Keith Marischal a lost castle and renaissance palace
Keith Marischal House in East Lothian, not too far south of Edinburgh, is in some ways a wonderful metaphor for modern Scotland. A baronial mass of gables, turrets and chimneys, an expression in stone of the kilts-and- bapipes Walter Scott-ery brand Scotland, but one currently being painstakingly renovated, repaired and, where appropriate, modernised by its owners, so it will not only be fit for the 21st century, but also still standing for centuries to come. Yet behind the facade, and below the driveway, lie the most tantalising story of an older and lost Scotland.
In the popular imagination Scottish history is punctuated by a few well-played greatest hits. First there’s the blue-painted Caledonii fighting the Romans, then we skip a bit until all that Braveheart business with William Wallace, then Robert the Bruce follows as the popular sequel, then we can skip another bit before we get to Mary Queen of Scots getting her head chopped off, then past the Jacobites being blown apart by Hanoverian cannons, before we get to dancing round swords at Balmoral and then the vague, messy, complicated stuff of modern history. Besides this there will be an imprecise idea of muddy-looking clansmen being violent to each other and maybe something about Robert Burns or Macbeth.
Yet there was a magnificent part that tends to be forgotten, a brief interlude after the worst of the wars with England and before the grim, dour austerity of covenanted Scotland. This is the glorious period of renaissance Scotland, the time of six Jameses and a Mary, a wonderful flowering of literature, architecture and national self-confidence. Most attention towards this period is on the unlucky fates of the monarchs, either killed by the English or while fighting the English (James II, James IV, Mary and, in a way, James V) or killed by the unruly and overpower Scottish nobility (James I, James III). Only James VI died of natural causes (although there is some debate about that), although he was safely away down in England, having been made king there as well in 1603.
At Drum the old medieval tower stands separate to the 1619 range and this may have been the case with Keith Marischal
Most depictions of this period in the media tend towards the grim, hairy, unkempt and vicious men prowling around cold and bare-stone castles, as if the comb, plaster and interior decoration were just something that happened to other nations. The recent Mary
