Luffness Castle

Luffness Castle stands near Aberlady Bay in East Lothian, on lands held by the Lindsay family after a twelfth-century marriage brought them the estate. The Lindsays raised a castle here in the thirteenth century, and one of their line, Sir David Lindsay, High Chamberlain of Scotland, died on crusade in 1256; a Carmelite friary rose nearby in 1293. The site lay in the path of England’s medieval campaigns — Edward I occupied it in 1311, and in 1547 an English force under Edward Clinton sacked the castle. Two years later, during the war of the Rough Wooing, French and Scottish troops under Paul de Thermes threw up a fort here to cut the English supply route to their garrison at Haddington. Once the threat passed, the fort was demolished in 1552 on the orders of Mary of Guise, though the house itself was spared. The lands then passed through the Hepburn Earls of Bothwell and the Durham family before reaching the Hope Earls of Hopetoun in 1739. The surviving tower house rises three storeys to an attic in a T-plan, its turnpike stair thought to date from the original thirteenth-century building. Still occupied and maintained by the Hope family, Luffness remains a lived-in fortress rather than a ruin.