By all accounts, the semi-ruined Hermitage Castle in Liddesdale, Scotland, is a grim, gloomy and forbidding place. Sinister, even. Well it ought to be, for the history of the keep and the land about is soaked in blood.
Not for nothing was the Hermitage called “the guardhouse of the bloodiest valley in Britain.”
The fortress was a key strategic point in the Scottish/English borderlands that were for centuries the wildest of wild frontiers, contested in bloody campaigns and cross-border raids.
Of course it’s haunted.
The castle was built around 1240 by Nicholas de Soules, a Norman-descended borderlord, heir of conquest. His descendent, William de Soules, Lord of Liddesdale, served Edward I of England, the Hammer of the Scots, then switched his allegiance to Robert Bruce — for a time. In 1320, he forfeited the Hermitage Castle due to his involvement in an English-inspired plot to usurp the throne, perhaps on his own account but more likely in order to install Robert’s rival Edward Balliol as King of Scotland.
He confessed his treason, and was locked up in Dumbarton Castle, where he died.
That is, if you believe the historians. Folklore gives us a different story.
For, you see, William de Soules was a sorcerer, a practitioner of Black Arts learned from Michael Scott, the Wizard of the North. He kidnapped local children for use in dark rites, and he ravished local women with a rapacious appetite.
Undiscovered Scotland recounts:
One day in 1320 he kidnapped a young Armstrong woman and tried to return with her to Hermitage Castle. When her father tried to stop him, de Soules killed him on the spot. However, by now a crowd had gathered, and de Soules was on the verge of being lynched when Alexander Armstrong, the Laird of Mangerton, intervened, calming the crowd and advising de Soules to return to Hermitage without his captive. De Soules was far from grateful, instead developing a hatred for someone who, as his social inferior, had demonstrated the power to influence the crowd and save de Soules’s life. De Soules therefore invited Alexander Armstrong to a banquet at Hermitage, and when he arrived, stabbed him in the back.
History and folklore agree: William de Soules was a first-class prick.
In his evil works, de Soules was assisted by his familiar, Robin Redcap, aka Robin Sly. A redcap is a kind of goblin frequently associated with the ruined castles of the dark and bloody ground of the Scottish/English Borders. Their main occupation is the robbery and murder of travelers, dying their caps in the victims’s blood. They are driven to kill frequently, because if the blood dries on their cap, the Redcap himself will die. Despite being shod in iron, the goblins are quick and deadly with their taloned hands and the pikestaff they traditionally wield.
Redcap by Alan Lee.
Robin Redcap was an especially virulent goblin, who imbued de Soules with immunity to harm from weapons of iron and steel and from hanging. Sir Walter Scott, the great Scottish author, recounted the charm in 1802 in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border:
Lord Soulis he sat in Hermitage castle.
And beside him Old Redcap sly ;
“Now tell me, thou sprite, who art meikle of might,
The death that I must die ?”“While thou shalt bear a charmed life.
And hold that life of me,
’Gainst lance and arrow, sword and knife,
I shall thy warrant be.”
That’s pretty good protection for an evil Borderlord, but it proved insufficient to counter the rage of an aroused populace. When the locals rebelled against the depredations of de Soules, they solved the problem of the protective charm by overpowering the Borderlord, hauling him off to a megalithic circle called Nine Stone Rig and boiling him in molten lead.
That, apparently, did the trick.
On a circle of stones they placed the pot,
On a circle of stones but barely nine;
They heated it red and fiery hot,
Till the burnished brass did glimmer and shine.
They rolled him up in a sheet of lead,
A sheet of lead for a funeral pall;
They plunged him in the cauldron red,
And melted him, lead, and bones, and all.
At the Skelf-hill, the cauldron still
The men of Liddesdale can shew;
And on the spot where they boiled the pot,
The spreat and the deer-hair ne’er shall grow.
*
The de Soules clan lost the castle, which passed to Douglasses and Hepburns before serving as the keep of the notorious Border Reiver Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, who famously broke the outlaw Kinmont Willie out of prison in 1596, royally pissing off none other than Queen Elizabeth I herself.
Robin Sly reportedly still haunts the ruins of the lonely keep on the moor. Perhaps it is unwise, but I should very much like to visit Hermitage Castle — goblin or no. He’ll nae get my blood for his red cap!
*
Here’s the tale of Kinmont Willie told in the finest Scottish Borders tradition — a ballad:
Paul McNamee says
Nice post!
R. A. Salvatore used RedCaps for his goblin/dwarf race in his DEMON WARS novels.
JimC says
Enjoy the day!
Keith West says
Excellent post. I, too, would love to visit this castle.
deuce says
You should, Keith! Exploring the Borders and the Wall is a great experience. There’s a good Reiver museum in Newcastleton. Just make sure to show up on a day it is open. My mom and I hit town on the ONE day of the week it was closed.
Matthew says
Great piece, Jim. I love learning about all this weird folklore. The geek in me can’t help but wonder if the redcaps are related to Robert E. Howard’s Picts.
It seems about every castle in Scotland is haunted.
deuce says
REH’s Picts weren’t “shod with iron”, nor were they known to wield pikestaffs. It is possible that there is a vague connection with the red-capped “Fear Dearg”/”Red Man” of Gaelic Irish folklore, but Otherworldly beings with red ears, red horns etc are known to the Cymric folklore of Britain as well. The Borders have been home to Gaelic and Cymric speakers for millennia.
