Glamis Castle

Glamis Castle stands beside the village of Glamis in Angus, in the broad vale of Strathmore. The Sidlaw Hills lie to the south and the Grampian Mountains to the north. One measure places the house about twenty kilometres, or twelve miles, inland from the North Sea. Another places it about twelve miles, or 19.5 kilometres, north of Dundee.

Forfar, the county town, lies about five miles, or eight kilometres, to the east, and Kirriemuir about four miles, or 6.5 kilometres, to the north. The land slopes gently down from the Sidlaws to the castle and to the Dean Water, which has been canalised through the policies. The soil is a rich loam with a good deal of sand, and the short summer limits what will grow. The whole estate is given as more than 57 square kilometres, or 14,000 acres, and it has produced timber and beef as well as the parks and gardens.

The designed landscape within that estate is given separately as 1,080 acres, or 437 hectares. The castle is not a world-heritage inscription. It was added to the highest category of listing on 11 June 1971, and the grounds were entered on the national inventory of gardens and designed landscapes on 30 June 1987, with minor corrections to that garden record in 2024. The house is still lived in.

It is the home of the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and it is open to the public.

The site is low for so old a stronghold. A tradition says that attempts to build on higher ground failed because fairies threw the stones down as soon as they were set. The castle was once defended by moats. Three ditches are also described around it, filled in during the seventeenth century, when the house was greatly changed.

Of the outer wall, two round towers remain in front of the castle. Each is about seven metres, or 23 feet, across and about four metres, or 13 feet, high, with a modern parapet, and the walls are about one metre, or 3 feet 3 inches, thick. They are also given as 7.0 metres in diameter and about 4.0 metres high, with walls 1.0 metres thick, and a visit on 16 December 1969 found no trace of where the curtain had joined them. They are thought to be of the fourteenth or fifteenth century.

The rest of the court walls have gone.

The neighbourhood has older traces that are not the castle itself. The Eassie Stone is a Class II Pictish cross-slab of about the middle of the eighth century, found in the Eassie burn in the late eighteenth century and now kept in a shelter inside the ruined church at Eassie, some four kilometres, or 2.5 miles, west of Glamis. The slab is 2.04 metres, or 6 feet 8 inches, high, 1.02 metres, or 3 feet 4 inches, wide, tapering to 0.84 metres, or 2 feet 9 inches, at the top, and 23 centimetres, or 9.1 inches, thick. Both faces are carved in relief.

The cross has ringed angles, a circular boss with keywork, and interlaced arms, and the upper quadrants once held angels. In 1707, digging into a small tumulus called the Green Cairn, near the castle, produced an urn said to hold great quantities of Roman silver medals, including a silver coin of Galba. In October 1929 a mason, William Johnston, struck a flat slab about 18 inches long and 13 inches across while digging in a garden at Charleston, near Glamis. Lieutenant-Colonel L.

A. Waddell read the marks as a record of a seventh-century battle. Other readers, among them Dr Mackenzie, judged the inscription a modern English sentence written in runes, and one local correspondent noted a symbol not used until after the fifteenth century. The stone then dropped from view.

A later discussion has treated the word hoax as too simple for the way the slab was found, while agreeing that it was not ancient.

Malcolm II, Máel Coluim mac Cinaeda, was king of Alba from 1005 until his death on 25 November 1034. He was a son of Kenneth II. An Irish prophecy called him Forranach, the Destroyer, and said his mother was a woman of Leinster. The Irish annals called him high king of Scotland, though Strathclyde, the Norse-Gael coasts, and the mormaers of Moray remained outside any simple obedience.

He had no surviving son. He married his daughters into those houses. Through his daughter Bethóc he was grandfather of Duncan I, and some accounts also make him grandfather of Macbeth through a daughter Donada. At Glamis his death is told in two ways.

One account says he was murdered there in 1034, at a royal hunting lodge. Another says he was mortally wounded in a nearby battle and carried to that lodge, on the site of the present castle, and that he died there. The stronghold itself is placed in the tenth or eleventh century, and the house is thought to date from the eleventh century. Before 1372 the estate is described as a royal hunting lodge.

The historical king Macbeth, Macbethad mac Findláech, nicknamed the Red King, died on 15 August 1057 and had no connection with this castle. He was a son of Findláech of Moray and may have been Malcolm’s grandson. He became mormaer of Moray in 1032, probably after the death of Gille Coemgáin, and he married Gille Coemgáin’s widow, Gruoch. In 1040 Duncan I attacked Moray and was killed by Macbeth’s men.

