Unicorn Tapestries

At Stirling Castle they have just unveiled the recreation of the lost tapestries of James V , this completes a 14 year project.
The seven tapestries were commissioned by Historic Scotland, work started in 2001 as part of a wider effort to restore the king’s palace to its 1540s style.

A team of 18 expert weavers from across the globe came together to reinterpret and create the “Hunt of the Unicorn” tapestries.

Visitors can now see all seven tapestries together for the first time.

In the 1540s, the palace was home to James V’s wife, Mary of Guise, and their young daughter, Mary Queen of Scots.

James V

It was known from royal inventories that when James V built the palace he owned more than 100 tapestries, but there is no record of what happened to them. The inventories, however, described a set of tapestries depicting “the historie of the unicorne”.

The “painstaking” project to recreate the tapestries involved extensive research and took the team to New York, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts a set of 15th Century tapestries on the same theme.

Peter Buchanan, Historic Scotland’s project manager who oversaw the process, said it had been a “privilege to watch” the weavers recreate the tapestries “in all their Renaissance glory”.
He said: “Whilst we may never know what happened to the original tapestries, the fact that we now have these fantastic recreations, with the assistance of the Met in New York and through the generosity of our donors, will provide visitors to the castle now, and for generations to come, with a real insight into how the palace may have been at the time of James V.
“The completion of this last tapestry, The Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn, is made all the more impressive by the fact that only two fragments of the original remain in New York.
“Through extensive research, the team were able to build up a picture of how the panel might have looked originally and it’s thrilling to see the end result hanging in the palace with the rest of the series, marking the final step in a 14-year journey.”

The Story of the Unicorn

Taken together, the seven tapestries tell the story of a unicorn hunted and killed by a group of huntsmen and dogs. This can be read as both as an allegory of love, and as a Christian parable.

The unicorn was an important mythical beast from Roman times and perhaps earlier. It was believed to be both powerful and pure, and could only be tamed by a maiden.

In the late-medieval period, the unicorn was adopted as the supporter of the Scottish royal coat of arms. We know that James V owned two sets of tapestries featuring a unicorn.

The pre-union arms of Scotland. The helmet’s crest features a sitting lion that carries the Honours of Scotland (crown, sceptre, sword).

The post Experts recreate king’s ancient lost unicorn tapestries at Sirling Castle appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.

Lordscairnie Castle

Lordscairnie Castle – situated on the outskirts of Fife near Moonzie – was built between 1493 and 1498 by Sir Alexander Lindsay, seventh Earl of Crawford. The forlorn ruins are being sold for around £200,000, with selling agent Smiths Gore hoping to find an ‘emotional purchaser’ ready to take on the castle’s challenges.

At the time the castle was built, Sir Lindsay was one of the most powerful noblemen in Scotland, with the castle acting as an important centre for Clan Lindsay’s operations and aspirations in central Scotland. Its colourful history includes castle raids, house arrests, conflicts with the Bishop of St Andrews and a visit by James V of Scotland just before his death in 1542.

The castle was abandoned in the mid 17th Century and was utilised by the local congregation as a church until the end of the 17th Century. Unoccupied since then, ownership was transferred to the Earl of Glasgow in the 1840s, then by a succession of local farmers before it became the property of the existing owner.

According to local lore, treasure was hidden in the castle, but to date nothing of significant value has come to light. The ghost of Sir Lindsay is also said to haunt the castle on New Years Eve. His ghost can be seen playing cards with the devil at midnight on December 31, though anyone watching it will travel to hell with them at the end of the match.

The B listed castle sits in 30 acres of open countryside at the foot of Colluthie Valley. The grounds also include a large pond, said to be home to about 50 different species of birds. The castle walls are 6 feet thick in many places and when restored the castle could be up to five stories tall, rising to a level of 65 feet. Smiths Gore has estimated that restoration would cost £600,000 to £1 million on top of the purchase price.

Lordscairnie Castle Property Listing

Cavers Castle

A slightly more ambitious restoration project is also available for purchase near the Borders. Cavers Castle, once a 64-room 100,000 acre residence, was the seat of Clan Douglas for more than 300 years. Today much of the land has been sold  – 11 acres remain – and all that remains of the castle is the east wing, but only as an empty shell.

