10 Manor Houses In Scotland Built Before 1700 — What They Actually Look Like Inside

From the road, it looks like a fortress, Pinkhall. A tower stacked up like a wedding cake. Narrow windows, built by someone who expected trouble. Now go through the door. The ceilings are white plaster, moulded into roses and thistles, and the faces of long dead kings. There's a fireplace. You could almost stand inside. A stair twists up through the thickness of the wall. And somewhere above you, a floorboard creaks, the way it has since 1626. Scotland built its manor houses to look hard. The outside was for enemies. The inside was for the family, and that's where the truth is. Ten of them. All standing before seventeen hundred, one hides a hole in the wall for listening to guests. One kept every room exactly as it was the day its owner died. And number one has barely changed in four hundred years. Quick note before we go in. In Scotland, a manor house rarely looked like an English one. It was usually a tower, the laird's home stacked upward, built to hold off a raiding party. Every house here was standing before 1700, and every one you can still walk inside. Where later owners changed a room, I'll tell you. We'll start with the politest front door on the list. Behind it, a lad came home to die on Christmas Day, ten. Leith Hall, Aberdeenshire. Out past Huntly, in farm country where the roads go narrow and the fields roll on for miles, Leith Hall doesn't shout. From the drive, it looks almost French. Pale harled walls, little turrets perched on the corners like they're keeping an eye on the weather. You'd be forgiven for thinking it was a tidy Georgian country house and driving straight past. Don't. It started around one thousand, six hundred and fifty as a tower house, three stories and an attic, raised by a man named James Leath. Over the next three centuries, the family kept building around it, wing by wing, until the old tower became one corner of a courtyard. The same bloodline lived here, Leaths, and then Leath Hayes for close to three hundred years, until the house was given to the National Trust for Scotland in nineteen forty-five. After serving as a hospital in wartime, even the grounds have a dark streak. Out in the parkland stands an old sycamore, known locally as the Jewel Tree. Jewel comes from an old word for grief, and trees like it were used by Scottish barons for hangings. Treat the tree's exact story as local tradition. But the name tells you what kind of power a laird once held here. Now step inside. The rooms are crowded in the best possible way. Portraits climbing the walls, souvenirs from a long line of soldiers, one of whom fought at Balaklava. Furniture that was clearly sat on, eaten off, argued around. It feels less like a museum and more like a home whose owners just stepped out into the garden. And then there's the staircase. In December 1763, the laird John Leith rode into Aberdeen. In a tavern on the castle gate, a quarrel broke out. The family's version says the other man, James Abernethy of Mayan. Accused him of selling bad grain, words turned to violence. And out on the street, a pistol ball went into John Leet's head. He didn't die there. They carried him home to this house, and he lingered for three days. He died, on Christmas Day. Here's where I put on my careful voice. For generations, people staying at Leath Hall have claimed to see a man on the stairs with a dirty bandage wrapped around his head. One writer who rented the house in the 1960s said she woke to find him standing at the end of her bed. That's a ghost story, and I'm labeling it as one. The shooting is history. The Christmas he died upstairs is history, so walk the stairs, ordinary stone. Ordinary banister. A house that looks polite from the drive, and inside, a family that lost its laird at Christmas, and never quite let him go. Number nine looks like the 16th century from the lawn. Open the front door, though, and you've jumped forward 300 years. Nine, Lauriston Castle, Edinburgh. On the north west edge of Edinburgh, past the bungalows of Davidson's mains, there's a park that slopes gently down toward the Firth of Forth. At the top of it stands a proper tower, round stair turret, little corner turrets, gun loops. It was built around 1590 by Sir Archibald Napier of Murchiston. Father of John Napier, the man who gave the world logarithms. If you ever pressed the log button on a school calculator, you've met his family's work. The list of owners reads like a who's who. In 1683, the estate was bought by William Law. An Edinburgh goldsmith, his son was John Law. The gambler turned economist, who ended up running the finances of France, and blew up the Mississippi bubble. One of the great financial