Macbeth then ruled Alba until 1057, mostly in peace, though in 1054 Siward, Earl of Northumbria, invaded on behalf of Edward the Confessor. Macbeth was killed at the Battle of Lumphanan by forces loyal to the future Malcolm III, and he was buried on Iona. William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, written in 1603 to 1606, nevertheless places its thane at Glamis, and the castle is said to have inspired that play.

By 1372 a castle stood here. In that year Robert II granted the thanage of Glamis to Sir John Lyon, thane of Glamis and husband of the king’s daughter. The same gift is also given as a grant of 1376 by Robert I, who is said to have given it to John Lyon, Lord Glamis, and to have seen the castle reconstructed about then. Robert II was born on 2 March 1316 and died on 19 April 1390.

He was king of Scots from 1371, the first monarch of the House of Stewart, the son of Walter Stewart, sixth High Steward, and of Marjorie, daughter of Robert the Bruce. He had been heir presumptive while David II was a child, and he took the throne when his uncle died without a surviving heir. Sir John Lyon of Glamis was born about 1340 and was killed on 4 November 1382. He was Chamberlain of Scotland from 1377 to 1382, and he is counted the first thane of Glamis and the progenitor of Clan Lyon.

His own ancestry is disputed. Sir Iain Moncreiffe took the kindred to be Celtic, from a younger son of Clan Lamont. Another claim derives them from a French family called de Léon. His father was another Sir John Lyon, of Forteviot and Forgandenny, and of Curteton and Drumgowan.

Through his wife he was also thane of Tannadyce, and the marriage brought him Kinghorn in Fife. He had a place at court before 1368, under David II. The wife is named Princess Jean, and also Joanna, and Dame Joanna. One account has him already her husband when the thanage was granted.

Another says he married Joanna, the king’s daughter, after the grant.

The present building is largely later. It was rebuilt as an L-plan tower house in the early fifteenth century. A more detailed sequence says construction of the Grant Tower, a large L-plan tower, began in 1435 under Patrick Lyon, who in 1445 became the first Lord Glamis. His death in 1459 stopped the work for a time, and his widow finished it before her own death in 1484.

Around the same time a great hall was added on the south side of the tower. Patrick Lyon, first Lord Glamis, was born in 1402 and died on 21 March 1459. He was created Lord Glamis on 28 June 1445. He was a grandson of the John Lyon who died in 1382 and of Princess Joanna Stewart, daughter of Robert II, through their son Sir John Lyon of Glamis, who died about 1435, and Elizabeth Graham.

From 1424 he was a hostage in England for James I, until he was exchanged on 9 November 1427. He was a lord auditor in 1450 and 1451, Master of the King’s Household from 1450 to 1452, and ambassador to England in 1451 and again in 1455. From 1456 to 1459 he kept the castles of Kildrummy, Kindrocht, and Balveny. Late in 1427, or soon after, he married Isabel, daughter of Sir Walter Ogilvie of Lintrethan, treasurer of Scotland.

Their children included Alexander, second Lord Glamis, and John, third Lord. The widow, Isobel, Lady Glamis, married again.

A fifteenth-century legend at the castle is that of Earl Beardie, who would not stop a card game on the sabbath. The story is attached both to Alexander Lyon, second Lord Glamis, who died in 1486, and to Alexander Lindsay, fourth Earl of Crawford, who died in 1453. In every version Beardie plays cards. Either his hosts refuse because it is the sabbath, or a servant tells him to stop.

He answers that he will play until doomsday, or with the Devil himself. A stranger arrives, joins the game, and is taken to be the Devil, who takes Beardie’s soul and, in some tellings, condemns him to play until doomsday. Alexander Lindsay was born in 1423, the son of David Lindsay, third Earl of Crawford, and Marjory Ogilvie. He was called the Tiger Earl as well as Earl Beardie.

He took arms against James II in the Douglas rebellion. In February 1452 James II killed William Douglas, eighth Earl of Douglas, at Stirling, after Douglas refused to break his league with Alexander. The Tiger Earl was defeated at the Battle of Brechin on 18 May 1452 and submitted later that year.

In the early sixteenth century the house passed through a forfeiture. John Lyon, sixth Lord Glamis, married Janet Douglas, daughter of the Master of Angus, while James V was at feud with the Douglases. Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, was born about 1498 and was burned on 17 July 1537. James V, born on 10 April 1512, had been king from 9 September 1513, when he was seventeen months old.