Dave Allen says
It is a fascinating tale, one which my elderly aunt Meme (Mildred) told me when I was a small lad, although with not as much detail as is related here. Once again more reading is required on my part.
If you do visit that castle Jim, make sure it is not on All Hallows Eve, the solstices, dark of the moon….
JimC says
That’s great that it was family folklore…
deuce says
My mother and I visited the Hermitage in late April, 2014–nigh unto May Eve. She was born a Nixon and Liddesdale is the one and only homeland of the Nixons. That clan rode with the Armstrongs, whose stronghold lies only about 10mi from the Hermitage, as I recall. The Hermitage is locked up in April so we could only walk around it and stroll the earthworks thereabouts, but it absolutely retains its air of glowering menace and close-coupled strength.
I would imagine that few Nixons walked the corridors of the Hermitage unshackled. Ponder the fact that what was arguably the strongest fortress in Britain per cubic foot was built to police a mere 120 square miles of land that contained no other population centers of any note other than the fortified houses of the reiver lords. Fort Apache on the Liddel Water, indeed.
The Scotts of Buccleuch (as in Sir Walter Scott, a proud descendant) were often the Wardens of the Middle March, of which Liddesdale was a separate administrative unit. Being Warden meant that you were the main fox set to guard the henhouse. That also meant they were in direct conflict with the Armstrong clan, the most powerful Reiver family on the entire Borders. Among those who “rode with the moonlight” alongside the Armstrongs were the Nixons.
“Flashman” author, George MacDonald Fraser, in his magisterial book on the Reivers, The Steel Bonnets, notes that the Nixons were small in numbers, but “up for anything.” Riding with the Armstrongs — along with other minor families like the Crosers and Elliots — the Nixons needed to be.
Fraser says of Liddesdale:
“[F]or this was the tough end of the frontier. Technically part of the Scottish Middle March, but linked by geography and tradition with the Western Marches, was Liddesdale, the cockpit of the Border and the home of its most predatory clans. It had what amounted to a Warden of its own, the Keeper, and from it were mounted the most devastating raids, usually into the English Middle March.
Few people go to it, even today; Sir Walter Scott is supposed to have taken the first wheeled vehicle into the dale less than two centuries ago. To get the full flavour, it should be visited in the autumn or winter, when its stark bleakness is most apparent. It is empty, drear and hard…”
And this is what Fraser has to say about the Hermitage:
“[T]his little glen manages to tell the traveller more about the dark side of Border history in a glance than he can learn by traversing all of the rest of the Marches.
Through the bare branches he suddenly catches sight of the medieval nightmare called Hermitage, a gaunt, grey Border castle, standing in the lee of the valley side, with a little river running under its walls. The Hermitage, which took its name supposedly from a holy man who once settled there, is not a big place, but in its way it is more impressive than Caernarvon or Edinburgh or even the Tower of London. For it is magnificently preserved, and one sees it as it was, the guard house of the bloodiest valley in Britain.”
deuce says
This book by Graham Robb might be worth checking out. I just learned of it:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/10/debatable-land-graham-robb-review
JimC says
Will check it out….
JimC says
Love this choice and very British stentence from the review…
Hah!
JimC says
Oh, that is fine stuff Deuce. Thank you.
deuce says
You’re welcome!
BTW, here’s a very mixed review of Robb’s book:
https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2018/02/the-debatable-land/
Dave Allen says
Did some reading on the clans that inhabited the Borderlands. Apparently James VI by decree outlawed many clans in the region in the early 1600’s and banished several of them to the colonies. True to their heritage and wont many ended up on the borderlands of the colonies, (Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas) and the Indian Nations. Many of these families figured prominently in the Revolution and in the War Between the States mostly for the Confederacy. Names from these families are recognizable from our American history books, Bell, Maxwell, Elliot, Armstrong, Nixon (Deuce’s family), Hall, Scott, Rutherford, Dodd, Dixon, the list is very long. It becomes evident why this country has a rough and rowdy liberty or death side to it. Long live the Borderland blood!
JimC says
There’s a clear, bright throughline from the Borders to Ulster to the Appalachian backcountry frontier.
deuce says
“Bell, Maxwell, Elliot, Armstrong, Nixon (Deuce’s family), Hall, Scott, Rutherford, Dodd, Dixon, the list is very long.”
The head of HR at my company (a local gal) is a Bell. I played guitar in high school with an Armstrong. All other surnames above are long-established in this, my home county out on the edge of the plains. You left out the Nobles. My dad–of Lowland Scots/Ulster Scots descent–was best friends with the Noble boys in high school and he married a Nixon.
Dave, if you want to read the definitive (and well-written) book on the Reivers, get hold of Fraser’s The Steel Bonnets.
John M Roberts says
I’ve always liked the tale of Walter Scott being summoned by Queen Elizabeth to answer for breaking Kinmont Willie from prison. She demanded how dare he attack one of her royal castles. Scott answered, “What is there, Madame, that a bold man may not dare?” She pardoned him on the spot. Bess had an eye for men with satyle, and Scott had style to burn.
JimC says
That is just freakin’ glorious, so it is.