Qualla: Yester Castle

Yester Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Helspence, CC BY-SA 4.0. The thirteenth-century chronicler Walter Bower wrote that Yester Castle's cellars were wrought by witchcraft. Old tales said the underground vault - the Goblin Ha' - had been raised by Sir Hugo de Giffard, lord of Yester, a man known across medieval Scotland as a warlock and necromancer. Hugo, the legend ran, had made a pact with the Devil that gave him an army of hobgoblins to do his bidding. Those hobgoblins, the stories said, built his castle. The pact is folklore. The vault is real. It is still there, intact beneath the East Lothian woods, six hundred years after the castle above it crumbled.

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Image: Helspence | CC BY-SA 4.0

Yester Castle: The Wizard of Yester

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Wangi assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5. The barony of Yester was granted in the twelfth century by King William the Lion to Hugo de Giffard, a Norman immigrant placed in East Lothian to help anglicise the kingdom. The original stone keep was built before 1267, and tradition attributes it to the famous Sir Hugo - the fo...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Wangi assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY 2.5

Yester Castle: The Goblin Ha'

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Beneath the surface ruins of Yester Castle survives the Goblin Hall itself - a Gothic-vaulted underground chamber some thirteen metres long, ribbed with the kind of pointed stone arches you would expect in a small abbey rather than buried under a hilltop. It is the only complete ...

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Image: M J Richardson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Yester Castle: The Colstoun Pear

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Sir Hugo had a daughter, Margaret, who married into the Broun of Colstoun family. According to the legend, Hugo gave her a hand-picked pear as a wedding gift, telling her that if anything happened to the fruit, disaster would follow for her descendants. The pear was put in a silv...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Yester Castle: Falkirk, Flodden, the Rough Wooing

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit L. Connell, Public domain. Beyond the sorcery, Yester accumulated the routine catastrophes of a Lowland Scottish castle. In 1298 men from the Yester garrison fought at the Battle of Falkirk against Edward I, and Yester briefly passed to the English crown. In 1357 the Giffard male line died out and the cast...

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Image: L. Connell | Public domain