Qualla: Huntingtower Castle

Huntingtower Castle: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian D Osborne, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two towers face each other across a three-metre gap, joined now but once separate, with a wooden bridge stretched between them at battlement height. The idea was simple. If one tower fell, the defenders could flee to the other and pull up the bridge behind them. Standing in the gap today at Huntingtower Castle, five kilometres north-west of Perth, you can still see the raggle where that bridge once met the western wall - and imagine, as the legend insists, a young woman named Dorothea making a desperate leap from one tower to the other to escape her mother's footsteps.

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Image: Brian D Osborne | CC BY-SA 2.0

Huntingtower Castle: Two Towers, One Castle

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original Huntingtower, now the Eastern Tower, was built at least by the fourteenth century as a free-standing gatehouse - three storeys plus a garret. Around the end of the fifteenth century the Ruthven family raised a second L-shaped tower beside it, with a deliberate gap be...

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Image: HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Huntingtower Castle: The Painted Ceiling

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dlsnider, CC0. On the first floor of the Eastern Tower survives one of Scotland's quiet treasures - the earliest substantially complete Scottish Renaissance painted ceiling. Grotesque animals dance along the main beams, including a Green Man peering out from the gloom. Renaissance knotwork patt...

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Image: Dlsnider | CC0

Huntingtower Castle: The Raid of Ruthven

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arthur Bruce, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 22 or 23 August 1582, the fifteen-year-old King James VI walked into a trap at what was then called Ruthven Castle. The 1st Earl of Gowrie and his Protestant associates seized the boy king and held him here, then moved him from place to place for ten months. They wanted to con...

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Image: Arthur Bruce | CC BY-SA 2.0

Huntingtower Castle: The Erasing of a Name

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maciej Lewandowski, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1600, the Gowrie story reached its bleak conclusion. The brothers John and Alexander Ruthven were killed at Gowrie House in Perth by an overwhelming force of the king's armed men, accused - some still say falsely - of trying to kidnap James again. This time the king was not me...

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Image: Maciej Lewandowski | CC BY-SA 2.0

Huntingtower Castle: Lady Greensleeves

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014, CC BY-SA 4.0. The castle's most famous ghost is Lady Greensleeves, identified in local tradition as Dorothea, daughter of the 1st Earl of Gowrie. The story has her in love with a servant who slept in the Eastern Tower, while she lived in the Western. One night her mother climbed the bridge bet...

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Image: HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014 | CC BY-SA 4.0