Glamis Castle

Long before any castle stood on the site, the vicinity of Glamis already carried traces of prehistoric activity, and the intricately carved Eassie Stone, a Pictish symbol stone, was recovered from a creek bed at the neighbouring village of Eassie. In 1034 the site is recorded as the location of a royal hunting lodge, where King Malcolm II was mortally wounded nearby and brought to die, giving Glamis a claim to royal association centuries before the Lyon family ever arrived.

By 1372 a castle had been built at Glamis, and in that year Robert II granted it to Sir John Lyon, Thane of Glamis, who had married the king's daughter. The Lyon family, later Bowes-Lyon, has held the estate ever since. In the early fifteenth century the building was reconstructed as an L-plan tower house, and in 1445 the title Lord Glamis was created for Sir Patrick Lyon, grandson of Sir John, fixing the family's status among the Scottish nobility.

In December 1528 Janet Douglas, wife of John Lyon, 6th Lord Glamis, was accused of treason for bringing supporters of the Earl of Angus to Edinburgh during James V's feud with the Douglas family. After her husband's death that September she was further charged with poisoning him, and the accusations escalated into a charge of witchcraft; she was burned at the stake in Edinburgh on 17 July 1537, and James V seized the castle for the crown before Janet's family recovered it in 1543.

In 1606 Patrick Lyon, 9th Lord Glamis, was created Earl of Kinghorne and began major building works, commemorated by an inscription on the central tower naming him and his wife, Dame Anna Murray. The English architect Inigo Jones has traditionally been credited with the redesign, though Historic Scotland regards the King's Master Mason William Schaw as more likely, given the strongly Scottish character of the resulting architecture. Soldiers were later garrisoned at the castle during the Commonwealth period.

In 1670 Patrick Lyon, 3rd Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, returned to Glamis and found it uninhabitable after the disruption of the Commonwealth years; restoration continued until 1689 and included the creation of a major Baroque garden. On 9 May 1728, following a funeral in Forfar, the 6th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne was accidentally killed by James Carnegie of Finhaven, who had drawn his sword against another man and run the Earl through as he stepped in to separate them; the resulting trial, defended by Robert Dundas of Arniston, returned a Not Guilty verdict and helped establish the right of Scottish juries to judge intent as well as fact.

In 1767 John Lyon, 9th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, married Mary Eleanor Bowes, heiress to a coal-mining fortune, and in the 1770s he reworked the grounds in a fashionable formal style, while the south-west wing was later rebuilt after an early nineteenth-century fire. In the 1920s a large fireplace bearing the Blakiston coat of arms was brought from the family's Gibside estate near Gateshead and installed in the castle's Billiard Room.

In 1900 Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, was born the youngest daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and spent much of her childhood at Glamis. During the First World War the castle served as a military hospital, and on 16 September 1916 a serious fire broke out; Elizabeth was particularly credited with helping organise the rescue of the castle's contents. She married Prince Albert, Duke of York, in 1923, and their second daughter, Princess Margaret, was born at Glamis in 1930. Since 1987 an illustration of the castle has appeared on the reverse of Royal Bank of Scotland ten-pound notes, and Glamis remains the family seat, currently home to Simon Bowes-Lyon, 19th Earl, who succeeded in 2016.