Spynie Palace

In the 1120s the first recorded bishop of Moray, Gregoir, appears on royal charters, though the early bishopric had no fixed home and its bishops moved between houses at Birnie, Kinneddar and Spynie. King William the Lion granted lands to the Holy Trinity church of Moray in 1172, and in April 1206 Pope Innocent III gave Bishop Bricius de Douglas formal permission to settle permanently at Spynie, a move probably completed by 1208.

Bishop Bricius judged the cathedral at Spynie too vulnerable to attack and too distant from trade, and before his death in 1222 he had written to the Pope requesting a further move to Elgin. His successor, Bishop Andrew of Moray, carried the change through, and on 19 July 1224 the See of Moray transferred to the Church of the Holy Trinity in Elgin. The bishop's fortified residence, however, remained at Spynie, beginning as a wooden hall, chapel and domestic buildings enclosed by a ditched rampart, work later uncovered in excavations between 1986 and 1994.

Stone building began in the 13th century with a chapel lit by coloured glass, and through the 14th century the timber ranges were gradually replaced until a near-square castle building rose within a curtain wall some 7 metres high, its main gate facing south and a corner tower fitted with narrow openings for archers. The earliest surviving reference to the castle itself dates from between 1292 and 1296, compiled for English administrators during Edward I's occupation of Scotland, and the first writ issued at Spynie was recorded in 1343.

In June 1390 Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan — known as the Wolf of Badenoch — burned Elgin Cathedral and is thought to have seized Spynie Castle itself, prompting his brother King Robert III to forbid him from interfering with it that August. After Bishop Alexander Bur died in 1397 the king took the castle into royal hands and, despite this history, appointed the reformed Wolf of Badenoch as its warden, before ordering him on 3 May 1398 to hand the castle and its contents over to the newly elected Bishop William.

Bishop John de Winchester, who held office from 1435 to 1460 and also served as the king's Master of Works on Inverness, Urquhart and Linlithgow, is thought to have moved the main gate to the east wall and fitted it with a portcullis, its fine stonework possibly the work of masons then restoring Elgin Cathedral. The palace's most imposing addition, David's Tower, followed in the later 15th century: begun by Bishop David Stewart between 1462 and 1476 and completed by Bishop William Tulloch by 1482, it rises six storeys over a vaulted basement holding a circular dungeon 5.3 metres across.

During the mid-16th century a walled garden and orchard were laid out south of the castle, a deed signed there in 1556, while a rabbit warren and a doocot (dovecote) followed in 1569. Bishop Patrick Hepburn, the last Roman Catholic bishop at Spynie, installed wide-mouth gun loops and enlarged windows, sheltered his relative Bothwell there in 1567 after Carberry Hill, and held the English agent Christopher Rokeby prisoner for eighteen months from 1566. In 1587 King James VI granted the castle to Alexander Lindsay, 1st Lord Spynie, who held it until 1605.

The castle withstood two 17th-century sieges: Bishop John Guthrie surrendered it to Covenanter forces under Colonel Robert Monro on 16 July 1640 and was later imprisoned in Aberdeen, and in 1645 the Marquis of Huntly besieged the Covenanter-held castle until it was relieved by John Middleton. Ownership passed back to the church in 1662, then decayed after 1689 when its last occupant, Bishop William Hay, was expelled for refusing an oath of allegiance; the ruins were later stabilised in the 1970s and opened to the public by Historic Scotland in 1994.