Glamis Castle

Glamis Castle

A fairytale in pink stone

Glamis Castle — its name is said "Glahms" — rises from the green farmland of Angus, in eastern Scotland, at the end of a long, straight avenue. With its forest of turrets, pointed roofs and warm pinkish stone, it looks exactly like a castle from a storybook. Yet behind the fairytale appearance lies a very real history stretching back more than six hundred years, along with some of the most famous legends in all of Scotland.

Six hundred years of one family

Glamis has been the home of a single family — the Lyons, later the Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne — since the fourteenth century, when the lands were granted to Sir John Lyon in 1372 by King Robert II. An earlier royal hunting lodge stood on the spot, but the dramatic castle we see today took shape mostly in the seventeenth century, when the third Earl of Strathmore rebuilt and extended it into the grand, turreted château that survives. For all its size, Glamis has remained a family home through the centuries, rather than a ruin or a museum.

A royal childhood

In modern times Glamis is best loved for its royal connections. It was the childhood home of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who in 1923 married the future King George VI and became, in time, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Her younger daughter, Princess Margaret, was born at Glamis in 1930 — the first member of the royal family to be born in Scotland for more than three hundred years. The castle's link to a much-loved queen has kept it firmly in the public eye.

Macbeth and the legends

Glamis is woven into one of the most famous plays ever written. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the doomed hero is the "Thane of Glamis," and the play has forever tied the castle to murder and ambition. It is worth remembering, though, that Shakespeare's drama is fiction: the real King Macbeth lived in the eleventh century, long before the present castle was built, so the connection is a literary legend rather than true history.

The castle is also famous for its ghost stories, which visitors have told for generations. According to legend, a hidden room somewhere in the thick walls once concealed a secret member of the family, the so-called "Monster of Glamis." Another tale tells of "Earl Beardie," a wicked nobleman said to be condemned to play cards with the Devil forever in a sealed chamber. These stories are folklore, not fact — but they have helped make Glamis one of the most famously haunted castles in Britain, which is part of its charm.

Visiting today

Glamis is still a lived-in family home, and visitors can tour its grand rooms, admire its art and furniture, and wander its gardens and parkland. Around every corner there is a story — of kings and queens, of a future Queen Mother growing up among the turrets, of Shakespeare's tragedy and of whispered ghosts. Few castles manage to be quite so beautiful, so historic and so wonderfully mysterious, all at once.