There are many castles in Scotland that are now not much more than a few stones. Newbyres Castle is one of these. There is not much left of it now, and its glory days are long gone. It is now no more than two sides of a low wall and a bramble covered mound standing in a small wildlife garden by the village of
Gorebridge. However, back in its heyday
the castle was a substantial and rather picturesque tower house.
Newbyres Castle was built in the mid-16th
Century for Michael Borthwick of Glengelt.
He had acquired the land in 1543 from James Haswell, the Abbot of the abbey at Newbattle. The castle was built as an L
shaped tower with a courtyard around it.
It had a vaulted ground floor and numerous gun loops on the upper
floors. From his new, fortified home,
Borthwick oversaw his coal mining operations in the area.
In 1624 the castle was sold to Sir James
Dundas of Arniston, who was the Governor of Berwick. After his death, the house became the main
residence of his widow Mary Hume, Lady Arniston. She had a reputation locally as a very
hospitable host and on one occasion a guest of hers was prosecuted for
drunkenness after being a bit rowdy and potty mouthed while making his way home. The charge against him was later found ‘Not
Proven’. Nowadays, we might look back
at the goings on in Newbyres Castle and see it as a bit of a ‘party
house’. The 17th Century
equivalent of the house on the street that at weekends always has music
pounding out until the early hours of the morning with lots of inebriated
people coming and going.
At some point the castle was abandoned
as a home and was left to decay and crumble away. A large part of the tower, including the
staircase collapsed in 1881. In 1963
most of the remaining walls were demolished by Midlothian Council due to fears
for public safety.
On a walk that took me through
Gorebridge, I stopped off at the remains of the castle. I walked to the top of the pile of overgrown
rubble and wondered if I zoomed back to a few hundred years ago, what room I’d
be standing in, and who would be there? Maybe
I’d bump into Lady Arniston, and she would offer me a nip of something nice
to drink. On a cold day like today, it
would be most welcome.
I left a Skulferatu in a gap in the
remaining chunk of the castle walls.
The coordinates for the location of the
Skulferatu are -
Latitude 55.84185
Longitude -3.048500
I used the following sources for information on the castle –
The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland from
the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century
Volume Three
By David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross
1889
(Sketches – Fig. 477 & Fig. 478)
Newbyres Castle: The Story So Far
https://gorebridge.org.uk/heritage/newbyres-castle-the-story-so-far/
The Arniston Memoirs, Three Centuries of a Scottish House,
1571-1838
By George W T Omond
1887
(Sketch of Newbyres Tower)
Public Information Board at Site