The ruin became a feature in the park of the Inch estate and a favourite subject for artists. An engraving of 1782 by Thomas Hearne and William Byrne was dedicated to Sir Alexander Gilmour. In 1836 William Miller engraved a view after J. M. W. Turner. Large parts of the roof had already gone by 1789.

A proposal in 1842 to repair the castle for Queen Victoria came to nothing. Victoria herself visited in 1886, and the owner, Walter James Little Gilmour, who died in 1887, carried out a good deal of restoration. The castle has been in public care since 1946 in one account, and since 1949 in another, when Sir John Little Gilmour entrusted it to the state. The year before, he had sold Inch House to the city. The grounds were entered on the national register of historic gardens on 30 March 2001. The castle remains a scheduled monument and is open to visitors. In the nineteenth century Agnes Strickland, an English historical writer born in 1796, published the letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and later a multi-volume lives of the queens of Scotland, working from archived papers with her sister Elizabeth, who refused to have her own name on the books. In 1969 Antonia Fraser, born in London in 1932, published a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, her first major work of history. The castle has also been used as a filming place for the series Outlander and the film Outlaw King, and the hall is let for weddings.

South of the castle were gardens and orchards. The family took exercise there and hunted with hawks and shot at the butts. A fruit orchard ran east for about two acres. The bases of sixteenth-century viewing towers remain at the corners of a drystone enclosure. The fishpond, or fish stank, is shaped as a letter P for Preston. It measures about 75 by 20 metres. A bank gave a path around the P, with two small platforms opposite each other on the stem, for fishing or for seats, and further platforms at the head. Two round islands in the water could hold nesting birds. Late eighteenth-century descriptions put trees along the bank and hawthorn on the islands. The depth is unknown, but it was enough for a small boat. The pond was meant to be seen from above, and there is evidence of a timber gallery at the south end of the west range, reached by a door that is now blocked. It is a rare, and in Scotland a unique, garden pond made in the shape of a family name. A round tower at the north-east corner of the outer court has gun-holes and a doocot upstairs. In the 1820s a scheme was drawn for a picturesque landscape between Inch House and the castle, taking in Queen Mary's Tree, a sycamore said to have been planted by Mary. Much of the woodland is of the early or middle nineteenth century. Old trees still stand in the grounds, including a sycamore that has grown around a drystone wall. Good-King-Henry, once eaten as a vegetable, grows by the castle and may be a survival of the garden.

The rock itself explains the plan. The castle sits on the crest of a ridge of fine red sandstone, the stone that was probably quarried for its own walls. The original tower stands on the summit of that ridge. Along the south side a low cliff is followed by the masonry. On the north the drop is gentler. From the wall-head the view runs north to the Old Town, Edinburgh Castle, and Arthur's Seat, and on to the Firth of Forth, and south to the Pentland Hills. Even after the city grew round the hill, the castle still reads as a rural house on a green knoll.

Archaeology inside the walls has been slight, which is why the buried evidence is thought to be unusually intact, especially under the garden terraces south of the tower. Antiquarian interest goes back more than two centuries, but most early digging was clearance of rubble after the castle came into public care, and it produced little. In 1813 a human skeleton was found upright, immured in a vault of the east range. Whose body it was is unknown, and the bones themselves are gone. About 1860 a crossbow was found by chance in an underground passage near the outer wall. The passage was never located. In 1961 a silver crucifix of the fifteenth or sixteenth century was unearthed.

Modern work has mostly been small trenches for drains, paths, and signs. In 1996 three trenches north of the enclosure wall, dug before a septic tank and waste pipe, found modern landscaping between half a metre and a metre and a half deep, and a metalled surface packed into cracks in the bedrock, a hint of an old ground level now buried. The same year, nine trial trenches for a car park found a small sandstone quarry, backfilled apparently in the nineteenth century, in one trench, and nothing of note in the other eight. Also in 1996, forty-four medieval coins were reported as a treasure find near the castle. In 1998 a watching brief on an electricity trench outside the walls found the red sandstone bedrock close under the turf. Beside the north-east tower the wall footing projects about 150 millimetres and sits almost directly on the rock. A grey silt with sandstone, mortar, charcoal, china, and bottle glass was read as nineteenth- or twentieth-century levelling, not as garden soil. A bed of loose pale yellow sandstone rubble may be a foundation raft for the tower. A further cable trench in the outer court crossed only ground that had already been disturbed. In November 2002 nine test trenches in the field to the north, for drainage under a car park, found nothing of archaeological significance.

In March 2007 small trial trenches under the gravel of the inner court and in the drawing room found make-up deposits, which may mean the court once stood at a lower level. In November 2007 the gravel and the soil beneath it were taken off to about 150 millimetres over much of the court, before a new surface was laid. Bedrock showed in a few places. The work was too shallow for a full reading, but it showed that the upper deposits of a complicated site had seen little modern disturbance, and that the archaeological potential is high. In February 2009 two small trenches for a bench near the dovecot found landscaping over demolition debris. In April 2009 trenches for signs near the ticket office found deposits full of brick, probably from the building of the eighteenth-century cottages nearby, and a rough surface that may have been an earlier access. On the east range, one account places a watching brief and minor excavation on 1 February 2009, and another places test trenches and excavation in November and December 2010. Both describe three trenches opened to learn the floor make-up and the height of the vaults before work to stop water flooding them, and both say previously undisturbed deposits were examined.

In 2011 a Roman trumpet brooch, about 51 millimetres long and missing its spring and pin, and a silver denarius of Marcus Aurelius, were found by metal detector near Craigmillar and allocated to the city's museums. They are evidence of Roman objects in the neighbourhood, not of a Roman fort on the castle rock. An evaluation before three interpretation plaques were set within the scheduled ground found no significant features. A test pit produced an unstratified fragment of a medieval or later ceramic strap handle. In 2022, when a stone plinth for an interpretation sign was lifted near the stone entrance gate on the north side, a previously unknown stone surface came to light. In 2024, between 28 March and 17 April, the scars of unauthorised metal detecting were recorded and filled. Fifty-two scars in forty-five places lay mostly north and north-west of the castle and the visitor building, with three in the P-shaped garden. All of them stayed within the topsoil, from about 0.15 to 0.30 metres deep and about a quarter to two fifths of a square metre across. Many had been left open. The turves were put back where they could be.

What the castle was for changed with its owners, and the walls still show the changes. It began as a burgess family's private tower and a secure court, a house that advertised lordship without being a major fortress. It was a royal refuge in plague, a prison for a king's brother, a target in the war over Mary's marriage, and the place where her nobles discussed the end of her marriage to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. It was a base in the civil war, a king's lodging while he waited for Anne of Denmark, and then a judge's comfortable house inside a medieval shell. Abandoned, it became a ruin in a park, a subject for poets and painters, and a public monument. The questions that excavation has not yet answered are the ones that matter most: whether anyone lived on the hill before the tower, exactly when the tower and the curtain were built, what the house looked like in the 1560s, and how the gardens were planted. The south garden, still largely undamaged by later building, is the ground most likely to answer the last of those.

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