The castle was constructed around 1200 and first inhabited by the Balliols. Clan Douglas, instrumental in banishing the Balliols from Scotland, were granted the lands by David II of Scotland in 1352. Sir Archibald Douglas, 3rd Earl of Douglas was responsible for the construction of Cavers Tower, a traditional fortified Scottish tower, on the site of the original castle after he succeeded to the earldom when James Douglas fell at the Battle of Otterburn in 1388.

In 1542 Cavers was burnt by Dacre with the help of Sir Walter Scott of Branxholm, and in 1545 it figures in a list of places “brent, raced, and cast doune” during the War of Rough Wooing. Cavers House was inhabited by a branch of the black Douglas family until the twentieth descendent, James Douglas died in 1878 leaving no male heir. The property passed to his niece Mary Malcolm who married Captain Edward Palmer in 1879 and the property was substantially re-modelled as Cavers House between 1881 and 1887.

Cavers House in better days, circa 1887

The house eventually became disused and was made available to the army for use in a demolition by explosives exercise in 1953. The army were partially successful in destroying the Victorian section but made little impact on the thick 11-feet thick walls of the older medieval section.

Cavers Castle Property Listing

Cavers Castle on Google Maps – You can see the castle in the woods near Cavers Auld Kirk.

Cavers Tower Flickr Set - Contains fascinating photographs of the castle as it was in 2009. Also contains an interesting story about a witch who cursed the 17th Century Douglases.

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“Yestre’en the Queen had fower Maries

The nicht she’ll hae but three

There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton,

And Mary Car-Michael and me.”

It is believed that the ballad is fictional, and the four Marys come from the four ladies-in-waiting chosen by James V’s Queen, Mary of Guise, to be companions to Mary, Queen of Scots who succeeded her father at the age of just 6 days old. However, none of these woman were called Mary Hamilton; they were in fact Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming, Mary Livingston, and Mary Seton.

Mary Hamilton awaiting execution

Yet, there was a real Mary Hamilton, whose story and downfall is rather similar to that of the Mary Hamilton in the ballad.

Mary Hamilton was a Scottish lady-in-waiting to the Russian Empress Catherine I. She was a member of a Scottish Hamilton family who emigrated to Russia sometime in the sixteenth century, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It is believed that she was the daughter of a William Hamilton. Mary became a lady-in-waiting to Catherine I in 1713, and she attracted a lot of attention around the royal Russian court due to her beauty and love life, and it wasn’t long before she became the mistress of Peter the Great. But the Tsar wasn’t her only lover, she was also having an affair with Ivan Mikhailovich Orlov, an aide-de-camp to Tsar Peter. However, Orlov had another mistress, and when Mary found out, she tried to win him back by giving Orlov gifts which she had stolen from Catherine.

Over the years Mary became pregnant on at least three occasions, and had two abortions – one in 1715, apparently by consuming constipation medicine. However, she did have a secret birth two years later in 1717, but afterwards killed the baby by drowning it. That same year her lover Orlov was questioned over some missing documents, and during the interrogation he confessed to having had an affair with Mary, and claimed that she had an abortion.

A rumor was spread that the Empress, Catherine, had a slightly unorthodox skin care method: it was alleged that she would eat wax to make her skin pale. And Mary Hamilton was accused of starting this rumor by Avdotya Chernysheva; Ivan Orlov’s other lover. This, unsurprisingly, annoyed Catherine, and she demanded that Mary’s room was to be searched. Unfortunately for Mary, her room was where she kept several of the items she stole from the Empress, and when they were discovered Mary and Orlov were both arrested and imprisoned in the Fortress of Saint Petersburg. Whilst in prison Mary not only confessed to the theft, but she also admitted that she murdered her new born child, however, even under torture, she refused to testify against Orlov, despite the fact he had been quick to point fingers at her.

In the November of 1718, Mary Hamilton was sentenced to death for abortion, infanticide, and theft and slander of Empress Catherine. Catherine asked Peter to overrule the death sentence, but he refused. The Tsar did, however, promise Mary that the executioner would not touch her at all, meaning that she would be beheaded with a sword instead of an axe. Mary was executed on the 14th of March, 1719, dressed all in white.

Unfortunately for Mary Hamilton, her execution was not the last indignity that she would suffer. After the decapitation the Emperor went over and picked up Mary’s head and gave the gathered crowd a lecture about its anatomy before kissing it and then throwing it down. The Russian Academy of Science were given her head and they preserved it for at least the next 50 years.

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