MacDuff's Castle

MacDuff’s Castle stands in ruin above the shore near East Wemyss, on the Fife coast, its name recalling the MacDuffs, the medieval Mormaers and Earls of Fife. A stronghold may have risen here as early as the eleventh century, though nothing of that first castle survives. The buildings seen today owe their origins to the Wemyss family, descended from the MacDuffs, who held the property from the fourteenth century and raised its earliest surviving portion. The site drew royal attention in 1304, when Edward I of England is said to have called here and afterwards ordered the castle destroyed, punishing Sir Michael Wemyss for backing Robert the Bruce. Ownership later passed to the Livingstones and then, in 1530, to the Colvilles, who added a second tower; Sir John Wemyss bought the property back in 1637. At its fullest the castle combined a four-storey fourteenth-century tower with a five-storey sixteenth-century one, linked by a gatehouse range pierced with gun loops. The eastern tower was pulled down in 1967 after a child was hurt, and a nearby sixteenth-century dovecot fell to coastal erosion in the 1970s. Local tradition tells of a Grey Lady, named as Mary Sibbald, whose spirit is said to linger among the walls.