His mother, Margaret Tudor, and then John Stewart, Duke of Albany, governed during his minority. His personal rule began in 1528, when he escaped the custody of his stepfather, Archibald Douglas, sixth Earl of Angus, exiled Angus, and confiscated Douglas lands. His hatred of Angus extended to Janet. In December 1528 she was accused of treason for bringing supporters of the Earl of Angus to Edinburgh in June.

She was also charged with poisoning her husband, Lord Glamis, who had died on 17 September 1528. A further account says she was accused of trying to poison the king, and that a suitor she had refused implicated her. In 1529 James called her his lovittis Dame Jonat Douglas in a licence that let her, and a co-accused, Patrick Charteris of Cuthilgurdy, go on pilgrimage and stand clear of proceedings. The historian Jamie Cameron thinks it unlikely she went.

She was at last accused of witchcraft and was burned at the stake at Edinburgh on 17 July 1537. James V seized the castle. He is said to have stayed at Glamis in November 1538. He is also said to have lived there for some four years after the burning, with his queen, two sons, and the court, and to have left the castle impoverished when he departed.

His own reign included the College of Justice in 1532 and two French marriages, first to Madeleine of Valois and then to Mary of Guise, and he died on 14 December 1542. The two sons named at Glamis sit beside a life in which the legitimate boys of Mary of Guise were born only at the end of that reign.

Janet’s son, John Lyon, seventh Lord Glamis, was born about 1510 and died in 1558. In July 1537 he was tried with his mother, who had married again, to Archibald Campbell of Skipnish, on a charge of conspiring to kill James V by poison. He was about sixteen. He confessed and was imprisoned.

On 3 December 1540 Parliament annexed his estates to the Crown. On 13 March 1543 the forfeiture was rescinded and he was restored to his titles and estates. The castle is said to have been returned to him in 1543. By 1562, when Mary, Queen of Scots, rested here, the castle was a four-storey L-plan tower house, with an enceinte wall, towers, and outbuildings.

In the middle of the sixteenth century the great hall and the south-east hall block were joined by a short link, which made a Z-plan. The seventh lord later stood with Patrick Gray, fourth Lord Gray, and Norman Leslie in support of Charteris of Kinfauns at Perth, against William Ruthven, second Lord Ruthven, and in the following year he commanded in the vanguard of a Scottish army that invaded England.

Patrick Lyon, ninth Lord Glamis, was created Earl of Kinghorne in 1606. He was born about 1575 and died in 1615, the son of John Lyon, eighth Lord Glamis, and Elizabeth Abernethy. His father was killed in 1578 by a gunshot to the head in a street fight at Stirling with the followers of David Lindsay, eleventh Earl of Crawford. David Hume of Godscroft said Crawford was a good shot and that Glamis, being so tall, was an easy mark.

An uncle, Thomas, Master of Glamis, then headed the family and was tutor to the boy. A portrait of the young lord, painted in 1583 by Adrian Vanson, still hangs at the castle. In February 1593 James VI sent him with the Duke of Lennox, the Earl of Mar, and the Master of Glamis to Penicuik to search for the rebel Earl of Bothwell. Glamis fell from his horse and broke three ribs.

In June 1598 he was declared a rebel for failing to appear and settle his feud with the Earl of Crawford. In September 1594 he was with the king’s force against the northern earls at the Battle of Glenlivet. As earl, he began major works on the castle. An inscription on the central tower reads that it was built by Patrick, Lord Glamis, and Dame Anna Murray.

The English architect Inigo Jones has traditionally been linked with the redesign. Inigo Jones was born on 15 July 1573 and died on 21 June 1652. He was the first significant architect in England of the early modern period to use Vitruvian proportion, and he brought Roman and Italian Renaissance planning to English buildings, among them the Queen’s House and the Banqueting House at Whitehall. He also designed masques, many of them with Ben Jonson, for the court of Anne of Denmark.

The Scottish character of Glamis has been taken to point away from him and toward William Schaw, master mason of the king’s works. William Schaw was born about 1550 and died in 1602. He was Master of Works to James VI and to Anne of Denmark, and a figure in the organisation of freemasonry in Scotland. The dated remodelling is 1606, four years after Schaw’s death, and one account simply says it is not known whether the final design was that of Inigo Jones.

