Within Haunted Midlothian
When History Starts To Feel Haunted
Midlothian's haunted atmosphere also grows from remembered crisis, royal flight and the battle stories attached to Borthwick and Roslin.
On this page
- Mary Queen of Scots at Borthwick
- Roslin battlefield memory and retelling
- How documented events become ghost traditions
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Introduction
Mary Queen of Scots at Borthwick and the Battle of Roslin belong to the same haunted-history pattern in Midlothian: neither case depends on a well-documented ghost sighting, yet both make real historical danger feel close enough to become eerie. At Borthwick Castle, the documented core is Mary’s desperate June 1567 refuge with Bothwell and the later tradition that she escaped in male disguise. At Roslin, the core is a 1303 Scottish victory remembered through a wooded battlefield, romantic landscape writing, inflated medieval retellings and local ghostly motifs such as the phantom hound. The value of these stories is not that they prove the supernatural, but that they show how a county’s haunted atmosphere can grow from crisis, flight, violence, ruins and repetition. Historic Midlothian, also known as Edinburghshire, is wider than the modern council area, so these traditions sit within the older county landscape of castles, glens and roads south of Edinburgh.[wikishire.co.uk]wikishire.co.ukOpen source on wikishire.co.uk.
Mary Queen of Scots at Borthwick
Borthwick Castle’s Mary story is unusually strong for a haunted-history page because it begins with a recognised historic episode, not merely with a later ghost tale. Historic Environment Scotland describes Borthwick as an exceptionally complete 15th-century Scottish keep, built after Sir William Borthwick received a royal charter in 1430, and notes the tradition that Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Bothwell fled there from Holyroodhouse in 1567. The same listing records the familiar version of the escape: once the couple’s hiding place was discovered, Mary “is said” to have got away dressed as a man. That cautious phrasing matters. It separates the castle’s documented importance from the more dramatic details that later retelling has polished into legend.[portal.historicenvironment.scot]portal.historicenvironment.scotBORTHWIC K CASTLE, INCLUDING OUTER WALLS AND GATEHOUSE (LB805BORTHWIC K CASTLE, INCLUDING OUTER WALLS AND GATEHOUSE (LB805
The political background was genuinely perilous. Mary’s second husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered at Kirk o’ Field near Edinburgh in February 1567, and suspicion soon attached itself to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Mary’s marriage to Bothwell in May 1567 was widely seen as disastrous, and by 15 June her forces faced the rebel lords at Carberry Hill, near Edinburgh; she surrendered, Bothwell fled, and Mary was imprisoned at Lochleven Castle before being forced to abdicate. Borthwick therefore belongs to the narrow, frightening interval between royal authority and collapse: the moment when a queen was still moving through Midlothian and the Lothians under her own banner, but the ground was disappearing beneath her.[The Royal Family]royal.ukmary queen scots r1542 1567mary queen scots r1542 1567
The strongest atmospheric detail is the escape itself. Borthwick Castle’s own history page preserves the episode through an extract from a letter to the Archbishop of Glasgow, presenting Mary’s flight as an anxious, urgent event and repeating the belief that she left disguised as a man. Later heritage and travel accounts often sharpen this into a page-boy escape through a window, sometimes with hostile troops surrounding the castle. Those details are vivid, but they should be read as tradition layered over a firmer historical skeleton: Mary was at Borthwick in the crisis of 1567; the castle became associated with flight and disguise; and within days the queen’s political freedom was effectively over.[borthwickcastle.com]borthwickcastle.comBorthwick Castle HistoryBorthwick Castle History
For haunted Midlothian, Borthwick’s power comes from that compression of place and fate. The castle is not just “old”; it is remembered as a last refuge. Its thick walls, great hall, stairs and high openings give the story a physical stage, and the later claim that Mary’s spirit still returns to the castle follows a familiar folklore pattern: a figure in extremity becomes attached to the last place where she seemed to have a choice. Modern ghost retellings do make that claim, but the evidence is folkloric and visitor-facing rather than a chain of early witness reports. It is better understood as royal memory haunting the building than as a confirmed apparition.[Clan]clan.comFolklore FridayFolklore Friday
