Craignethan Castle

Craignethan Castle, above the River Nethan in South Lanarkshire, was built from about 1530 by Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, master of works to James V, and is celebrated among students of fortification for its caponier — a roofed stone gun gallery at the bottom of the ditch, thought to be the first in Britain, buried when the castle was slighted in 1580 and only rediscovered by excavation in 1962. Mary, Queen of Scots really was here: English intelligence reports of 6 and 12 May 1568 place her at Draffen, as the castle was then called, and the second adds that she had gone there "lyttle to her contentation", having been refused Dumbarton by her Hamilton hosts. The famous night before the Battle of Langside, however, the best reconstruction of her itinerary puts her at Hamilton, not here. The castle's headless ghost, usually said to be Mary, is identified only by guesswork: every source that reports it hedges, and neither the 1830 nor the 1887 standard account of the castle mentions a ghost at all. Historic Environment Scotland has kept the site closed for conservation work since 2020.

Craignethan was not called Craignethan when it mattered most. In every sixteenth-century document about it the place is Draffane — or Draffen, or Nauthane — and that single fact is why so much of its history has been lost to people searching under the modern name. The barony belonged to the Black Douglases until their forfeiture in 1455, after which it passed to the Hamiltons. A Great Seal confirmation of January 1538/39 covers an earlier charter of 15 May 1532 by Kelso Abbey granting Sir James Hamilton of Finnart "the castle and fortalice of Nauthane"; the charter says the castle was built by Sir James, which means building work was already under way before May 1532. Historic Environment Scotland dates the start to about 1530. Finnart is the reason the place is famous among people who study fortification. Illegitimate eldest son of the 1st Earl of Arran, he became the effective head of Scotland's second family on his father's death in 1529, had lived abroad, and in 1539/40 was appointed Master of Works Principal to James V, in charge of all royal building — by then chiefly the new palace at Stirling. He had already worked at Linlithgow and Blackness. At Draffane he built for himself, and he built strangely. The low, wide tower house stands inside a walled inner court whose west wall — the side overlooked by higher ground — was up to five metres thick, designed to take artillery on its head. Beyond it he cut a ditch, and at the bottom of the ditch he put a caponier: a roofed stone gallery pierced with gunloops, from which defenders could rake the ditch lengthwise. It is believed to be the earliest caponier in Scotland and probably the first in Britain. Nobody saw it for nearly four centuries. The ditch was filled in when the castle was dismantled in 1579, and the caponier was only uncovered in the excavation of 1962, directed by Iain MacIvor, Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and dug largely by local labour under a government winter relief scheme. The showpiece had a flaw, and a professional soldier put it in one sentence. Reporting to London in May 1570, Sir William Drury, governor of Berwick, called it "Draffin, a strong house of the Duke's, but situate in a hole, so that it is commanded on every part, and has no ordnance". Historic Environment Scotland's own assessment concedes the point and adds a second, drier one: the caponier would have filled with gunsmoke had it ever been used in earnest. Finnart never got to find out. He fell from favour, was tried for plotting against James V and executed in 1540, and Craignethan became a royal castle with a captain, three gunners, two heavy cannon and five smaller pieces. The king did visit, though not — on the best evidence — for the celebrated wedding of Finnart's daughter Agnes to the Master of Somerville, a story HES traces to a much later Somerville family history and explicitly declines to treat as reliable. The visit that is documented is duller and firmer: entries in the Exchequer Rolls record eighteen hens delivered for the king's expenses at the castle of Craignethan, and stables repaired or newly built for the royal horses, some time between 1 September 1540 and July 1542. The Hamiltons recovered the castle in 1542, when Finnart's half-brother James, 2nd Earl of Arran, became regent for the infant Mary. Arran added the large outer courtyard to the west, and visited often enough that his household books record the dates and the food. Then came May 1568, the fortnight that made Craignethan a name in ghost books. Mary escaped from Lochleven on the evening of the 2nd, crossed the Forth and reached Hamilton before dawn on the 3rd. What happened over the next ten days is genuinely disputed, and the dispute is better than the legend. Her own secretary, Claude Nau, writing about ten years later, says flatly that she was at Hamilton from the 3rd to the 13th. But Sir William Drury, reporting English intelligence from Berwick, twice puts her at Draffane. On 6 May he tells Cecil that "the Queen continued still at Draffen among the Hamiltons, and all the dependers thereupon. She came thither accompanied with threescore horse, or somewhat more, and now increaseth". On 12 May — the eve of the battle — he adds a passage that nobody quotes and that changes the tone of the whole episode: "The Quene would willingly have gone for her more suerty to Dumbarton Castle; but the Ambletons wyll not therunto condescend… and she is now gone to Draffen, lyttle to her contentation". Little to her contentation: she did not want to be there. The modern scholarly reconstruction, Edward Furgol's itinerary of Mary's Scottish movements published by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1988, resolves the contradiction by putting her at Craignethan on 4 May and again on the 10th and 11th, and back at Hamilton from the 12th until the morning of the 13th. On that reading Mary slept at Craignethan twice — and not on the night before Langside. The battle on 13 May destroyed her cause in Scotland. She rode without stopping to Sanquhar, reached Terregles, spent the 15th at Dundrennan Abbey and crossed the Solway on the 16th. Craignethan and Cadzow were surrendered to the new regent, the Earl of Moray, who had all the guns removed; some of James V's household furnishings turned up in both houses. The end came eleven years later. In May 1579 Regent Morton moved on the Hamilton strongholds; the siege train was small — two heavy battering pieces, a bastard and a moyen — and it never had to fire. The garrison of Craignethan fled in the night before the guns appeared. The Privy Council then ordered James Hamilton of Libberton to "dimolische and cast doun to the ground the inner barmkin of the said hous, and the tour upoun the south nuke of the samin, as alsua the tour upoun the north nuke at the entres, and the fowse thairof fillit". The work was still not done by June 1580, but it was done: the great west rampart went into its own ditch, and Finnart's tower — which the order left standing — has been looking at the gap ever since. Afterwards the place became domestic and then literary. Duchess Anne sold it in 1659 to Andrew Hay, a Covenanting laird, who built a two-storey house in the south-west corner of the outer court; the date 1665 is carved on it. Archibald Douglas bought the ruin about 1730. Walter Scott came in 1799, was offered Hay's house as a summer residence and declined; readers of Old Mortality (1816) decided anyway that Craignethan was his Tillietudlem, Scott's denials notwithstanding, and in 1876 the railway company named a station after the fictional castle. The 12th Earl of Home repaired the masonry around 1900; the 14th Earl handed the place to the state in 1949.