Work continued under John, the second Earl of Kinghorne. The east wing was added in 1629. The drawing room, formerly the great hall, has a plaster ceiling dated 1621, with the monograms of John, second Earl of Kinghorne, and Margaret Erskine, by the artist who worked at Muchalls and Craigevar. The same monograms, with medallion heads of Roman characters, appear in the plaster of King Malcolm’s Room.

Patrick Lyon, third Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was born on 29 May 1643 and died on 15 May 1695. He was the son of John Lyon, second Earl of Kinghorne, and Lady Elizabeth Maule, and the grandson of the first Earl of Kinghorne and Anne Murray. On 12 May 1646, aged two, he inherited the earldom of Kinghorne, the lordship of Glamis, this castle, and Castle Lyon, now Castle Huntly, which the first earl had bought in 1614. Another account says he was only four at that succession in 1646, and that castle and estate were neglected while he was a child.

He is also said to have succeeded to a debt of £400,000 and to a castle that was uninhabitable. On 23 August 1662 he married Helen Middleton, daughter of John Middleton, first Earl of Middleton. During the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, soldiers were garrisoned at Glamis. They are also placed here by 1653.

When Patrick returned in 1670 he found the house uninhabitable, and serious restoration was required. The work lasted until 1689 and is written up in his Book of Record. The tower was raised, and the west wing was added, between 1670 and 1689. A north-east corner wing containing the chapel was added between 1679 and 1683.

On 30 May 1672 he obtained a new charter, ratified in Parliament on 1 July 1677, styling him Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, Viscount Lyon, Lord Glammis, Tannadyce, Sidlaw, and Stradichtie, with the precedence of the older earldom of Kinghorne. A further account places a charter of 1688 behind the titles Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, Viscount Lyon, and Baron Glamis. His garden is reputed one of the four great Baroque gardens of Scotland. The Great Sundial, which he brought in between 1671 and 1689, stands 21 feet high.

In the seventeenth century four brazen statues were set on the approach: Charles I in boots, James VI in a stole, Charles II in Roman dress, and James VII as in his Whitehall portrait. The first two were sculpted by Arnold Quellin, that is Artus Quellinus the Elder, the Flemish sculptor born in Antwerp on 20 or 30 August 1609 and dead there on 23 August 1668, who trained in Rome with François Duquesnoy and kept workshops in Antwerp and Amsterdam. The lead statues of Charles I and James VI are also said to have been found years later in a basement and put back in front of the castle. The chapel of 1679 to 1683 was lined with panel paintings by Joseph de Wit in 1688.

Earl John’s Bridge, on the north drive, is dated 1697. The lectern doocot, once attached to the offices, has 750 nesting boxes.

The eighteenth century rearranged both the family and the ground. John, fourth Earl, had four sons, and each succeeded in turn. In 1735 Thomas, the eighth Earl, the last of those sons, commissioned Thomas Winter’s plan of the Mains of Glamis, showing parks, meadows, plantations, courts, and gardens as then laid out. By 1746, when Winter drew the policies as they stood, the design ran from north of the Dean Water to Crams Hill, Hunters Hill, and Lera Park in the south, with radiating avenues in the woods and a straight approach lined by a broad avenue.

The parks near the castle were enclosed in a diamond, and a shrubbery with serpentine walks lay to the south-east. General Roy’s plan of 1750 shows the same layout. Winter also offered a revised formal design for the courts and the north garden, and he put in a beech avenue. Thomas died in 1753.

His son John succeeded as ninth Earl.

John Bowes, ninth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was born John Lyon on 17 July 1737 and died on 7 March 1776. He was known as the beautiful Lord Strathmore. Jesse Foot later wrote that his pursuits were innocent and without guile, but not those of science, and that he was a sincere friend, a hearty Scotchman, and a good bottle companion. In 1760 he made the Grand Tour, for the first months with his classmate Thomas Pitt, later Baron Camelford, and from March 1761 until June 1763 he had an affair with Costanza Scotti, Contessa Sanvitale.

On 24 February 1767, at St George’s, Hanover Square, he married Mary Eleanor Bowes. She had been born on 24 February 1749 in Upper Brook Street, Mayfair, the daughter and heiress of Sir George Bowes and his second wife, Mary Gilbert of St Paul’s Walden, and the day of the wedding was her eighteenth birthday. Her childhood home was Gibside in County Durham. Her father died when she was eleven and left her a fortune estimated at between £600,000 and £1,040,000, made through the Grand Allies, a cartel of coal owners.

