Earlshall Castle

The Story of Earlshall Castle

Among the glorious buildings that have survived in Fife there are few to match the ancient fortalice of Earlshall standing superb in its dignity and ancient power in the Parish of Leuchars at the seagirt Eastern end of the peninsula of Fife, aloof to a march of science that has brought supersonic air machines incongruously to blast their way around its battlements.

Here is a proud house whose pride, once humbled, has been restored by lairds conscious of a great respon-sibility. Six centuries ago the estate on which the house now stands was part of the barony of King Robert III's brother the Duke of Albany who exercised baronial power in the peninsula as Earl of Fife, but a third part of the Leuchars lordship was granted by Robert III in the fourteenth century to Thomas Monypenny, laird of Pitmilly in Fife, an estate given to his ancestor Ricardus Monypenny in 1211 by the prior of St. Andrews. A family of great antiquity the Monypennys carried a dolphin in their arms suggesting that they came originally from the Dauphiny in France, the province that in 1343 was transferred by Humbert Dauphin de Vennois to Philip VI de Valois on condition that the heir to the French crown should for all time be called the Dauphin and bear the dolphin of the Dauphiny in his arms.

William Monypenny, descendant of Thomas, fought in the service of Charles VII de Valois, Charles the Victorious, and was rewarded in 1444 with the lands of Congressault. As an ambassador from France sent to negotiate the marriage of Princess Eleanor of Scotland to the Dauphin he was styled Natif d 'Ecosse, escurier d 'escurieres of the King of France but despite being a natifd'Ecosse and granted a Scottish peerage by James II of Scotland his love of France overshadowed his in-terest in Leuchars estate known then as Leuchars-Monypenny and after his death his son exchanged the barony with Sir Alexander Bruce of the Airth family for the latter's lands of Escariot in France.

This was in 1495. Two years later Bruce's ownership was ratified by James IV when he bestowed upon Sir Alexander by charter "the lands of Earlishall and the Prusk'' but it was left to his son, also Sir Alexander Bruce, to build in 1546 the original Earlshall castle, the nucleus that has changed so little in four centuries.

To his great grandson, Sir William Bruce, goes the credit for restoring and developing the original castle into the magnificent fortified house that stands today despite the vicissitudes that intervened, credit shared by his second wife whose tombstone in Leuchars Kirk reads " D. Agnes Lyndesay, Lady to William Brvce of Erishall, who in her life was charitable to the poore, and profitable to that hovse, dyed 1635. ..." It was in fact her considerable fortune that went to the rich embellishment of Earlshall that has endured through the centuries.

Sir William died a year later, to be succeeded by his eldest son Andrew who married a great-grand-daughter of King James V, father of Mary Queen of Scots who rode from St. Andrews to hunt over the lands of Earls-hall. In 1664 he in turn was succeeded by his elder son Andrew then aged 34 and destined to go down in history as a savagely cruel persecutor of the Covenanters when he took a commission in the Royalist army under Claver-house. Commander of the force that massacred Richard Cameron and his band of devotees of pure Presbyterian-ism against the Episcopalism being forced on Scotland by Charles II, the band that inspired the formation of that great Scottish regiment, the Cameronians, Andrew Bruce is recorded as paying a guinea to hack off Cameron's head and hands with a dirk and selling them in Edinburgh for £500.

Ever one for the main chance this laird of Earlshall subsequently and publicly abjured allegiance to Bishops, to the Pope, to King James II, at just the right time to curry favour with King William III and he died at Earlshall in the odour, albeit synthetic, of sanctity though it is said that his restless ghost haunts the great tower.

His only son Robert who had no heir was the last of the line of Bruces of Earlshall and, through the marriage of one of his daughters, the estate passed to the Hen-dersons of Fordell in Fife and in 1852 Sir Robert Bruce Henderson, the last baronet of Fordell, sold Earlshall for £68,000 to Lieut. Colonel Samuel Long of Bromley Hill in Kent.

Then came the vicissitudes, the years of neglect that reduced a superb example of the Scottish fortified house to a near ruin, to a state of decay enough to deter anyone from the immense task of restoration. Happily it did not deter Mr. R. W. R. Mackenzie of Stormontfield, Perthshire, who acquired the dilapidated property in 1891 and set about restoring it to the zenith of its former glory. His architect was none other than R. S., after-wards Sir Robert, Lorimer and Earlshall stands today as a unique memorial to his genius. The entrance to the courtyard, and so to the main door of the house set at the foot of the great tower, is the archway in the curtain wall bearing the arms of Sir William Bruce. The tall oval tower with its stone stairway spiralling through four floors to the battlemented roof is the primary external feature. Joined to this by the main body of the house with the great gallery and the other public rooms is another tower, cylindrical and lower, and the journey between the towers is quite an experience for the uninitiated visitor.

The ground floor, accessible from outside by a modest side entrance in a continuation of the curtain wall, con-tains a labyrinth of vaulted kitchen quarters and offices. Above are the lofty dining hall and drawing rooms div-ided by a tall screen whose period beauty disguises the fact that it was copied by Lorimer from a screen in Falkland Palace. Surmounting the entire building be-tween the towers there stretches the most remarkable feature of a remarkable house, the great gallery fifty feet in length and famous for the riot of tempera heraldic paintings and proverbs dated 1617-1620 and covering the whole of the flat roof and its wide curved frieze.

As the arms of the Bruces and other great families, some connected with them by marriage, are interspersed with fanciful devices purporting to be the arms of, for example, Hector of Troy, David King of Israel, Julius Caesar, Judas Maccabeus and Charlemagne, and as there is further embellishment in the form of exotic animals, it is thought that intentional humour played a part in the whole fantastic decoration. On the other hand they might have been inspired by a manuscript, not very long discovered, in which Sir David Lindsay of the Mount when Lord Lyon King-at-Arms drew and coloured the arms of the principal Scottish nobles and embellished it with the same fanciful heraldic and animal devices painted some 80 years later in the great gallery of Earlshall at the instigation of Sir William Bruce and his Lady Agnes.

The restoration of the painted roof was one of Lorimer's supreme achievements. When Mr. Mackenzie engaged him it was in such a state of decay from years of rain percolating through the rotting roof above that sections had fallen in. Piece by piece with infinite patience and loving care the painted surface was stripped from its rotten wood and glued to sound wood which was then secured to the repaired outer roof. When this intricate work was completed the whole pictorial pattern was reverently restored to its original splendour.

The central block of the house contains no bedrooms, all of which are interspersed precariously yet comfortably up the two towers, the main bedroom in the dominant tower having inevitably a secret escape passage.

Lorimer was not only an architect of houses. He was a late 19th early 20th century Capability Brown and the Earlshall garden which he created out of rough farm land can best be described in his own words taken from Christopher Hussey's book of his work : '' The natural park comes up to the walls of the house on the one side, on the other you stroll out into the garden enclosed. That is all-a house and a garden enclosed ; but what a paradise such a place can be made. Such surprises- little gardens within the gardens, the ' month's' garden, the herb garden, the yew alley. The kitchen garden too, and this nothing to be ashamed of, to be smothered away from the house, but made delightful by its laying out ".

Such is the perfect setting for a great house of great antiquity, a fortified house conceived in the auld alliance between France and Scotland, born in strength to resist hostile neighbours and political embroilments, weakened temporarily by neglect but restored to its strength and glory, and now a private hotel.

If you would like to visit this area as part of a highly personalized small group tour of my native Scotland please e-mail me:

Return to Places to Visit in the Kingdom of Fife