Airlie Castle

Airlie Castle stands on a raised bank where the Isla and Melgund rivers meet, nine kilometres west of Kirriemuir in Angus. A castle was first built there in about 1432 for Walter Ogilvy, Scotland’s Lord High Treasurer, and later became the main home of the Ogilvy family. The original stronghold had walls three metres thick and a deep moat on its eastern side. A square tower now crowns the north entrance, though it was added long after the first courtyard. The east wall, about 36 metres long and nine metres high, still survives from the 15th-century fortress. The castle’s history is tied to the Ogilvies’ loyalty to King Charles I. In 1639 Charles made James Ogilvy the first Earl of Airlie, but the family’s support for the Royalists led to its destruction the following year. Parliamentarian troops under the Earl of Argyll burned the castle, an event remembered in the ballad “The Bonnie Hoose o’ Airlie.” The Ogilvies did not rebuild it until 1792–93, when David Ogilvy returned from exile and turned the ruins into a new mansion. Today the house and stables are listed Category B buildings, and the grounds appear in Scotland’s Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. Visitors see the medieval east wall rising beside the rivers, the later mansion incorporated into the old structure, and the stable block that completes the group. The steep drop to the river below and the remains of the moat add to the sense of the site’s past strength.