She was called the wealthiest heiress in Britain, perhaps in Europe. His will required her husband to take the name Bowes. Parliament allowed John Lyon to become John Bowes. Some of their children used Lyon-Bowes.

Five were born in the first six years: Maria Jane in 1768, John, later tenth Earl, in 1769, Anna Maria in 1770, George in 1771, and Thomas, later eleventh Earl, in 1773. Mary Eleanor published a poetical drama, The Siege of Jerusalem, in 1769, kept candid diaries, and financed an expedition by William Paterson to the Cape in 1777 to collect plants. The earl spent much of his time on Glamis and contracted tuberculosis. On 7 March 1776 he died at sea on the way to Portugal.

Their spending left her with debts of £145,000. She later married Andrew Robinson Stoney, who treated her with cruelty, and she came to be counted among the early advocates of a woman’s right to divorce. She died on 28 April 1800. The clock tower at Glamis still holds family papers, among them a papal bull and her memoirs.

People who wish to read the castle archive do so in the search room at the University of Dundee.

The ninth Earl’s work on the ground is told through several designers. Around 1764 he consulted Robert Robinson about draining Forfar Loch, and Robinson is said to have visited Glamis that year. An unsigned, unfinished improvement plan of 1764, in the picturesque manner, has been attributed to Robinson and also, from the hand, to Thomas White the elder, in which case it would be one of White’s earliest known Scottish works. It was not carried out.

From 1766 to 1771 the earl employed James Abercrombie, first as surveyor and then for draining and planting. Abercrombie worked with the gardener George Baillie, and a shrubbery was made near the house. In 1768 Abercrombie drew two informal schemes. They removed the formal planting, including the avenue, made two connected lochs south of the castle, and placed a kitchen garden to the north.

He asked that the gates and walls in front of the castle be kept. The walls came down in 1774. The same decades are also described as a remodelling in the style of Capability Brown, in which the ninth Earl removed garden walls and re-sited three gates. Of three gateways shown in a late seventeenth-century portrait of the third Earl, the outer gates went to the south-east entrance, the Church Lodge, the middle gates, called the De’il Gates, went to the South Lodge, and the inner gates, the Gladiator Gates, went to the North Lodge.

The ha-ha of about 1770 belongs to this softened version of Abercrombie’s plan.

Thomas Gray had described the old approach in 1765. A visitor came down from the south through a double and triple avenue of Scotch firs, 60 or 70 feet high, under three gateways, a full mile long. Past the second gate the firs gave way to limes, and an oblique avenue ran off on either hand toward the offices. The enclosures were bordered with three or four ranks of sycamore, ash, and white poplar, 70 to 100 years old, and Earl Patrick’s planting still filled the alleys and walled gardens with broad-leaved elm, oak, birch, black cherry, and laburnum.

Winter had called the approach ten hundred feet wide, with a strip of planting of the same breadth on either side. That avenue was cut down. Walter Scott was among those who mourned it. The parks, given as 2,700 acres, were informalised, and the offices were taken away from beside the doocot, which was left as a feature in the park.

The ninth Earl died in 1776. His son John, the tenth Earl, commissioned the surveyor Blackadder to map the estate in 1810. That plan shows the park without its central avenue and with a rectangular pond east of the house. The avenue must have been replanted soon after, because the present trees date from that time and the avenue is mature on the first-edition map of about 1860.

The tenth and eleventh Earls were agricultural improvers. They enclosed the farms, drained, fenced, built, reclaimed land, and made roads, and many of the farm buildings are of their time.

The west wing has several dates. It was added between 1670 and 1689, demolished in 1775, and rebuilt in 1798 to 1801. The south-west wing is also said to have been rebuilt after a fire in the early nineteenth century. The factor told a visitor that the north-west wing, though in a seventeenth-century style, had been rebuilt after a fire about 1806.

Other lists of building campaigns give 1606, about 1620, about 1690, 1811, 1849, and 1891. The billiard room, a former dining room over a sixteenth-century kitchen, is dated 1773 to 1776, with a ceiling of 1903 carrying the monograms and coronet of the thirteenth Earl’s golden wedding. Its carved fireplace, with the arms of the Blakistons of Gibside, was brought from Gibside in County Durham, the Bowes seat. One account places that move in the 1920s.

Elizabeth Blakiston, heiress of Gibside, had married Sir William Bowes.