Roslin battlefield memory and retelling
Roslin’s battlefield memory begins much earlier, with the Battle of Roslin in 1303 during the First War of Scottish Independence. Historic Environment Scotland’s battlefield record places the action in the period after Edward I had reversed many Scottish gains following Falkirk. John Comyn was chosen as Guardian in 1302, Scottish resistance continued, and at Roslin a Scottish army under Comyn destroyed a much larger English force. Yet HES also stresses the bigger strategic point: despite the victory, the war still favoured Edward, and Comyn’s party negotiated terms in 1304. That tension helps explain why Roslin is remembered as both dramatic and oddly overshadowed.[portal.historicenvironment.scot]portal.historicenvironment.scotBattle of Roslin (BTL37Battle of Roslin (BTL37
The numbers attached to the battle are part of the legend-making. HES notes that Roslin is one of the relatively well-recorded battles of that phase and gives the traditional scale as around 8,000 Scots routing an English mounted force of up to 30,000. At the same time, modern summaries warn that the earliest accounts seem to inflate the figures and that the inflation may reflect pro-Scottish propaganda. The question for haunted-history readers is not only “what happened here?” but “why does the story feel so large?” Roslin became a memory of sudden reversal: a weaker force, a night movement, a steep landscape, and an enemy broken in stages.[portal.historicenvironment.scot]portal.historicenvironment.scotBattle of Roslin (BTL37Battle of Roslin (BTL37
Rosslyn Chapel’s own public-facing battlefield article uses the phrase “Scotland’s ‘Forgotten’ Victory in the Wars of Independence”, which captures the local memory problem neatly. The battle is important enough to have a cairn, a protected battlefield designation and strong local interpretation, but it has never occupied the national imagination in the same way as Stirling Bridge, Bannockburn or even Falkirk. That semi-forgotten status can make a place feel more haunted, not less: the visitor senses that something violent and significant happened in the landscape, but the story has to be recovered from fragments, signs, guide material and local retelling.[The Official Rosslyn Chapel Website]rosslynchapel.comThe Official Rosslyn Chapel WebsiteThe Official Rosslyn Chapel Website
Roslin Glen intensifies that effect because it was later framed as a romantic landscape. Historic Environment Scotland describes Roslin Glen and Hawthornden Castle as a steep-sided picturesque gorge along the River North Esk, shaped from the early modern period onward by walks, ruins, antiquarian features and literary associations. By the 18th and 19th centuries, it had become an archetypal Scottish Romantic landscape, linked with figures such as Burns, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth and Turner. A battlefield in open farmland may be remembered as a military site; a battlefield folded into woodland, ruins, river paths and romantic tourism is more likely to be felt as a place where the past lingers.[portal.historicenvironment.scot]portal.historicenvironment.scotOpen source on historicenvironment.scot.
The ghostly strand at Roslin is thinner than the battle history, but it is revealing. Local and folklore-style retellings link Rosslyn Castle and Roslin Glen with a phantom hound said to belong to an English knight killed in the fighting; the dog is sometimes heard baying in the woods or appearing in castle space before the tale resolves into a death-warning motif. These accounts are not strong historical evidence for a specific haunting, and some modern versions even blur the date as 1302 rather than 1303. Their importance lies in how they translate battle memory into folklore: the dead soldier becomes less central than the loyal animal, the violence moves from battlefield to guard room, and the sound of the glen becomes part of the story.[thehazeltree.co.uk]thehazeltree.co.ukThe Hazel Tree Rosslyn Castle – falling shadowsThe Hazel Tree Rosslyn Castle – falling shadows
How documented events become ghost traditions
Borthwick and Roslin show two different ways that documented history can become haunted tradition. Borthwick is a crisis-of-flight story: a named historical person, a precise political emergency, a castle refuge and a dramatic escape. Roslin is a battlefield-memory story: a medieval victory, contested scale, patriotic retelling, a memorialised landscape and later folklore that gives the violence a spectral afterlife. In both cases, the supernatural element is secondary. The haunting begins with the emotional charge of the documented event.
