Balgonie Castle

Balgonie Castle stands beside the River Leven in Fife, its oldest part a fourteenth-century tower house raised by the Sibbald family, who set a keep at the corner of a fortified courtyard from the 1360s onward. The tower has vaulted ground and first floors and a pitched roof with crow-stepped gables. In 1496 Sir Robert Lundie, newly appointed Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, married into the family and extended the buildings; King James IV visited that August and tipped the masons at work. The castle passed through several hands over the centuries, coming to Sir Alexander Leslie, first Earl of Leven, in 1635, and later to the Balfour family in 1824. Its fortunes then declined, and roofs were reportedly stripped in the mid-nineteenth century to avoid property tax, leaving much of the range ruinous. Restoration began in 1971 under David Maxwell and continued through the 1980s, and the keep and chapel have since been brought back into residential use. Today the castle is privately occupied and open to visitors, with the restored great hall and chapel hired for weddings and events. It also keeps its ghost stories, chief among them a spectre known as Green Jeanie.