Before those Georgian works, the family had already suffered a death that changed Scots criminal practice. Charles Lyon, sixth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was baptised on 12 July 1699 and was the son of John, the fourth Earl. His brother John, the fifth Earl, and his uncle Patrick Lyon of Auchterhouse joined the Jacobite cause and were both killed at the Battle of Sheriffmuir in 1715. Charles was not directly implicated.

Both family seats were visited by the Old Pretender, James. On 25 July 1725 Charles married Susanna Cochrane, daughter of John Cochrane, fourth Earl of Dundonald. She died on 23 June 1754. On 9 May 1728, after the funeral of a daughter of Patrick Carnegy of Lour in Forfar, Charles was killed by his cousin James Carnegy of Finhaven, also written James Carnegie of Finhaven.

His life is also given as ending on 11 May 1728. Earlier that day John Lyon of Brigton, also called Bridgeton, had behaved rudely toward Finhaven’s sister, Lady Margaret Auchterhouse. After the company left the house, Brigton harassed Finhaven and pushed him into a street kennel. Finhaven drew his sword on Brigton and ran through the earl, who had stepped between them.

The minister of Forfar recorded Finhaven’s deep remorse in the tolbooth. Robert Dundas of Arniston, the Elder, defended him. The verdict was not guilty. The case fixed the right of a Scottish jury to judge the whole case, including intent, and not only the physical blow.

A full-length portrait of the sixth Earl hangs in the drawing room at Glamis, on the far right.

The nineteenth century stripped and enriched the house. Fashion took off the harl and the external plaster so that medieval rubble showed, and a dining room was made which has been called one of the finest Scotch Baronial revival interiors. The room itself is dated 1798 to 1801, and the revival interior of 1851 to 1853 is by the Honourable Thomas Liddell. Oak panelling and stained glass carry heraldic emblems.

The oak fireplace has paired fluted pilasters and an overmantel with the arms of the twelfth Earl. The plaster ceiling, with thistles, roses, and lions, had originally been panelled and painted with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a title also given as Metamorphosis. In 1865 Claude, the thirteenth Earl, succeeded. Fowler of Castle Kennedy designed the five-acre walled garden north of the castle.

The pinetum was begun by the thirteenth Earl in the shrubbery toward the river. In 1891 a formal Dutch garden was made south of the castle, a sunken garden whose walls, in the manner of Edzell, are dated 1891 and 1893. A statue of Mercury stands in a pond among box-edged beds of roses and annuals. The North Bridge is dated 1866, with Blackadder as engineer.

Some rainwater hoppers are dated 1882. A Baronial wing was added on the east in 1891. The chapel windows received stained glass by Kempe of London in 1867 to 1868 and again in 1882 to 1883. The north-east wing was restored in 1866.

In 1870 the singer and composer Virginia Gabriel stayed at the castle for an extended visit. Mary Anne Virginia Gabriel was born on 7 February 1825 at Banstead in Surrey, the daughter of Major-General Gabriel, and she died on 7 August 1877 of injuries from a fall from a carriage. She studied with Pixis, Dohler, Thalberg, Molique, and the opera composer Mercadante, wrote popular ballads and a number of operas and cantatas, and in 1874 married her librettist, George March of the Foreign Office. She was also known as Mrs George E.

March. Accounts of a secret in the castle, a mysterious occupant called the Monster of Glamis, were later traced in part to her stay. The usual form of the story is that a hideously deformed child was born to the family, kept in the castle all his life, and that his rooms were bricked up after his death. Another form says that every generation produced a vampire child who was walled up in the same room.

Guests are said to have hung towels from every window to find the blind suite, and to have seen some windows without towels. Relatives have said the owners simply removed the towels so the rooms would not be found. The monster tale has been connected with an older story of the Ogilvies. A further monster, said to have lived in Loch Calder near the castle, is asserted without a stated authority.

Tour guides have told visitors that one of the forty-six seats in the chapel is kept for a White Lady, identified with Janet Douglas, and that nobody sits there. The chapel is still described as used for family occasions.

Claude George Bowes-Lyon, fourteenth Earl, was born on 14 March 1855 in Lowndes Square, London, and died on 7 November 1944. He was styled Lord Glamis from 1865 until he succeeded his father on 16 February 1904. He was educated at Eton, commissioned in the 2nd Life Guards in 1876, and later honorary colonel of a Black Watch battalion. With the earldom he inherited Glamis, St Paul’s Walden Bury, Gibside and Streatlam in County Durham, and Woolmers Park near Hertford.