The single most important thing to know before planning a trip: Craignethan Castle is closed, and has been for years. As of August 2026 the Historic Environment Scotland page for the site carries the notice "This site is currently closed while we carry out vital conservation work", and the plan-your-visit page lists no opening hours and no admission prices at all. The closure is not new. Archived versions of the same page show the castle shut from the 2020 pandemic season ("closed until Spring 2021"), and from at least May 2022 onwards the wording changes to a straightforward "currently closed for conservation works". It has not reopened since, and HES has published no reopening date. The castle also appears as "Currently closed" on HES's own Mary Queen of Scots trail page, which still lists it as one of the places Mary went in May 1568. This matters because third-party listings have not caught up. Castle gazetteers and travel sites still publish "Open Apr–Sep, daily 9.30–17.30, last ticket 30 mins before closing", which was the pre-2020 arrangement. Do not drive to Clydesdale on the strength of it. For the record, the practical details HES still publishes: the address is Blackwood, Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire ML11 9PL; the National Grid reference is NS 815 463; the site telephone is 01555 860 364. HES warns that although the postcode is correct, satnav does not take you to the castle, and advises leaving the M74 at junction 8 or 9, following signs to Blackwood and then the brown tourist signs. Strong footwear is recommended. When the castle was open it was a modest operation: April to September, a little over 5,300 visitors in 2018, a small shop selling the site guidebook. From the level tarmac car park it is about 85 m down a steeply sloping tarmac path and a further 25 m of bound gravel to the gate; there are no marked accessible parking bays, but visitors with mobility difficulties could be dropped at the castle gate by prior arrangement on the site telephone. The outer and inner courtyards are level grass and paving. The caponier is reached down a spiral staircase of 31 steps only 70 cm wide, with a sloping and rough floor; the cellars and the upper levels of the tower house involve straight and spiral stairs of up to 38 steps. Light levels inside are very low in winter. There is no adapted toilet on site — the nearest is about 2.5 miles away. Until it reopens, the surroundings remain: the castle stands on a promontory above the Nethan gorge in ancient woodland designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its rare plants and insects, with buzzards, sparrowhawks and kestrels overhead. The nearest open Historic Environment Scotland properties are Bothwell Castle, about 12 miles away, and Glasgow Cathedral at about 18 miles; St Bride's Church at Douglas, 10 miles off and holding the Black Douglas mausoleum, opens by guided tour only. Before travelling to any of them, check the HES site page on the day — the same conservation programme that closed Craignethan has restricted access at other properties too.