Hermitage Castle

Around 1240 Nicholas de Soulis raised the first stronghold in the valley of the Hermitage Water, a timber motte and bailey (an earthen mound with a fortified enclosure) built in the Norman style then common along the border. The de Soulis family held it for roughly eighty years, until William de Soulis, a descendant, was accused of plotting against King Robert I and forfeited the estate around 1320 amid suspicions of witchcraft.

In 1338 the castle's English occupant, Sir Ralph de Neville, was besieged by Sir William Douglas, the Knight of Liddesdale, known as the Flower of Chivalry for his prowess as a soldier rather than any romantic gallantry. Once in possession, Douglas used the castle to imprison and starve to death Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie, a rival for royal favour, an act that darkened the fortress's reputation for generations to come.

After the Battle of Neville's Cross the castle passed briefly into English hands under William Dacre, 2nd Baron Dacre, before William Douglas, 1st Earl of Douglas, secured it following the killing of the Knight of Liddesdale by a kinsman. It was this Earl who oversaw construction of most of the stone castle that survives today, work possibly guided by John Lewin, master mason of Durham Cathedral. The Black Douglases held Hermitage until 1455, when the ninth Earl's forfeiture passed their lands to the rival Red Douglas line.

In 1492 the Earl of Angus, suspected by James IV of dealing too closely with England, surrendered Liddesdale and Hermitage to the Crown, which granted them to Patrick Hepburn, 1st Earl of Bothwell. The Hepburns held the castle through the sixteenth century; in 1591 Bothwell's nephew Francis Stewart, keeper of Hermitage, was arrested over his supposed involvement in the North Berwick witch trials, and after a brief pardon was attainted again in 1593, returning the castle once more to the Crown.

In October 1566, weeks after giving birth to the future James VI, Mary, Queen of Scots rode from Jedburgh to Hermitage to visit James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who lay wounded there after a violent clash with the border reiver John Elliot of Park. The journey, undertaken at speed across dangerous country, later fed suspicion of the pair's relationship; Bothwell married Mary the following year, shortly after the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley.

In 1594 James VI granted the forfeited castle to Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, a noted border reiver and Warden of the West March who had led the raid on Carlisle Castle to free the prisoner Kinmont Willie Armstrong. Hermitage lost its military purpose after the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and fell into decay, standing as a ruin by the early eighteenth century; the fifth Duke of Buccleuch carried out repairs in 1820 to stabilise the remains.

The Scott family retained ownership until 1930, when Hermitage Castle passed into the care of the nation and later became the responsibility of Historic Environment Scotland. It is now protected as a scheduled monument and opens to visitors between April and October each year, its walls still dominating the lonely valley once known, in local memory, as the guardhouse of the bloodiest valley in Britain.