Qualla: Fordell Castle

Fordell Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leon Hicks, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most Scottish tower houses had one main staircase. Fordell Castle has two, each rising from its own door to the outside, each spiralling up to a different part of the building. It is the only tower house in Scotland built this way. The reason is lost to record - perhaps a quirk of two patrons, perhaps a defensive redundancy, perhaps a way of letting the laird and his lady arrive in their separate worlds. Whatever the answer, it makes Fordell strange even among Scottish strangenesses, and the castle has been hiding in its woods near Dunfermline for over four hundred years, accumulating stranger stories still.

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Image: Leon Hicks | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fordell Castle: Two Doors, One Family

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leon Hicks, CC BY-SA 4.0. Fordell Castle sits about a mile and a quarter northwest of Dalgety Bay and two miles east of Dunfermline, in Fife. Its main entrance tower is believed to date from the 1400s, but most of the present Z-plan tower house was built or rebuilt after 1566, when James Henderson, third ...

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Image: Leon Hicks | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fordell Castle: Mary, Coal, and Cromwell

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Suzanne Henderson Emerson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Marion Scott, one of Mary Queen of Scots' ladies-in-waiting, married George Henderson, the laird. Tradition has it that the young queen visited Fordell for the wedding - hence the vaulted, panelled chamber over the main stair head, still called Queen Mary's Room. The Hendersons s...

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Image: Suzanne Henderson Emerson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fordell Castle: The Witch Knowe

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. Margaret Echlin, born a Henderson of Pittadro, was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned in 1649 during the Great Scottish witch hunt of 1649 to 1650. The Witch Knowe stands on the right of the carriage drive that leads up to the castle - the small mound where, according to local ...

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Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fordell Castle: Cedars, Sundials, and St Theriot

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leon Hicks, CC BY-SA 4.0. St Theriot's Chapel, about seventy yards southwest of the castle, was dedicated to an 8th-century cleric one historian called splendidly apocryphal - Saint Therotus, or Theoretus, or Theriot, take your pick. The chapel is rectangular and Renaissance in proportion, with late Gothi...

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Image: Leon Hicks | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fordell Castle: The Modern Lairds

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit McPhail, CC0. After the Hendersons came the Mercer-Hendersons, then the Earls of Buckinghamshire, then Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, the controversial Solicitor General for Scotland who died in 1995 and was buried in the crypt beneath St Theriot's Chapel. He was followed by Andrew Berry, then in Nov...

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Image: McPhail | CC0