His wife was Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck. Between 1907 and 1910 she made the Autumn Garden east of the castle, felling and levelling about four acres of shrubbery. She recorded that she designed it on the lines of old French gardens, closed in by clipped yew, with a fan-shaped parterre that was first planted in rainbow colours. An inscription names the local people who made it.

Two pleached beech alleys give diagonal views. A fountain, a seat, and two gazebos stand in it. In 1980, for the eightieth birthday of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, a new wrought-iron gate for this garden was designed and made by a local blacksmith, George Sturrock.

Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born on 4 August 1900, the youngest daughter and the ninth of ten children of Claude, then Lord Glamis, and Cecilia. She spent much of her childhood at Glamis and at St Paul’s Walden. The place of her birth is uncertain. It has been given as her parents’ Westminster home at Belgrave Mansions, as a horse-drawn ambulance on the way to a hospital, as Forbes House in Ham, the home of her grandmother Louisa Scott, and as St Paul’s Walden Bury, which the censuses of 1901 and 1911 give as her birthplace.

She was christened at All Saints there on 23 September. A governess taught her until she was eight. She liked field sports, ponies, and dogs. At school in London she began an essay with two Greek words from Xenophon.

Literature and scripture were her best subjects. Under a later governess, Käthe Kübler, she passed the Oxford Local Examination with distinction at thirteen. On her fourteenth birthday Britain declared war on Germany. Four of her brothers served.

Her elder brother Fergus, of the Black Watch, was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Another brother, Michael, was reported missing on 28 April 1917, and the family later learned he was a prisoner. During the First World War the castle was a military hospital. It is also described as a hospital for convalescent soldiers opened in 1914, and as a Red Cross auxiliary hospital.

On 16 September 1916 a serious fire broke out in the upper floors of the central tower. Lady Elizabeth was particularly active in saving the contents. Charred doors and woodwork from that fire can still be seen.

On 26 April 1923 she married Prince Albert, Duke of York, second son of George V and Queen Mary, at Westminster Abbey. The same marriage is also dated 26 April 1932. After the 1923 marriage a suite was converted for the royal family: the King’s Room, the Queen Mother’s Bedroom, and the Queen Mother’s Sitting Room, formerly the Tapestry Room, which has a stone ledge by the door, possibly a sentry’s seat, and a carved oak fireplace lined with blue and white Dutch tiles. She became queen consort on 11 December 1936, when Albert succeeded as George VI after the abdication of Edward VIII, and she was the last Empress of India until 15 August 1947.

After her husband died on 6 February 1952 she was known as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, so as not to be confused with her daughter Queen Elizabeth II. She died on 30 March 2002, aged 101, seven weeks after her younger daughter.

Princess Margaret, Margaret Rose, was born at 9:22 in the evening on 21 August 1930, by Caesarean section, at Glamis. She was the younger daughter of Prince Albert, Duke of York, and Elizabeth, Duchess of York. In the family she was Margot. She was the first prince or princess born in Scotland since Robert Stuart, Duke of Kintyre, in 1602.

Sir Henry Simson delivered her. The Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, attended to verify the birth.

Registration was delayed for several days so that she would not be number 13 in the parish register. Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, baptised her in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace on 30 October. Her mother had wanted the name Ann Margaret. George V disliked Ann and approved Margaret Rose.

At her birth she was fourth in line to the throne. She died on 9 February 2002, aged 71. Since 1987 a drawing of the castle has appeared on the reverse of the ten-pound notes issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The building that visitors walk through is a five-storey L-plan main block of red sandstone, with a central stair tower in the re-entrant angle, an ogee caphouse, pinnacled turrets, and a roof walk with wrought-iron railings. The angle wings are of two storeys and a basement, four bays, with battlements and corbelled turrets. The east wing is lower, of three storeys and an attic, seven bays, with crowsteps, and there is a two-storey service wing. Later twentieth-century modernisation was by James Dunbar-Nasmith.

The principal door is studded timber with an iron knocker dated 1687, and above it a carved panel of the royal arms sits under a circular niche holding a bust of Patrick, first Earl of Strathmore. The drawing room is vaulted, 60 feet by 20 feet, with walls 8 feet thick and three deeply set windows, and a well room in the thickness of the wall at the west end. The crypt was the lower hall of the fifteenth-century tower. It has a stone-flagged floor, a dressed stone vault, and deep windows.

