Duffus Castle

In 1130 Oengus, Mormaer of Moray, led a rebellion against David I, King of Scots, and was defeated and killed in the fighting that followed. David responded by installing Freskin, a nobleman probably of Flemish origin, as his chief agent in Moray, granting him lands in the region as a reward for loyalty and a means of securing royal control over a rebellious province.

Around 1140 Freskin raised a great earthwork and timber motte-and-bailey castle on boggy ground in the Laich of Moray. The motte was a steep-sided mound surrounded by a wide ditch, topped with timber buildings and a wooden palisade and reached by steps cut into its slope; the lower bailey held the working buildings needed to sustain the household. The castle was already standing when the king visited in 1151, and by the thirteenth century Freskin's descendants were calling themselves 'de Moravia', of Moray, having become one of the most powerful families in the north.

The castle may have been destroyed in 1297 during the First War of Scottish Independence, and it is possible that it suffered further damage during Robert the Bruce's campaign through Moray in 1306, though the record of these episodes is uncertain rather than confirmed in detail.

In 1270 the castle passed by marriage into the hands of Sir Reginald le Chen, who wed the heiress Mary de Moravia, a descendant of Freskin. In 1305 the younger Reginald le Chen received a grant from Edward I of England of 200 oaks from the royal forests of Longmorn and Darnaway to build his 'manor of Dufhous', timber likely intended for scaffolding, flooring and roofing as the family undertook a substantial rebuilding of the site in stone.

The stone castle that resulted, dating from the early fourteenth century, replaced the old timber structure with a two-storey rectangular tower on the motte, its first floor holding the lord's hall, latrine and bed chambers, its ground floor used for storage and defended by a single entrance fitted with a portcullis. A curtain wall enclosed the bailey, and doors from the tower's upper floor opened onto its walkway; putlog holes in the wall show where further buildings once stood against it.

The tower's foundation on the old motte proved unstable, and at some unknown date serious subsidence set in; evidence of repair work shows the family tried to shore it up before part of the tower slid bodily down the mound, a collapse it never fully recovered from. A newer hall building on the north side, likely built by the Sutherland family, took over as the main residence, housing a kitchen, great hall and principal bedchamber, and was itself altered repeatedly over the following generations.

On the death of Reginald le Chen in 1345, Duffus passed to his daughter Mariot, who had married Nicholas, second son of Kenneth de Moravia, 4th Earl of Sutherland — a family itself descended from Freskin. The Sutherlands held the castle for the rest of its working life; in 1689 John Graham, 1st Viscount of Dundee, stayed there as a guest of Lord Duffus shortly before the Battle of Killiecrankie, one of the last notable visitors before the 2nd Lord Duffus died in 1705 and the castle, by then unfit to live in, was abandoned.