Gight Castle

Gight Castle stands in farmland about six and a half kilometres east of Fyvie in Aberdeenshire. The Gordons acquired the land around 1480 and built a tower house on an L-shaped plan in the mid-16th century. The first Laird had died at Flodden Field, and the second Laird completed the stronghold with stone walls and narrow windows. In the 18th century the estate passed to Catherine Gordon-Byron, 13th Laird, whose husband had gambled away their fortune. The Byrons sold the castle in 1787, and their son Lord Byron was born a year later. The new owner, the Earl of Aberdeen, gave the ruin to his son George Gordon, Lord Haddo, whose family later included the future Prime Minister George Hamilton-Gordon. The L-shaped keep measured roughly twenty-one metres by sixteen metres. Visitors enter through a main door set away from the inner corner, stepping into a vaulted vestibule where carved coats of arms line the ceiling. A passage leads from the vestibule to two vaulted cellars and a bakehouse in the main block, plus a kitchen in the adjoining wing, and a stairway rises between the blocks to the upper floors. The first floor holds a great hall and private chambers, with a small vaulted bedchamber between them. Above that, the upper storeys have vanished, and a later north-east wing was added before the castle was abandoned. Today the roofless walls rise from grassy mounds, and ivy clings to the remaining stone. A ghost story tells of a piper who entered a supposed underground passage and never returned; locals still claim to hear faint bagpipe music on quiet evenings. The ruin is protected as a scheduled monument, standing open to the wind and sky, its crumbling masonry framing views of the surrounding fields.