Fa'side Castle.

Our Wednesday cycle route took us up Fa'side today where one of our number had a convenient puncture. Since there were big boys to look after it I continued a few hundred yards up the road to photograph the castle. It's a fifteenth century keep that has had a chequered history.

A few years ago (in 1189) the monks at Newbattle gave the land around here to the De Quincy family to build the castle but, a hundred years later when the De Quincy family sided with Edward, the "Hammer of the Scots", The Bruce reclaimed the land and gave it to the Seton family who held a local earldom.
Another eighty years later on the Fawsydes acquired the land and subsequently started building only about two hundred years late. A few years after having suffered an arson attack during the prelude to the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, it was restored and extended before being sold to an Mbra merchant. After that it went into slow decline until it was eventually scheduled for demolition in 1970, but the author and historian, Nigel Tranter, campaigned for its restoration which was completed in 1982.

This scant history of the keep is all I could find out in the time available, but it has suggestions of much of Scotland’s history. While I know nothing of the Battle of Pinkie, I do at least know of it’s existence; I’d not even heard of the Battle of Carberry Hill which took place only a mile or two away. Again, I know absolutely nothing about the Seton and De Quincy families even though the names are familiar, Seton being commemorated in several local place names.

It's a bugger about the satellite dish.