A stair in it is placed by the building record in the ninth century, leading to the ground-floor entrance, with a further stair to a well, and the plaster was stripped in the nineteenth century. A newel stair of about 1600 has a hollow newel that holds a clock. The kitchen was formed from sixteenth-century barrel-vaulted cellars and was restored in 1990. The chapel paintings were restored in 1979 and 1980.

A guided tour takes in the dining room, the crypt, the drawing room, the chapel, the billiard room, King Malcolm’s Room, the royal apartments, Duncan’s Hall, and the family exhibition room, and lasts about fifty minutes. One survey of the masonry has recorded 156 mason’s marks belonging to 60 different masons.

The designed landscape kept changing after the avenue returned. By about 1860 the railway had cut the estate north of the Dean Water, and the formal lines of the 1750s had given way to picturesque curves and to single trees in the parks. Woodland south of the village is now commercial plantation, outside the policies but still part of the view from the castle. North of the Dean Water, older birch wood once called the Back Park or Cossans Wood has been separate since the railway.

In the 1930s Captain Michael Bowes Lyon made a pond there, the Captain’s Pond. That ground is kept as a nature and wildfowl reserve and is not open to the public. In the policies proper, Alan Mitchell in 1981 measured and listed more than 130 specimen trees in the pinetum and shrubbery, one of his largest Scottish lists. A ginkgo and larch avenue now runs from the north-east of the castle toward the walled garden.

The five-acre walled garden was kept for vegetables, fruit, and flowers until the 1970s, and was then let for commercial market gardening. Parkland oaks, limes, ashes, and beeches include trees from the late eighteenth-century laying out, with more added since 1860. The south drive still climbs from the village as an avenue, now of oak, ash, horse chestnut, and sycamore. The rose Rosa ‘Glamis Castle’ was named for the castle by the Shropshire breeder David C.H.

Austin, David Charles Henshaw Austin, who was born on 16 February 1926 and died on 18 December 2018. He bred repeat-flowering roses with the character of old garden roses, introduced Rosa ‘Constance Spry’ in 1961, and received the Victoria Medal of Honour and an OBE.

Two modern pictures have used the silhouette. In the British children’s series Thomas & Friends, Lord Callan’s castle is based on Glamis. In 1982 the Belgian comic artist Roger Leloup, born in Verviers on 17 November 1933, a former assistant at Studios Hergé and the creator of Yoko Tsuno, drew a fictional Loch Castle, near-identical to Glamis, for the album La Proie et l’ombre. The castle is also named in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the episode Sub Rosa.

Archaeology on the castle ground is recent and limited. In July 2002 a watching brief during topsoil stripping for a new retail pavilion, at a point just north of the house, found on an access road a deposit with glass, iron slag, and pottery, and possibly two ditches. Under the new building, salvage excavation uncovered the foundations of a small building and part of another, together with walls and a metalled surface. Eighteenth-century bottle glass was abundant, and there were nineteenth-century pottery sherds.

The buildings were read as outbuildings, or gatehouses, and a roadway to a courtyard, belonging to eighteenth-century landscaping and shown on the plan of 1746. A later stage of the same brief recorded pits and a stone drain. The archive was to go to the national monuments record, and the estate sponsored the work. In February 2007 a watching brief on a new approach road from the village to the castle found no features.

More than thirty mature trees had been grubbed out and the ground was badly disturbed. Five sherds of medieval pottery and an almost complete post-medieval bronze tripod cooking pot came from the topsoil. Those finds went to the Angus museums.

The ownership recorded in the late twentieth century and the ownership now do not use the same name. A note of 1998 places Michael, eighteenth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, at the castle with his wife and three sons. The historical essay in the garden inventory still calls Fergus, grandson of the fourteenth Earl, the present and seventeenth Earl. The castle is now the home of Simon Patrick Bowes-Lyon, nineteenth and sixth Earl, born on 18 June 1986, who succeeded in 2016 and was styled Lord Glamis until then.

He is the eldest son of Michael, the eighteenth Earl, and Isobel Weatherall, and a second cousin once removed of King Charles III. He is also described as a first cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth II. In February 2020, during a residential event he was hosting at Glamis, he sexually assaulted a guest in the castle. He pleaded guilty.

On 23 February 2021, at Dundee Sheriff Court, Sheriff Alastair Carmichael sentenced him to ten months in prison. He was also placed on the sex offenders register for ten years. Another account says he served five months. The house remained the family home, and it remains open to visitors.

The property is held by Strathmore Estates (Holding) Ltd.