Traquair House

From the twelfth century onward Traquair served as a hunting seat for Scottish kings amid dense Border forest, with Alexander I recorded as the first monarch to stay and hunt there. No part of the building standing today can be dated with certainty before the fifteenth century, though the site's long royal association gave it an early claim to prominence in the Tweed valley, then a remote and thickly wooded frontier.

Alexander III's death in 1286 shattered the uneasy peace of the Borders and pulled Traquair into the front line of Anglo-Scottish conflict, as the house became a link in the chain of strongholds guarding the Tweed valley against English incursion. Over the following two centuries ownership passed repeatedly between English and Scottish control, a pattern reflecting the volatility of the frontier the house occupied.

In the 1460s James III granted the estate to Dr William Rogers, a musician and royal favourite, who held it for some nine years before selling it in 1478, for a modest sum, to the Earl of Buchan. The Earl passed Traquair to his illegitimate son James Stuart in 1491, who obtained letters of legitimation and married the Rutherford heiress, bringing the Roxburghshire estates of Rutherford and Wells into the family before he was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513.

James Stuart's descendants tied Traquair into the wider web of Border nobility: his daughter Jane Stewart's daughter Janet, born to the Earl of Angus, married Patrick Ruthven, 3rd Lord Ruthven, and the house remained the family seat of the Earls of Traquair for four centuries afterward, passing through successive lairds who reshaped its interiors while leaving its outward form largely untouched.

Mary, Queen of Scots stayed at Traquair in August 1566, and her presence is still marked by a room bearing her name, holding relics said to include her rosary, crucifix and purse; James VI followed in March 1602. Over a century later, in 1738, the fifth Earl Charles Stuart installed the Bear Gates at the entrance to the grounds, with the stone bears added in 1745; the gates were sealed in 1796 on the Countess's death, and the seventh Earl vowed they would remain shut.

In 1875 Traquair passed, via the female line, to Henry Constable Maxwell, a cousin of the Stuarts, carrying the estate beyond the direct male succession while keeping it within the wider family. The National Portrait Gallery later held a 1992 portrait of Catherine Maxwell Stuart, 21st Lady of Traquair, marking the house's continuing line of stewardship into the modern era.

The house's own brewery was revived in 1965 by Peter Maxwell Stuart, the 20th Laird, using eighteenth-century domestic brewing equipment and oak fermenting tuns over 200 years old; five years later, in 1970, the house provided the setting for the horror film Tam-Lin, starring Ava Gardner.