Qualla: Luffness Castle

Luffness Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Barton, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1256, on crusade with King Louis IX of France, Sir David Lindsay - High Chamberlain of Scotland and one of King Alexander III's regents - lay dying. He made a deathbed promise: if his body could be returned to Scotland, he would endow a religious house at his East Lothian estate. The body came home. The friary was built. Carmelite monks established themselves at Luffness around 1293, and the priory's remnants still survive, overgrown, in the woods beside the castle. Sir David's effigy lies inside the ruin - a knight in mail, his hands folded in stone prayer, seven hundred years after the promise was kept.

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Image: Jim Barton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Luffness Castle: The Lindsay Castle

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA 2.0. The lands around Luffness were originally part of the estates of the Gospatrick Earls of Lothian, holding the title that ran back to Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. In the twelfth century they passed by marriage to the Lindsay family. The Lindsays built the castle in the thirteenth cent...

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Image: Mike Pennington | CC BY-SA 2.0

Luffness Castle: The French Fort

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Barton, CC BY-SA 2.0. In May 1547 the castle was sacked by an English force under Edward Clinton, Lord Clinton, during the war the Scots called the Rough Wooing - Henry VIII's attempt to force the marriage of the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, to the future Edward VI. The English diplomat Ralph Sadler a...

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Image: Jim Barton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Luffness Castle: From Bothwell to Burn

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Barton, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Luffness passed to the Hepburn Earls of Bothwell - the same family from which James Hepburn, Mary Queen of Scots's third husband, came. The Hepburns rebuilt the castle. In the seventeenth century it changed hands again, to the Durham f...

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Image: Jim Barton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Luffness Castle: The Ditch and the Friary

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit alan thomson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The house sits at the north-western angle of a square fortification, delineated by a partially infilled ditch. Nobody is quite certain when the ditch was dug. It may be the outline of the French artillery fort of 1549. It may be the moat of the earlier Lindsay castle. The two pos...

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Image: alan thomson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Luffness Castle: Fly Past

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Barton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Luffness Castle sits at 56.0143 degrees north, 2.8439 degrees west, just south of Aberlady village on the southern shore of Aberlady Bay in East Lothian. The bay opens north into the Firth of Forth. The castle is a T-shaped tower house set in walled grounds, with the partially in...

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Image: Jim Barton | CC BY-SA 2.0