Ethie Castle

Ethie Castle stands about three miles north of Arbroath in Angus, its oldest fabric a sandstone keep raised around 1300 by monks from the nearby Arbroath Abbey. After passing through the de Maxwell family, it became linked with David Beaton, the last cardinal in pre-Reformation Scotland, who was murdered at St Andrews in 1546. The castle still keeps a small chapel and the Cardinal’s Sitting Room, from which a concealed stair climbs to the Great Hall above. In 1665 the Carnegie family bought the property, later rising to become Earls of Northesk; the seventh Earl served alongside Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805 and was allowed to add the battle to his arms, a device still carved into one of the castle’s dormers. Sir Walter Scott, a close friend of the eighth Earl, stayed here often, and Ethie is thought to have inspired the fictional Castle of Knockwhinnock in his novel The Antiquary. A Glasgow artist, William Cunningham Hector, took it on in 1927, and it was later restored by Alistair Forsyth, chief of Clan Forsyth, as the clan’s seat. Local tradition holds that it is haunted, both by a Grey Lady and by the shade of Cardinal Beaton himself.