Craigmillar Castle

The Preston family received lands at Craigmillar in the fourteenth century, and either Simon Preston or Sir George Preston began the tower house that forms the castle's core. It was in place by 1425. A fifteenth-century courtyard wall, probably built by Sir William Preston, enclosed the tower, and an outer courtyard followed in the early sixteenth century. These successive defences produced the layered form visible today.

English troops burned Craigmillar in 1544 during the Rough Wooing, after which Sir Simon Preston repaired it and remodelled domestic ranges. Mary, Queen of Scots stayed from 20 November to 7 December 1566 while recovering from illness. During that stay, leading nobles made the Craigmillar Bond, a plan to remove Lord Darnley; Mary appears to have been unhappy with Darnley but probably unaware of a plot to kill him.

Sir John Gilmour bought the castle in 1660 and rebuilt the west range as modern accommodation, but the family later moved to Inch House and Craigmillar fell into ruin. It entered state care in 1946 and is maintained by Historic Environment Scotland. The castle is a scheduled monument, and its grounds are included in the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.

The scheduling, made on 21 October 1994, treats the castle and its designed landscape as one monument and calls Craigmillar arguably the best surviving example of a medieval castle in Scotland — instructively complete, built to fifteenth and sixteenth-century principles of fortification, and set within substantial designed grounds. The scheduled area measures a maximum of 1,020 metres south-west to north-east by 830 metres north-west to south-east.

The core is the late fourteenth-century L-shaped tower house raised for the Prestons, who held the land from 1374 to 1660. Its original entrance lay in the re-entrant angle of the jamb, facing west and protected by a shelving pitfall in the rocky crags. Storage occupied the lower floor and its entresol, the great hall the first floor of the main block, fitted with a late fifteenth-century fireplace; the kitchen sat in the jamb beside the hall and was later turned into a bedroom.

The massive enceinte of 1427 sits flush with the tower on the south and encloses the present inner courtyard, with rounded towers at each corner and a parapet walk along the north, east and part of the south. Its north-east tower is one of the earliest artillery batteries in Scotland. Domestic ranges were built against the east wall after Hertford's army burned the castle in 1544, and against the west wall in 1661, when the new owner Sir John Gilmour added his renaissance house to complete the courtyard buildings.

The outer curtain or precinct wall went up soon after 1544, furnished with gunloops but no battlements. Inside the precinct stands a chapel of the late fifteenth century, along with the usual farmyard offices, one of which is said to have served later as a Presbyterian meeting place. South of the castle a field holds a pond cut in the shape of a letter P, for Preston — the most visible survival of the medieval garden, around which more formal gardens and later an elaborate designed landscape of parkland and coppiced woodland were laid out.