The bonniest wee Z-plan in Scotland

March 2011

Claypotts Castle from the east: The first proprietor of Claypotts was John Strachan – the first of many chancers – whose right to the land was confirmed in 1512.

by Mark Chalmers

Within an arrow’s flight of one of Scotland’s busiest roads, Claypotts Castle is one of the most complete buildings of its type – yet it is rarely visited, even by those who live on its doorstep.

Claypotts is a curious beast, a Lilliputian castle stranded amongst 1960s bungalows. Its story features the famous and infamous from Scotland’s history, including Cardinal Beaton, Alec Douglas Home, and Bonnie Dundee.

The Lands of Claypotts belonged to the ancient Barony of Dundee, which was conferred on the Abbot of Lindores by King Alexander II during the early 1200s, and confirmed by David II in a charter of 1345. The neighbouring lands of Craigie were also vested in Lindores, and just like Rome, as the old saw goes, Dundee was built on seven hills. The most easterly was the Heights of Craigie, and even today if you peer through the gates of the old Wallace Craigie jute mill, you can see the centuries-old face of the old Craigie quarry, which once lay just beyond the old city walls.

Claypotts lies three miles to the east, surrounded by what was countryside until the turn of the last century.

The first proprietor of Claypotts to build something substantial was John Strachan, whose right to the land was confirmed in 1512, the year after he was convicted of stealing seven horses and wagons from Dunkeld Cathedral. He was also the first of many chancers and dodgy characters in Claypotts’ history; his brother Gilbert (also convicted of being a horse thief) later became Canon of Aberdeen. John Strachan’s son, also John, inherited Claypotts in the mid-16th century: he knocked down what was already there – probably a small fortified house surrounded by rude hovels – and began work on the present castle.

The dates carved into skewputts on either end of the castle ‘bookmark’ its construction: work started in 1569, and the castle was completed in 1588. The latter figure ‘5’ is inverted, and folk have long speculated why. In that era, superstition and numerology were still powerful, so it could be a masonic code.

Claypotts was built to a sophisticated design, and is probably the best example of a Z-Plan tower house left in the world. By arranging two circular towers at the salients, or diagonally opposite corners of the rectangular hall, the little castle gained a dramatic and picturesque profile. Square penthouses are perched on the circular drums; their gables are crowstepped and terminate in chimneys with broad flashbands.

In passing, it is worth noting that the fireplaces draw up a tapering flue which is still black with soot from Claypotts’ final inhabitants, and smoke exits through a doocot top, with a stone slab over the opening, rather than a lum can. Yet the main generator of Claypotts’ form is defence: the Z-plan means you can defend every side of the castle, by firing across the flanks of the main block from shot holes in the circular towers.

As Millar relates in his book, Historical Castles & Mansions of Scotland, “There are many absurd traditions regarding Claypotts, which will not bear examination”. There’s some entertainment value to be had from the spurious history, though!

Most flagrant, in every sense, is the tale of Cardinal Beaton, who supposedly built Claypotts in order to install a mistress there. He was a colourful character, and it takes little stretch of imagination to see him as a modern day gang boss, rolling up in a Range Rover with black-tinted windows, snapping his fingers at burly henchmen.

There’s no proof to back up the tale of Beaton’s mistress, and the sense of unreality is increased when you read that she supposedly signalled from the castle’s battlements to bring the cardinal across the Tay from St Andrews. He must have owned a more powerful telescope even than Johannes Kepler – but the myth does unite the two institutions which controlled Scotland in those times – the Castle and the Kirk.

State-of-the-art fighting machine

The Beaton myth got one thing right – Claypotts is more of a home than a fortress. It is not a state-of-the-art fighting machine, like Caerlaverock or Stirling Castle; nor is it a baronial showpiece, like Crathes or Craigievar – its modest size and modest defences ensure that. Instead, Claypotts is a fortified tower house.

The tower evolved on the Celtic fringe of Europe: the Irish, Welsh and Scots spent centuries working out strategies to make their homes more defensible. Towers like Invermark near Loch Lee are simple – four square stout walls, wee windows to fire arrows from, and a door set high enough up one wall to make it difficult to reach, fitted with an iron yett which makes it impossible to get in, even if you manage to climb up to peer through the bars. You would probably get a sharp spear in the eye for your trouble, and a shower of boiling oil.

Gradually flat walls with sharp corners fell out of favour – curves are inherently stronger, and they deflect cannon balls – and the part of lowland Scotland around Dundee became a wee bit more civilised. By the 1500s, the Strachans’ main concern was feuding with neighbours rather than a foreign army turning up and parking its siege engines on your lawn. Of course, battles still raged on the west coast thanks to the Lord of the Isles, and in the Debatable Lands close to the English border.

