Corgarff Castle

Around 1530 the Elphinstone family built a tower at Corgarff to hold the ground where the Lecht road climbs through the pass between Strathdon and Tomintoul, then leased the stronghold to the Forbes of Towie. That tenancy placed a Forbes household in a building that stood exposed to the family's long-running feud with the Gordons, a rivalry that would shortly turn the tower into a scene of mass killing rather than simple shelter.

In 1571 the feud reached Corgarff directly when Adam Gordon of Auchindoun led a raiding party against the tower and set it alight while Margaret Campbell, Lady Forbes, her children, and members of the household were still inside. Twenty-six people died in the fire, a toll severe enough that the episode probably gave rise to the ballad Edom o Gordon, which carried the memory of the killing long after the details of the feud itself had faded from record.

In May 1607 the castle changed hands again, this time by force, when Alexander Forbes of Towie led companions, including a piper named George McRobie, in breaking down the gate with hammers and battering rams to seize it from Alexander, 4th Lord Elphinstone. Having taken the tower, the Forbes party garrisoned it with men the record brands as "Highland thieves and limmers", turning a private feud into an armed occupation of the pass itself.

The Earl of Mar acquired Corgarff in 1626, bringing the tower under a new landholding that would carry it through the mid-seventeenth-century wars. In 1645 it served as an assembly point for the troops of the Marquis of Montrose during his campaigns for the Royalist cause, a use that shows how the castle's value lay less in comfort than in its command of the routes through the surrounding hills.

Corgarff was burned twice more in the decades that followed, in 1689 and again in 1716, both times by Jacobite supporters during the risings that repeatedly drew the north-east of Scotland into national conflict. The Forbes family resettled the site in 1745, but their renewed Jacobite sympathies cost them the property outright, and the castle was forfeited to the government in the aftermath of the rising.

In 1748 the British government bought the forfeited castle and rebuilt and extended it as a barracks, stationing a detachment of troops there to watch over the military road running from Braemar Castle to Fort George at Inverness. Soldiers held the post into the nineteenth century, with military use continuing as late as 1831, by which point the wider task of policing the Highlands had shifted from suppressing rebellion to enforcing the law on the ground.

After the troops left, the tower took on a quieter role suppressing illegal whisky distilling in the surrounding hills, before passing into private ownership as part of the Delnadamph estate held by the Stockdale family. In 1961 the Stockdales placed the castle into state care and gave ownership to the Lonach Highland and Friendly Society; it is now looked after by Historic Environment Scotland, open to visitors for seasonal periods, and protected as a scheduled monument.