Meggernie Castle

Meggernie Castle sits near the head of Glen Lyon, twenty-two miles west of Aberfeldy: a square tower of five storeys with turrets at its corners, a Victorian mansion grafted on to it, and an avenue of lime trees running the best part of a mile along the river. Its legend is among the strangest in Scotland. Tradition holds that a Menzies of Culdares killed his young wife in a fit of jealousy, cut the body in two and buried only half of it, and that ever since the ghost has appeared in detached halves — the upper part in one wing of the house, the lower elsewhere. Every version dates the events to 1862 and to a shooting party given by the tenant Herbert Wood, yet the story cannot be found in print before the 1950s. The oldest local record, left by a Glen Lyon man who had worked on the estate, describes something else entirely: a ghost in mail armour whose reputation dated from Queen Anne's reign, and which the Innerwick schoolmaster laid with a Bible and a pistol. Meggernie is a private house and cannot be visited.

Meggernie Castle stands near the head of Glen Lyon, about twenty-two miles west of Aberfeldy, in the long single-track glen that runs west from Fortingall towards the Argyll border. The oldest part of the house is a square tower of five storeys with turrets at the angles and ornamental dormers. When David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross surveyed it for "The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland" (1889) they described "an ancient keep, with a modern mansion added to it", approached "by a fine avenue of lime trees", and wrote that Glen Lyon "was for long the property of the Campbells, by whom this keep was probably erected in the beginning of the seventeenth century". Popular guides usually give a firmer date of about 1585 and the builder as "Mad Colin" Campbell of Glenlyon; the two Victorian surveyors, working from the fabric itself, would not go that far. By the later seventeenth century the castle and the greater part of Glen Lyon belonged to the Menzies family of Culdares, a branch of the Menzies of Weem. In October 1689, with the Jacobite rising still alive in the hills, the government turned Meggernie into a barracks. Major-General Hugh Mackay wrote to the young Laird of Weem on 7 October desiring him "to establish a sufficient garrison in the house of Miggernie in Glenlyon, should the said house be capable to secure it, for the better protection of the country against the rebels". Five days later Mackay wrote again, brushing aside a complaint from the neighbouring laird: "'Tis no matter what Glenlyon says bout the fitness of the house of Miggernie for a garrison… Glenlyon grumbled because he was not placed in trust of the house himself." Both letters were printed in 1894 from the charter room at Castle Menzies. That neighbour was Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, who in February 1692 commanded the soldiers quartered on the MacDonalds of Glencoe. The Glencoe link that gets repeated about Meggernie is real, but it is this one: a documented quarrel over who should hold the house, not a residence and not a massacre planned under its roof. The Menzies lairds left a gentler mark too. James Menzies of Culdares, "Old Culdares", brought larch plants back from the Tyrol around 1737 and planted them near Meggernie Castle — among the first larches grown in the Highlands. He was also a Jacobite who survived by double-dealing. After Culloden he had the glen's firearms gathered and secretly buried near the castle in case of another rising, and through the summer of 1746 an "important fugitive" from the battle lay hidden in the ravine of the Gallin Burn while government patrols from Weem, Fortingall and the head of Loch Lyon were "often visiting Meggernie Castle", where Old Culdares received them "with a show of loyal welcome and Highland hospitality". The account comes from Duncan Campbell, born in Glen Lyon in 1828, whose own great-grandfather was drawn into the episode one night and then curtly sent home before he could see too much. Old Culdares died in 1775 and his son, Commissioner Archibald Menzies, in 1776; the contents of the castle were then sold off. Campbell, rummaging as a boy through the farmhouses of the glen, believed the odd Reformation-era books he found there had come from that sale. The castle's modern character was set in the nineteenth century, when Highland lairds discovered that letting a house was more profitable than living in it. In 1851 Herbert Byng Hall published a long description in "Scottish Sports and Pastimes": walls "of immense thickness", doors "defended by iron gratings of prodigious size and weight", a dungeon "adorned with hooks" on which, he was told, executions had been carried out, and a position fourteen or fifteen miles from the house of any other laird "and about the same distance from a medical man or post-office". The owner, Byng Hall noted, had "very recently attained his majority" and wisely preferred to let the castle and its shootings to English sportsmen. Duncan Campbell, who helped plant the wood on Meggernie hill and spent several seasons as gillie to the Earl of Sefton — who held the Meggernie shootings for fifteen years — remembered the young laird's coming-of-age feast and the ball that followed it in the estate peat-house. By the 1860s the shooting tenant was Herbert Wood, an Englishman of Bitteswell Hall who later bought the island of Raasay. The sporting writer Augustus Grimble shot capercaillie with him and remembered it precisely: "during a visit to the late Mr. Herbert Wood, at the time he rented Meggernie Castle 'by' Aberfeldy; the said 'by' meaning twenty-two miles from the railway station". Thirty years later Grimble was still writing about "the happy days spent at Meggernie with the late Mr. Herbert Wood, prior to his purchasing the island of Raasay". It is one of Wood's house parties that the famous ghost story is hung on. In 1883 the estate went to auction. The sale was reported as far away as North Carolina as "the largest estate ever sold in Scotland in one lot at public auction": upwards of 32,000 acres in an area of fifty square miles, a salmon fishery running "to the almost unprecedented length of over 40 miles", knocked down to Mr John Bullough for 515,000 dollars, timber to be paid for separately. Bullough was the Lancashire cotton-machinery manufacturer whose family would later build Kinloch Castle on Rùm; he died in 1891. In the twentieth century Meggernie passed to the Wills family of Bristol — Sir Ernest Wills held it from 1920 — and it remains a private, working estate today.

Meggernie Castle cannot be visited. It is a private house, still lived in, at the centre of a working sporting estate; there are no tours, no open days, no interior access and no public right to walk the policies or the lime avenue. Architectural guides that list the site — grid reference NN 554 460 — describe it simply as privately occupied. Do not drive up the entrance road, and do not knock. What is public is the glen itself. A single-track public road runs west from Fortingall up Glen Lyon; the castle's entrance lodge stands at Bridge of Balgie, roughly twenty-two miles west of Aberfeldy, where a side road climbs south over the hills to Loch Tay. Passing places on this road are for passing, not parking; the drive is slow, and in winter it is genuinely remote. Byng Hall's 1851 complaint that the castle was fifteen miles from a doctor or a post office still gives a fair idea of the scale. The honest alternatives are worth the trip on their own terms. Fortingall, at the mouth of the glen, has a churchyard that is freely open and contains the Fortingall Yew, a tree that Forestry and Land Scotland considers to be up to 5,000 years old, though other authorities put it nearer 2,000 to 3,000; it was already so famous that its girth was measured at 52 feet in 1769, and a protective wall was built round it in 1785. Treat it gently — it has been damaged by visitors taking cuttings. The hills on either side of the glen are open under Scottish access rights, but Glen Lyon is stalking country: the standard Scottish hillwalking access guide lists the Meggernie estate office at Bridge of Balgie as the contact during the deer season, and a phone call before a September or October walk is normal courtesy rather than an imposition. There is no visitor centre, no signage about the ghost, and nobody in the glen is selling the story. That absence is part of the point: Meggernie's legend has survived for a century and a half without a gift shop attached to it.