A city of spires and towers

Glamis Castle, Angus, part 2 The seat of the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne; In the second of two articles, John Goodall looks at the eventful later history of this most celebrated of Scottish castles and its association with Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother

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WHEN the modern visitor travels down the long avenue at Glamis and first catches sight of the castle, they must feel some of the astonished enthusiasm articulated by Daniel Defoe in his A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26). It was, he wrote ‘one of the finest old built palaces in Scotland, and by far the largest... when you see it at a distance it is so full of turrets and lofty buildings, spires and towers, some plain, others shining with gilded tops, that it looks not like a town, but a city...' In calling Glamis 'old built', Defoe was not, in fact, speaking about the age of the building—although it was ancient in origin—but its style, with its busy outline of high roofs, turrets and crow-step gables, a treatment in complete contrast to the familiar Classicism of the Palladian revival.

Then, as now, Glamis is a building that answers the popular ideal of a great Scottish castle. As we discovered last week, the form of the present building was broadly established over the course of the 17th century. This witnessed by stages first the aggrandisement of the medieval castle—work probably begun in about 1606 by the 1st Earl of Kinghorne—and then the total reconfiguration of the building from 1669 by his grandson Patrick Lyon, 1st Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. In a protracted project that extended over two decades, he turned the existing great stair and keep (Fig 1) into the centrepiece of a symmetrical façade with flanking wings and formalised the surrounding landscape. Of his interiors, little now remains with one important exception, the chapel.