Qualla: Falkland Palace

Falkland Palace: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mary, Queen of Scots scandalised her courtiers at Falkland by wearing men's breeches to play tennis. The court she played on is still there - the oldest real tennis court in the world still in use - and on summer afternoons you can hear the thwack of a ball striking the same plastered walls she knew. Falkland Palace was the Stewart kings' favourite escape, a place for falconry, boar hunts, and the slow theatrics of court life under the Lomond Hills. Mary loved it best of all.

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Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Falkland Palace: Before the Palace

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dorn Carran, CC BY-SA 4.0. There has been something on this site since the late twelfth century, when a royal hunting lodge stood here. By the thirteenth, the lodge had grown into a castle held by the Earls of Fife of Clan MacDuff. The slight rise it sits on offered a defensible vantage over the surroundin...

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Image: Dorn Carran | CC BY-SA 4.0

Falkland Palace: The Renaissance Comes to Fife

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horacio Gomes, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between 1497 and 1541, James IV and James V transformed the old castle into one of the earliest French Renaissance buildings in Britain. James IV brought imported oranges to Falkland in April 1497, and a Pittenweem man delivered a live seal to him in 1502. The masons John Brownhi...

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Image: Horacio Gomes | CC BY-SA 3.0

Falkland Palace: The Death of James V

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stanley Howe, CC BY-SA 2.0. James V died at Falkland in December 1542, from a sickness brought on by grief. His army had just been broken at Solway Moss, and word arrived that his wife had borne him a daughter rather than the male heir he wanted - the infant who would become Mary, Queen of Scots. His body l...

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Image: Stanley Howe | CC BY-SA 2.0

Falkland Palace: Mary's Palace

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Johnston, CC BY-SA 2.0. Mary held her Maundy Thursday ceremony at Falkland in March 1562, washing the feet of nineteen young women - the count matching her age. She came back for Easter in 1563 and again in 1564. It was at Falkland that James Hamilton, 3rd Earl of Arran, arrived in 1562 with the lurid c...

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Image: Simon Johnston | CC BY-SA 2.0

Falkland Palace: Ruin and Rescue

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex Bishop, CC BY-SA 2.0. Charles II was the last reigning monarch to stay at Falkland, in July 1650. A fire during Cromwell's occupation in the 1650s gutted much of the palace, and for two centuries it stood as a romantic ruin. Then in 1887 John, 3rd Marquis of Bute, bought the estate and spent twenty ye...

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Image: Alex Bishop | CC BY-SA 2.0