The first mechanism is attachment to a threshold moment. Mary at Borthwick is compelling because it sits on the edge between sovereignty and captivity. Her surrender at Carberry Hill, imprisonment at Lochleven and abdication make the Borthwick escape feel retrospectively like a last passage through freedom. That is why the story adapts so readily into ghost lore: apparitions often attach themselves to doors, windows, staircases and roads because those are the places where a life appears to change direction.[portal.historicenvironment.scot]portal.historicenvironment.scotBORTHWIC K CASTLE, INCLUDING OUTER WALLS AND GATEHOUSE (LB805BORTHWIC K CASTLE, INCLUDING OUTER WALLS AND GATEHOUSE (LB805
The second mechanism is landscape that retells the event for the visitor. Roslin Glen has steep banks, wooded paths, castle ruins, chapel associations and river sound. HES’s designed-landscape record shows that these features were not merely accidental scenery; they became part of how Roslin was admired, walked, painted and described. When a place is already read as picturesque, ancient and dramatic, battlefield stories and ghost stories have a ready-made stage.[portal.historicenvironment.scot]portal.historicenvironment.scotOpen source on historicenvironment.scot.
The third mechanism is useful uncertainty. Roslin’s battle numbers, Wallace associations and medieval chronicle traditions have all been questioned or qualified, but that does not make the place meaningless. It makes the memory layered. HES notes uncertainty around Wallace’s presence at Roslin, while battlefield interpreters continue to ask how far maps, stories and later tradition can take us towards the truth. For folklore, those gaps are fertile: where military history says “uncertain”, local imagination often supplies a figure, a sound, a warning or a repeated anniversary.[portal.historicenvironment.scot]portal.historicenvironment.scotBattle of Roslin (BTL37Battle of Roslin (BTL37
The fourth mechanism is tourism without complete invention. Borthwick and Roslin are not empty settings onto which ghost stories have been randomly pasted. They are already historically resonant places. Borthwick’s listed-building record, Mary’s wider royal chronology and the castle’s own visitor history all support the importance of the 1567 episode. Roslin’s battlefield designation, chapel interpretation and designed-landscape record support the importance of the battle and the glen’s later cultural afterlife. The ghostly additions are best treated as folklore growing around real anchors.[historicenvironment.scot]portal.historicenvironment.scotBORTHWIC K CASTLE, INCLUDING OUTER WALLS AND GATEHOUSE (LB805BORTHWIC K CASTLE, INCLUDING OUTER WALLS AND GATEHOUSE (LB805
What a careful visitor should take from the stories
The most reliable reading is neither sceptical dismissal nor paranormal certainty. At Borthwick, the Mary association is historically serious, but the idea that her ghost wanders the castle is a later tradition with limited evidential weight. At Roslin, the battle is nationally recognised, but the most dramatic casualty figures and some chronicle-linked details need caution; the phantom hound belongs to folklore rather than battlefield archaeology. Both stories are still valuable because haunted history is often about memory under pressure: how people give emotional shape to danger, defeat, escape and violence.
For a visitor, the best way to understand this part of Midlothian is to keep three layers separate. The documented layer includes Borthwick’s 15th-century fabric, Mary’s 1567 crisis, the Carberry Hill aftermath, Roslin’s 1303 battle and the protected historic landscape. The retold layer includes the escape disguise, the inflated battle scale, “forgotten victory” language and romantic descriptions of the glen. The haunted layer includes Mary’s supposed returning presence and Roslin’s phantom hound. The eerie feeling comes from the overlap, but the credibility changes from layer to layer.
That is what makes Mary and Roslin such a useful pair within Midlothian’s haunted map. They are not simply two ghost stories. They show how the county’s supernatural imagination can grow from real crises: a queen slipping out of a castle as her reign collapses, and a wooded battlefield where a violent victory was remembered, enlarged, half-forgotten and retold until the glen itself seemed to carry the sound of it.
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Further Reading
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Mary, Queen of Scots
First published 1969. Subjects: History, Biography, Queens, Kings and rulers, Mary Stuart,.
Scottish Myths and Legends
First published 2009. Subjects: Tales, Legends, Folklore, Legends, scotland.
Scotland
First published 2000. Subjects: History, Scotland, history, Scotland, social conditions, Scotland, economic conditions, Histoire.
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Endnotes
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Source: portal.historicenvironment.scot
Title: BORTHWIC K CASTLE, INCLUDING OUTER WALLS AND GATEHOUSE (LB805)
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Source: portal.historicenvironment.scot
Title: Battle of Roslin (BTL37)
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Title: Folklore Friday
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Additional References
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