crashes in history, the laws held Loristan for well over a century. In 1827, Sir Walter Scott came to inspect the new building work. And he praised the owner in his journal for keeping the old tower instead of tearing it down. So you'd expect walking through the door to step into the one thousand, five hundred and ninety s. You don't. Close the door behind you. You're in nineteen ten. In 1902, Loriston was bought by William Reid, who ran Morrison and Company, one of Scotland's top cabinet makers. He and his wife Margaret put in modern plumbing and electric light. And then they filled every room with the things they loved, blue Johnstone. Sheffield plate, Italian furniture. Woolen mosaics, Eastern rugs on every floor. William died in 1919. Margaret lived on until 1926. And as the two of them had agreed, the castle, the grounds, and everything inside went to the nation. On one condition, it had to stay the way they'd left it. It has. Her piano is still there with her music on it. There's a newspaper reporting the sinking of the Titanic. There's an Edwardian bathroom that, in its day, was the height of luxury. Partly because Missus Reed's brother was in the plumbing trade. You go round on a guided tour today, through the dining room, the drawing room. The study and the library. And it genuinely feels like the reeds have only popped out. Think about what that means. Most of the houses on this list are layered, every century painting over the one before. Loristan simply stopped. Two people decided the clock would halt when the last of them was gone, and it did. The outside says Napier, the inside says Reed. Both are telling the truth. Number eight was built by the king's own mason, and from the road, it's the chimneys that give the game away. Eight, Winton Castle, East Lothian. Between Tronent and Penkaitland, there's a house. Your spot bites roofline before anything else. The chimneys are twisted, solid stone carved into spirals like sticks of barley sugar rising off the roof. Nobody else in Scotland was doing that. That was William Wallace. Not that William Wallace. This one was Master Mason to King James the Sixth, a man who worked on Edinburgh Castle. Linlithgo Palace, and George Heriot's Hospital, he wasn't starting from nothing. A seat and tower had stood here since around 1480. Then, in 1544, during the war, Henry VIII waged to force a marriage between his son and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, a war people later called the Rough Wooing. English troops burned it. For decades, it sat as a ruin. Between 1620 and 1627, George Seton, third Earl of Winton, paid Wallace to turn the wreck into a Renaissance palace. Why the hurry to make it beautiful? Because royalty was on the way. Charles the First came north in 1633 to be crowned in Scotland. And Wintem was dressed to impress. Years later, his son Charles II came through these doors as well. Go in, and the first thing you do is look up. The plaster ceilings at Winton are some of the most elaborate in the country. Deep, heavy, crowded with detail. Made to convince a king, he'd arrived somewhere worthy of him. There's still a room called the King Charles Room, and the old castle hasn't vanished either. Down in the bones of the house, there's a vaulted basement and an old stair turret, left over from the tower the English burned. The Setons didn't get to keep it. In 1715, the fifth earl backed the Jacobites and lost everything. Thirty years later, in September 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie's army requisitioned Winterton to quarter its troops. After that, it passed through the Hamilton Nisbets, to the Ogilvie family, who have lived here since the one thousand, nine hundred and twenty's. They still do. Sir Francis Ogilvie and his family live under that roof. To pay for it, they open the house for weddings and events. He once said they planned to install ornate iron radiators, then realised nobody looks at the radiators when there are Van Dykes on the walls. That's the bargain, a house burned by one king's army, rebuilt for another king's visit, and now home to a family who have to make a 400-year-old ceiling pay its own way. Number seven was burnt too, only this time. The fire took the family's entire memory with it. Seven, Brodie Castle, Moray, between Forres and Nen, on flat green lands near the Moray Firth, stands a Z-plan tower house. Two towers at opposite corners of a central block, so defenders could cover every wall with a single glance. It was finished in 1567. The same year, Mary Queen of Scots was forced off her throne. Rose-tinted stone. Corbel battlements, the full Scottish defensive kit. The Brodie say they've held this land since around 1160. A gift from King Malcolm the