Dance Neidpath Castle 4890

On a high bank above the River Tweed, not far from Peebles, is Neidpath Castle, once the stronghold of the Lowland Frasers, the Norman ancestors of the Highland Frasers of Lovat and the Frasers of Philorth.

Neidpath Castle is roofed but uninhabited. It consists of two connected tower-houses which rise to five stories and in some places the walls are eleven feet thick. The ancient castle, supposedly erected in the late 13th century, was the property of Sir Simon Fraser, an adherent of both Sir William Wallace and Robert I. At the battle of Roslin Moor in 1302 he was reputed to have defeated the English three times in one day, certainly a remarkable feat for both sides. In 1306 he was captured by the English at the battle of Methven, where Robert Bruce was defeated shortly before his coronation, and was taken to London. There he suffered death by hanging, drawing, and quartering in the same barbaric manner as had Wallace a year earlier. Sir Simon’s eldest daughter and heiress married a Hay of Yester, whose descendents would become the Earls and Marquesses of Tweeddale. The castle, rather as it appears today, was built by Sir William Hay in the 15th century on the ruins of the older castle. Further additions were made in the 17th century.

In 1650 the twenty-four year old John Hay, Lord Yester, the future Earl and first Marquess of Tweeddale, whose political career swung from side to side, held Neidpath Castle for Charles I during a battering and prolonged attack by Cromwell’s artillery.

The castle and estate were purchased in 1686 by William Douglas, 1st Duke of Queensberry, for his second son, the Earl of March. When Charles, 3rd Duke of Queensberry, died in 1778 he was succeeded by his cousin WIlliam, 3rd Earl of March. This fourth duke, better known as “Old Q”, was a man of extravagant tastes and was a notorious London companion of the Prince of Wales, later Prince Regent and George IV. The duke died unmarried in 1810, but in 1795, burdened with gambling debts and needful of prividing a dowry for Maria Pagniani, whom he supposed to be his daughter and was to marry the Earl of Yarmouth, caused the extensive woods that lay about both Drumlanrig Castle and Neidpath Castle to be cut down and sold.

Robert Burns, who detested the fourth duke, was infuriated by this devastation and immediately wrote “Verses on the Destruction of the Woods near Drumlanrig” in which he referred to “Old Q” as a “reptile” that “wears a ducal crown”. The duke did not fare much better at the pen of William Wordsworth who, after viewing the scene in 1803, called him “Degenerate Douglas” who had acted:

To level with the dust a noble horde,
  A brotherhood of venerable Trees.

Unfortunate though the deforestation may have been, providing as it did an opportunity for poetic outrage, the trees were, after all, ducal.