Fyvie Castle

Fyvie began as a royal stronghold and stopped being one in 1390, when Robert III granted it to Sir Henry Preston after the Battle of Otterburn. Preston built the oldest of the five towers, dated to between 1390 and 1433, and the castle then passed through four more families, the Meldrums, the Setons, the Gordons and the Leiths, each of whom added a tower of their own. The result is one of the finest examples of Scottish baronial architecture, with a grand entrance tower raised by Alexander Seton in 1599.

Seton is the key figure in the castle's ghost lore. Laird of Fyvie from 1596 to 1622 and later 1st Earl of Dunfermline, he was a great builder and one of the most powerful men in Scotland. His first wife, Lilias Drummond, died in 1601 after bearing him daughters but no son; he remarried quickly, and the legend of the Green Lady grew from that second wedding night. Whether Lilias died of natural causes, of a broken heart or, as the darker version has it, of starvation in a locked room at her husband's hands, is exactly the sort of question the castle leaves open.

The Gordons, who followed the Setons, are attached to the castle's other great legend, the curse of the weeping stones. Their line at Fyvie ended with Cosmo Gordon in 1879, who is said to have seen the Green Lady before he died. The Leith family bought the castle in 1889 and filled it with the art collection that still hangs there. In 1984 Fyvie was bought by the National Trust for Scotland with support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and has been open to the public ever since.

The Green Lady's reputation rests first on the carving, which is physical, visible and very old, and second on a long run of family tradition. The most specific report concerns Cosmo Gordon, the last of the Gordon lairds, who is said to have seen the Green Lady in his room shortly before his death in 1879 and to have taken her as an omen. His younger brother reportedly saw the same apparition a few days later and bent the knee to her as a gesture of respect. On a grey December morning, the story goes, Cosmo died. The Green Lady has been treated as a portent of death in the family ever since.

Since the National Trust for Scotland took over in 1984 the reports have come from staff and visitors rather than lairds: a figure in green at the end of a corridor, footsteps on the stairs, the smell of cigar smoke in rooms where nobody has smoked for a century, and the weeping stone in the Charter Room damp on a dry day. The Press and Journal, Aberdeen's daily paper, has revisited the castle's ghosts, weeping stones and secret chambers more than once, including an account from staff who spent lockdown living in what it called "the north-east's most haunted castle".

The sceptical reading is straightforward. A stone that sweats in a cool room is doing what porous stone does; a wet window ledge carving can be read as a memorial cut by masons rather than a ghost; and a family that lost eldest sons over 600 years was doing no worse than most. But the guides tell the stories with a straight face, the carving is there to be touched, and Fyvie is a castle that rewards an open mind.

Fyvie Castle is a National Trust for Scotland property in the village of Fyvie, about eight miles south of Turriff and 25 miles north-west of Aberdeen, in the rolling farmland of Aberdeenshire. The castle interior is seen by guided tour only, which is the best way to do it: the guides take you to the Drummond bedroom and the window ledge, the Charter Room with its weeping stone and the great wheel stair, with plenty of time for the ghosts. The castle, shop and tearoom are open from late March to the end of October, and tours run on set days and times, so check the Trust's website before travelling; the grounds, walled garden, loch and lakeside walks are open all year.

The tour involves a good many stairs and there is no lift, though there is disabled parking beside the castle and the tearoom and the grounds are mostly level. There is no accommodation at the castle and no ghost hunts, but Turriff, Oldmeldrum and Inverurie have inns and B&Bs, and Aberdeen is an easy 40-minute drive for a wider choice of hotels.