Anyhow, Claypotts had one fatal flaw if you wanted to retreat inside and sit out a siege – it has no internal source of water. Rain was gathered from the roof using the castle’s rones, and collected in water butts: the same eco-friendly system we use nowadays to make a house self-sufficient. Yet rainwater isn’t enough to support the household and if you needed more, you had to leave the safety of the castle, cross what is now Claypotts Road, and go down into the modern curling pond, where a stream once ran.

The history of Claypotts is embroidered with colourful myth and innuendo, but we know the Strachans moved on in 1601, selling the castle to William Graham of Ballunie – he also owned the neighbouring Gotterstone estate, but took the title ‘Graham of Claypotts’ and transferred the lands to his son David in 1616. David was the last owner to actually occupy the house, and four years later, he sold the house to William Graham of Claverhouse for 12,000 Scots merks.

The era of the Grahams of Claverhouse is backed up with many documents, yet the tales of wild orgies which Millar mentions in his book may just be salacious rumour: it seems that the innocent castle had became a vehicle for scandal. William was a burgess of Dundee, a Justice of the Peace, and the local MP. The estate passed down through his family to his great-grandson, John Graham of Claverhouse, who was the famous Jacobite leader Bonnie Dundee.

It’s worth noting that the Grahams had several homes, and historians reckon that Bonnie Dundee lived in the much larger Dudhope Castle. John Graham was a loyal servant of the Stuart monarchy, and fell at the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689: all the Claverhouse lands were forfeited after the battle and Claypotts was passed to James, 2nd Marquis of Douglas in the aftermath by the Protestant king.

The Douglas connection

Claypotts still forms part of the Douglas and Angus estates, under the Douglas Home family, relatives of the Tory prime minister of the 1950s. That also explains why the suburb to the north is signposted ‘Douglas and Angus’, which sounds more like a pair of wee laddies than a sprawling housing estate. The Homes placed the castle in the care of the Commissioners of Works (the grandfather of Historic Scotland) in 1926, and they have looked after it ever since.

Three centuries of Douglas ownership have seen many changes to Claypotts’ context. The tower house wasn’t always a clump of big stone toadstools sprouting from the neatly-cropped grass: centuries ago, it was the heart of a fermtoun. There was a cluster of farm buildings – byres, dairy, grain stores and the like – along with cottar houses, all encircled by a modest curtain wall in stone. Over time, that fell into disrepair, as did the castle, and by the 1800s the farmhands were living inside it.

One unique facet of Claypotts is that so much is original: the masonry of the walls, the stone slates on the roof, even the beams that hold up the slates – all date back to Claypotts’ construction. Architects like to celebrate materials – they enjoy, for its own sake, the very stuff that the building is made from. When work was carried out at Claypotts in the 1950s, new floorboards were nailed to the original 16th century beams, but the first floor sits on stone vaults, so it was slabbed over. The castle’s main hall was floored in something very like Carmyllie flags, which is appropriate since the roof was weathered with stone slates that look very much like they came from Carmyllie quarries, too.

I’ve written about Carmyllie before, and suffice it to say the world-famous quarries are only a few miles from Claypotts. By the time of Claypotts’ restoration, Carmyllie was slowly being wound down, but the flagstones in the hall at Claypotts are, just like the floor of Cologne Cathedral, a wonderful advert for this magical stone. A beautiful dove blue, its fine natural grain makes the stone more slip resistant than any man-made material, and it can be planed as smooth as a sheet of slate.

As Broughty Ferry grew, the castle was encroached upon – across the road lay the Claypots Nurseries (note the single ‘t’) with ranges of glasshouses, and to the north lay the bleachfields of the Dighty Valley. The Dighty was once the most intensively-used linen bleaching burn in the country, feeding a couple of dozen mills and bleachfields – the newest of these are still visible on Balunie Drive, absorbed into a tyre depot and Harry Lawson’s haulage yard.

The castle had some breathing space until the early 1960s, when Claypotts Farm steading was demolished, and bungalows were built hard against its western face. The nearby junction was rebuilt as a roundabout – the Claypotts Circle (perhaps uniquely, Dundee’s roundabouts are referred to as ‘circles’). Around the same time, the Claypotts Curlie, or skating pond, fell out of use – it drew water from the same burn that the castle dwellers once used.

The most recent change is the most positive. The castle has been adopted by the local primary school – and Murdo Wilson, who looks after the castle for Historic Scotland, recounts the happy voices of children exploring the building, letting their imaginations run riot. For the first time in centuries, Claypotts is full of life – and not a horse thief or philandering cardinal in sight.

Mark Chalmers trained as an architect, but now turns his hand to writing, drawing and photography, as well as designing buildings. His current diversion is finding out about the city that never was – Aberdeen’s unbuilt architecture.

This is an article from the March 2011 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, subscribe to Leopard Magazine.