Cortachy Castle

01 / Reading the castle

A house built in layers

Cortachy’s towers and gables do not belong to a single building campaign. Historic Environment Scotland identifies a south wing of sixteenth-century date and earlier, with substantial nineteenth-century additions. The result is a large castellated mansion: a house shaped for occupation and display around surviving older fabric.

The Dictionary of Scottish Architects records alterations in 1696, further additions in 1787–90, and remodelling in 1820–21. David Bryce’s extensive work followed in the 1870s. Fire struck in September 1883; dated rebuilding plans survive from 1884–85. These successive campaigns help explain why a simple description such as “fifteenth-century castle” misses so much of the building.

The house later became smaller. Mid-twentieth-century work removed much of Bryce’s expansion, while retaining parts of the older composition. Cortachy’s present outline is therefore also a record of subtraction. Its battlements may suggest an unchanging stronghold, but the architecture tells a story of families continually reshaping their surroundings.

02 / The Ogilvy landscape

A home among the trees

The Ogilvy connection reaches back through a complicated history of landholding. HES’s landscape inventory records Thomas Ogilvy’s purchase of the estate in 1625 and James, Lord Ogilvy’s creation as Earl of Airlie in 1639. After the destruction of Airlie Castle during the seventeenth-century conflicts, Cortachy became the family home. The two castles are distinct places, although their family stories often overlap.

The inventory also records exile in France after the Jacobite risings. Later generations invested in a different kind of legacy: parkland, woodland walks and gardens. In the nineteenth century, Henrietta Blanche, Countess of Airlie, developed the arboretum, wild garden and kitchen gardens.

The South Esk and the neighbouring Prosen Water help define this designed landscape. Trees, riverbanks and carefully arranged approaches belong to Cortachy’s history as much as its masonry. The setting gives the castle space to emerge gradually, rather than reveal everything at once.

03 / The origin legend

A warning promised from the tower

The drummer’s story has no single agreed beginning. Our Scottish Paranormal articles preserve versions involving jealousy, betrayal and a failure to warn the household of attack. The punishment most often repeated is that the man was forced into his own drum and thrown from a high window or battlement, threatening to return before a death in the family.

Catherine Crowe printed the jealousy-and-drum version in The Night-Side of Nature. Her account leaves the lord and victim unidentified. It supplies a tradition explaining the sound, rather than a record establishing that a named drummer was executed here.

Later retellings add different details: a burning drum, enormous height, accompanying pipers. Those variations deserve to remain visible as variations. Combining them into one dramatic scene would create a certainty the sources do not possess. The enduring thread is the warning itself — a familiar household sound transformed into something its listeners dread.

04 / The best-known reported visit

Music before dinner

Crowe describes receiving a letter around Christmas 1844 about a visitor she calls Miss D. While dressing for dinner, the woman reportedly heard music beneath her window becoming the distinct sound of a drum. Her question at the table distressed her hosts. Only afterwards, the account says, did she learn the family’s explanation. A second hearing prompted her departure.

This is unusually close to the nineteenth-century circulation of the story: Crowe says the letter reached her before the death later associated with it. The letter itself has not been independently examined for this guide, however, and her narrative remains a transmitted account.

Another voice complicates the chronology. In correspondence reprinted by The Spiritualist in October 1881, Ann Day placed her attendance on Miss Margaret Dalrymple in early 1845. Day recalled apparent carriages, marching feet, shrill instrumental notes and a drum. Finding nobody outside, she initially considered an echo from farther away.

Day said the countess later died after giving birth to twins. Crowe mentioned an alleged note about the omen but questioned the suggestion that fear caused the death. Neither supports the suicide attribution in our older entry. The two visit dates also remain unresolved; they should not be silently made identical.

05 / A story beyond Cortachy

Following the reported music

The later stories move beyond these walls. Martin Coventry’s account places the reported music of 19 August 1849 near Tulchan Lodge in Glen Isla, where an English visitor was approaching a shooting party. News of the Earl’s death in London followed. The old entry’s compressed version loses this separate setting.

Coventry also locates the 1881 account involving Lady Dalkeith and Lady Skelmersdale at Achnacarry in the Highlands. They reportedly heard drumming on the night Lord Airlie died in America. This belongs to the wider family tradition; it is not a documented encounter inside Cortachy Castle.

Stories associated with the Earl’s death in South Africa in 1900 likewise place mysterious music overseas. The claimed connections between sound and death remain reported interpretations. Our later articles described a final appearance followed by the spirit finding peace. The material reviewed cannot establish a last-ever encounter, or explain why subsequent reports might cease.

06 / A published personal account

Among the pines

The older Scottish Paranormal entry directs readers to Elliott O’Donnell. His 1911 Scottish Ghost Stories contains a dedicated Cortachy chapter, drawing first on Crowe and then on a man he calls Mr Porter. Porter’s childhood recollection describes a tall figure in woodland and pursuing sounds resembling a muffled drum.

O’Donnell then presents his own night excursion. He describes wind moving through the pines, noises suggesting a drumbeat, and a pale-faced figure crossing his route. He also describes a fall, shaken nerves and moments when animals or trees initially startled him. Those conditions belong to the account and should remain alongside its stranger elements.

The chapter gives no calendar date for his excursion and supplies no independent record of the figure. It can be read as the author’s claimed experience in a highly dramatic narrative. It is separate from Scottish Paranormal’s own work: none of the reviewed articles supplies an HSI investigation or recording at Cortachy.

07 / Planning a visit

Check the estate’s current notice

Cortachy remains a private family seat. Airlie Estates advertised its Cortachy policy walks for 6–31 May 2026. Those dates had passed when this guide was checked on 15 September; they should not be read as permission for year-round access or entry into the house.

The same official page warns that part of the Cortachy riverwalk is closed following a landslip after Storm Babet. It also lists the path between the Sawmill and Cullew Haugh as impassable and closed. Check the estate’s current information before planning a route, and follow closures on the ground.

Take care to distinguish Cortachy notices from events at Airlie Castle, which the estate advertises on the same website. A future permitted walk may offer the best way to appreciate the river and woodland setting. The drummer’s story can travel with you; it does not require entering private rooms or a closed path.