Fourth. They can't prove it on paper. And the reason they can't, is the whole story of this house. In 1645, Scotland was tearing itself apart in a religious civil war. Alexander Brodie of Brodie was a Covenanter on the Presbyterian side. That spring, the Royalists crushed the Covenanters at the Battle of Aldern, just a few miles down the road. Soon after, Lord Lewis Gordon, a young Royalist with a reputation for recklessness, rode to Brodie and set it on fire. Charters, deeds, letters—centuries of the family's paperwork went up in smoke. Everything that could have told us exactly how old the Brodies were, the towers survived. The family rebuilt. Inside, head straight for the dining room and look up. The ceiling is 17th-century plasterwork. So dense and so heavy that visitors walk in and simply stop. Read it as a message. We got burned. We're still here. This is what we can afford now. Later in the 1820s, the architect William Burn added a big Victorian wing. So you cross whole centuries just by walking through a doorway. The library holds more than six thousand books. A family whose archive was burned built itself a new memory, one shelf at a time. And the Brodie stayed. The National Trust for Scotland took over in 1980. But Ninian Brodie of Brodie went on living in the castle. He was the last of the family to do so, and he died in 2003. Outside there's a carved Pictish stone in the grounds, and every spring the lawns turn yellow with a national collection of daffodils. Inside there's a ceiling built by a family that had just watched its history burn. Locals will add that the blasted heath where Macbeth met the three witches lies somewhere close by. That one belongs to Shakespeare and legend, not the record. We're halfway. So far, every secret has been something a family chose to show you. Number six keeps something a queen never chose to show anyone, her own face. After death, six Lennoxlove House, East Lothian. A mile south of Hadlington, in more than four hundred acres of old woodland, sits a long, handsome house with a fortified tower at one end. That tower is the oldest thing here. In the 14th century, this place was called Lethington. And it belonged to the Maitlands. The most famous of them, William Maitland of Lethington, was Secretary of State to Mary, Queen of Scots. Clever. Slippery, always at the center of things, he was even caught up in the murder of her secretary David Rizzio, stabbed to death at Holyrood. In the fifteen forty s, English soldiers damaged the tower during Henry VIII's war. It was repaired, and it still forms one corner of the house. The name came later, and it comes from a love story. Early in the seventeen hundreds, the estate was bought for the heirs of Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox. She was the great beauty of Charles II's court, the woman whose likeness was used for Britannia on British coins. Her wish was that the house be called, Lennox's Love to Blantyre. Mercifully, it got shortened. Since 1946, it has been the family home of the Dukes of Hamilton, and the architect who restored it in 1912 was Sir Robert Lorimer. Remember him, he turns up again very soon. Walk in past the great hall to the small room beside it. It's part of the original tower, and in a glass case, there's a face, a wax death mask believed to be that of Mary Queen of Scots, made after her execution at Fotheringay in 1587. Eyelashes, eyebrows, and color were added afterwards to make it look alive. I'll be straight with you. It's believed to be hers, it isn't proven, but stand in front of it. And see how much the doubt really matters. For centuries, the house also held a silver casket. French, made in Paris around fifteen hundred, probably a gift to Mary from her first husband. Tradition says it once held the casket letters, the letters used to accuse her of plotting the murder of her husband Darnley. In 2022, the National Museum Scotland bought it for 1.8 million pounds, so today you'll find it in Edinburgh rather than here. A sapphire ring linked to Mary has also been shown with the Lennox Love Collection. Said to have been left by her to the Hamiltons, and then comes a twist nobody expects. In May 1941, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy. Flew alone to Scotland and bailed out over Remfrewshire. He said he'd come to see the Duke of Hamilton. Lennox's love has kept items linked to that strange flight. One house. A medieval tower, a doomed queen's face, and the oddest gamble of the Second World War. From outside, it just looks like a country house in the trees. Five. Kelly Castle, Fife, inland from Pit and Weem, in the east nuk of Fife. Kelly Castle stands behind a walled garden full of old roses, three towers joined into one house. Crow-stepped