Noltland Castle

Noltland Castle stands near Pierowall on Westray in the Orkney Islands. It dates mainly to the later sixteenth century and was never fully completed, which is unusual for a building of this ambition. An unfinished sixteenth-century castle is rare, and the reason it stopped is bound up with what happened to the man who started it.

In 1560 Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, granted the lands of Noltland to his brother-in-law Gilbert Balfour, who built the castle. Balfour was Master of the Royal Household to Mary, Queen of Scots, and was involved in the plot to kill her husband Lord Darnley. Balfour's position at court is what made the grant possible and what eventually made the castle a liability. He kept backing her after her deposition and exile, and it cost him the castle. Robert Stewart, 1st Earl of Orkney, an opponent of the queen's supporters, seized Noltland, and was forced to hand it back to Balfour in the early 1570s. Balfour was executed in Sweden in 1576.

Ownership then passed to Andrew Balfour of Montquhanie. Patrick Stewart, 2nd Earl of Orkney, seized the castle in 1598, but by 1606 it had been restored to the Balfours, who sold it to Sir John Arnot, Provost of Edinburgh and later Sheriff of Orkney. The castle changed hands four times in fifty years without a single siege being recorded. During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in 1650, Royalist officers occupied the castle after their defeat at the Battle of Carbisdale. Local Covenanters captured it and burned it, which is how a building that had survived a century of seizures finally came down.

It is built on the Z-plan — a rectangular main block with towers at opposite corners — with a courtyard added to the south in the seventeenth century. The plan was designed to let defenders cover every face of the building. Z-plan castles were built across Scotland in this period, but few of them were armed to this extent. What marks Noltland out is the sheer quantity of shot holes, unusual for its period, and a large staircase that has been compared to the stair at Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire. It is a house built by a man who expected to be attacked.

The castle was described as a ruin by 1881 and was given into state care by the Balfour family in 1911. It is now maintained by Historic Environment Scotland and protected as a scheduled monument. A hundred and thirty years passed between the burning and the formal recognition that anything was worth saving.