Niddry Castle

This is another image from my past. When I was 13 or thereabouts this castle was a ruin and supposedly secure, but the folk securing it never counted the resourceful determination and physical nimbleness of a bunch of teenage adventurers. The castle was very much a ruin, the basement was open to the sky and there was only really the four walls and a couple of parts of the internal staircases left, but what a playground.

Niddry castle was built around 1500 and was witness to a lot of Scottish history. The fallout from the defeat at Flodden (1513), The “Rough Wooing”, Mary, Queen of Scots stayed there when she escaped from Lochleven (1568), was twice besieged unsuccessfully and had Cromwells English army quartered in and around it in 1650, the castle was sold as part of the owner Lord Seton’s security around 1680 and it slowly fell into disrepair to the point where is was a fun to place to chill, as long as it didn’t rain.

In the 1990’s it was bought along with the attached land and converted to a private residence, along with originally a 9 hole golf course now 18 holes. The background to the blip is a shale ‘bing’ which was the waste from the local oil business of the early 20th century.