gables, a thicket of chimneys, the oldest part goes back to the 1300s. A new tower went up in 1573. And by 1606, the whole thing had been joined together. In one thousand six hundred and seventeen, James the sixth came home to Scotland, the only time he did after taking the English throne. The owner of Kelly, Thomas Erskine, had grown up alongside him. They'd been boys together. So Thomas got ready the way rich men did. He had a ceiling made. It's still there. Climb up into the library in the East Tower and look above you. Lions and monkeys in plaster. The date, sixteen seventeen. The initials T V F, for Thomas Viscount Fenton. It may be one of the first rooms in Scotland plastered in the London style, instead of the painted boards that were in fashion. Two years later, the king made him Earl of Kelly. More sealings followed as the family married and climbed. The vine room has plaster vines running across it, with a round painting in the centre by Jacob Duvet, the Dutch artist who also painted for Holly Reed House. The dining room is wrapped in painted panelling, and here's the twist. Kelly very nearly didn't make it. After the Earls of Kelly died out, the house was left to decay. When it was found again in the 1870s, the plaster was literally falling off the ceilings, and a painted panel was missing. In 1877, James Lorimer, a professor of law in Edinburgh, Came across it and fell for it. His family leased it and started putting it back together. Local plasterers from Pittenweem copied the surviving moulds, and if you look closely in the vine room, you can still spot where the new relief is a little shallower than the old. His son was fourteen when they moved in. The boy sketched every ceiling in the house. His name was Robert Lorimer. The same Robert Lorimer, who later restored Lennox Love and became one of Scotland's best-known architects, in 1897 the artist Phoebe Anna Trequart painted a panel above the drawing room fireplace, inspired by Botticelli's Primavera. And the guides will tell you, even now, there are bats living behind the paneling in one of the towers. So walk through Kelly, and remember you're inside two stories at once. A ceiling made for a king. And a family who found it falling apart, and decided it wasn't finished yet. Number four was built by a merchant. His son played cards with the devil. Or so they say. Four, the house of the bins, West Lothian. On a hill above the Firth of Forth near Linmouthgo. There's a house with battlements that are mostly for show. It was built from 1612 by Thomas Dalziel, an Edinburgh merchant who had made his money at the court of James VI in London. He bought the estate, then rebuilt on older foundations. The family has been here for over 400 years. The last famous Tandaleal, the long-serving Labour MP, lived in the house until he died in 2017. Through the door, the house feels like a home. First, portraits, porcelain, chairs that have been sat in. Then you reach the high hall and the king's room, and the ceilings change everything. Plaster from 1630, made ready for Charles I's visit in 1633. Look carefully, and you'll find something rarer still. Painted wood decoration from the house's earliest years. A survival from the Scottish Renaissance, but you're really here for the sun. General Tam Daliel, born 1615. A Royalist captured after the Battle of Worcester and locked in the Tower of London. He escaped. He fled to Russia and fought for the czar, and came home with a reputation so black that people called him Bloody Tam and the Muscovite Devil. In 1666, he crushed a Covenanter rising at Rullion Green. Later, he raised the regiment that became the Royal Scots Greys. His boots are still in the house. So is his enormous comb. Now the legend, and I'm flagging it clearly. Tam liked to play cards with the devil. The devil, usually won. Then one night, Tam beat him. The story says, by sneaking a mirror behind his opponent to read his hand, the devil, furious, hurled the marble table at him. It missed. Flew out through the window, and landed in the sergeant's pond. Here's the part that makes people go quiet. In the dry summer of one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-eight, the pond dried out, and lying at the bottom, there was a marble-topped table. It's back in the entrance hall now. You can stand right next to it. Did the devil throw it? No, was it in the pond? Yes, that gap is exactly where a story like this lives. One more thing worth finding. Among the family papers are letters from a Captain James Dalliel, killed and scalped in America in 1763 during Pontiac's War. And a later Dalliel. Sir John Graham Dalliel was a naturalist who taught a young Charles Darwin, and his scientific drawings are on show