Brechin Castle

Brechin Castle stands on the edge of Brechin in Angus, a solid grey stone house built in the 13th century and reshaped in the early 18th century by Alexander Edward for James Maule, 4th Earl of Panmure. The grounds have belonged to the Ramsay family since the 12th century and now form part of Scotland’s Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. The front of the castle was given a Georgian look in the 1780s by William Ramsay Maule after he took his mother’s family name. The Earl of Dalhousie, chief of Clan Ramsay, has lived here since the family seat moved from Dalhousie Castle early in the 20th century. In September 1593 Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar, received her brother-in-law the Earl of Huntly at Brechin Castle. The castle has sheltered kings and poets. King James stopped here in 1617 on his return from England, and John Taylor the Water Poet visited in the same period. The countess had inventories made of the furnishings in 1611 and 1622. The estate once stretched to 150,000 acres but now covers 55,000 acres, mostly farmland and woodland. A 1990s addition is Brechin Castle Centre, a country park with a café, garden centre and children’s play areas. In 2022 the royal cortège carrying Queen Elizabeth II paused here for 45 minutes to rest on its way from Balmoral to Edinburgh. Inside the house eight reception rooms and sixteen bedrooms remain from the early 18th-century remodelling. The oldest visible part is the kitchen block dated 1703, though major work in 1711 gave the castle its present shape. Battlemented walls were added in the mid-1800s, the building was remodelled in 1854 and a tower was built in 1863. Formal gardens laid out in the early 1700s lead into parkland where guest lodges stand among fields and forests.