too. This family's history never stayed politely at home. Three left. And the next house was built by people who didn't trust their own guests. Three. Castle Fraser, Aberdeenshire, west of Aberdeen near the village of Kemnay, Castle Fraser rises out of open parkland, pale and enormous. It's a Z plan, like Brodie, but much bigger. Five stories, turrets bursting out at the top, carved stone wherever you look. Michael Fraser, the sixth Laird, began it in fifteen seventy-five, and it wasn't finished until sixteen thirty-six. Sixty-one years, he didn't live to see it done. The Masons were linked to the Bell family, a dynasty of northeast builders. Hold on to that name. It comes back. The door shuts. You're in the great hall. The oldest feeling room in the castle. A huge stone fireplace, a vaulted ceiling. Fraser portraits looking down. It's simple, almost stern. Now look up toward one corner, high in the wall. There's a small opening. Behind it sits a tiny hidden chamber, reached by a secret route. It's called the Laird's Lug. Lug is scops for ear. The laird could slip in there and sit in silence, listening to every word his guest said about him over dinner. A medieval bugging device, your host could be smiling at you across the table, while his ear was in the wall. And it isn't the only trick. The castle is riddled with secret stairs, trapdoors, and hidden passages. As if it were built by people who fully expected to be betrayed. Then there's the green room and its legend: a young woman, some say a princess, was staying at the castle and was murdered in her sleep. Her body was dragged down the stone stairs of the round tower, and the bloodstains would not scrub out. So the steps were covered in wooden boards, which are still there today. That's legend, and I'll give you the likelier answer too. The stair was used by servants in the eighteen hundreds, and boarding made it easier to climb. But the boards are real, and people still look at them twice. There's real sadness here as well. Lady Blanche Drummond, wife of the Laird Frederick Mackenzie Fraser. Died of tuberculosis at the castle in the 1870s. Staff over the years have reported piano music drifting through empty rooms. Again, a ghost story. So treat it as one. Look out for one more small strange thing in the collection. According to the National Trust for Scotland. A lock of a young Fraser bride's hair is kept here. Cut by her grieving husband after her death, and it has held its rich auburn color to this day. In the late 1700s, the house was run by a woman, Eliza Fraser, the Lady Laird, who modernized it with sash windows and a new entrance on the south side. The Frasers held the place until 1921, and in 2006, the castle appeared on screen in The Queen with Helen Mirren. Outside a fairy tale tower, inside a man in the wall, listening. Number two is the only house on this list that has been allowed to fade on purpose. Two, New Hales Musselburgh, just outside Musselburgh, east of Edinburgh. Past retail parks and housing estates, there's a gate. Behind it, parkland. And behind that, a pale classical house, that looks as if it was lifted straight out of Italy. That's no accident. In 1686, an architect named James Smith bought this land, then called White Hill. As a young man, Smith had gone to Rome to train for the priesthood. He came home an architect instead, in love with the work of Andrea Palladio. This was no amateur. Smith went on to design great houses like Hamilton Palace and Dalkeith Palace. Here, though, he was building for himself. He put up a villa, an early taste of a style that would sweep across Britain. He even gave it a secret passage leading to a private suite upstairs. Smith sold up in 1701. In 1709, the house was bought by Sir David Dalrymple, who renamed it after his family's lands at Hales. Then the Dalrymples stayed for nearly 300 years. They added wings, including an enormous double-height library. And that library mattered. In the 18th century, it held one of the great private book collections in Scotland. David Hume and Adam Smith borrowed from it. Dr. Samuel Johnson is said to have called it the most learned drawing room in Europe. If the Scottish Enlightenment had a living room, it may well have been this one. Now the thing that makes New Hales different from every other house here. In one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-six, after Sir Mark Dalrymple died, the books went to the National Library of Scotland to settle death duties. The shelves emptied. His widow, Lady Antonia, lived on as the house quietly aged around her. When the National Trust for Scotland took over in 1997, it made an unusual choice. It decided not to restore. Walk in, and the first thing you notice is what's missing. Nothing has been made shiny. Paint is faded. Fabric is worn thin. In the Chinese sitting room, which began life as the dining room of Smith's original villa, very little has changed in 300 years. The library stands huge and nearly bookless, and somehow that silence says more than full shelves ever could. It's the honest version of an old house. Most places polish the years away. New Hales lets you see them. One note to keep this fair: the library and the big wings came after seventeen hundred. The heart of the house, Smith's Villa, is sixteen eighty six. And now the house I promised you at the very start, pink walls, a tower like a wedding cake. And a family who never put the lights in, one. Craigievar Castle, Aberdeenshire. Here it is. On a wooded hillside south of Olford, a pink tower rises seven stories. Plain and blunt at the bottom, then up top it bursts into turrets, corbels, little domes, and balconies, as if the builders suddenly lost patience with being sensible. Craigievar was begun by the Mortimer family, who ran out of money. In 1610, an Aberdeen merchant bought the half-built tower. His name was William Forbes, and people called him Danzig Willie because he'd made his fortune trading across the Baltic. He finished it in 1626, and the master masons linked to those towers, the Bell family. The same builders as Castle Fraser. The door shuts behind you, and the light changes. The great hall is the heart of the house. Above you, a plaster ceiling heavy with ornament. Over the fireplace, a great royal coat of arms, so no guest could miss whose side the Forbes family was on. Through the house, the ceilings carry medallions and heads, including figures of the nine worthies, the great heroes of history and legend. The rooms themselves are small. This is a castle built to the scale of a family, not an army. Now the fact that makes Craigievar number one, above the ground floor, there's no electric light. There never has been. For a long stretch, the family used it as a holiday house. Then, during the First World War, their main home, Fintry House, was taken for the war effort, and they moved into Craigievar full time. They lived here until one thousand, nine hundred and sixty-three without wiring the upper floors. And when the castle passed to the National Trust for Scotland, it stayed that way. So you see these rooms the way the 1620s saw them. Grey Scottish daylight through small windows. On a dull afternoon, the corners simply disappear. It nearly didn't survive at all. In the 1820s, Sir John Forbes was thinking about pulling it down. Instead, he called in the Aberdeen architect John Smith, and the tower was repaired. A couple of stories clearly labelled. Locals say a Gordon from the rival clan was forced out of a window by a Forbes and still haunts the Blue Room. That's legend, and you'll often hear that Walt Disney modeled Cinderella's castle on Craigievar. There's no evidence for that at all. It's a myth, though you can see why people want it to be true. For three and a half centuries, one family lived here. Then they handed it on, and the rooms were kept as they had known them. Nobody wired them, nobody brightened them. Climb to the top floor late in the day and watch the room go dark around you. No switch to reach for, no bulb overhead. That is the inside of 1626. Exactly the way it looked, so here's the thread running through all ten. From the road, every one of these houses was saying something. Keep out! We're armed. We're richer than you. Outside, it was gun loops and battlements and towers built to intimidate. But step through the door, and every house tells on its owner. Leith Hall tells you about a laird carried home to die at Christmas. Loristan tells you about two Edwardians who stopped the clock. Brody shows you a family that lost its past in a fire, and spent the next century putting ceilings up. At Castle Fraser, your host is listening through the wall. At New Hales, nobody's polishing anything. And at Craigievar, the lights were never put in at all. The outsides were built for enemies. The insides were built for the people who actually lived there, and that's why, 400 years on. The insides are the part that still feel alive. Now I want to hear from you. If you could walk into just one of these rooms tonight, which would it be, the Laird's lug? The dark top floor at Craighivar, the empty library at Newhales. Or the little room at Lennox's love with Mary's face in it, and what's the first thing you'd touch? Tell me in the comments. I read them. And if you like your Scotland from the inside, past the gift shop, past the rope, into the rooms where people actually ate and argued and slept. Stay with us. That's what this channel is for. We go past the walls.