The Castle That Remembered Better Times
Nestled on the rocky promontory overlooking the Firth of Forth in East Lothian, Scotland, Tantallon Castle looms like a half-remembered war hymn carved in red sandstone. Built in the mid-14th century by William Douglas, 1st Earl of Douglas, the fortress was one of the last great curtain wall castles constructed in Scotland. Its very foundation speaks to both ambition and paranoia—a coastal sentinel designed not only to thwart English incursions but also to symbolize the indomitable power of the Black Douglases, a family whose name once rattled both crown and church.
Tantallon is not your storybook fortress crowned with quaint turrets and lily-drenched moats. It is severe—architecturally austere, strategically uncompromising. The castle featured a massive curtain wall on its landward side, upwards of 15 feet thick, encasing the inland approach with a near-impervious red sandstone shield. On the other three sides, precipitous cliffs fall away into seaweed and gull-cursed surf, making it accessible only by the bravest or most foolish.
It changed hands—often violently—throughout the late Middle Ages. After the death of William Douglas in 1384, the castle passed to his illegitimate son George Douglas, 1st Earl of Angus, whose descendants would come to be known as the Red Douglases. It was James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton and Regent of Scotland, who memorably described Tantallon as “defiant rubble held together by ghosts and politics.”
The castle endured multiple sieges. James IV attempted to pacify it in 1491 with royal artillery, but to little effect. In 1528, James V took a more hands-on approach, besieging the stronghold after repeated challenges by Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus—at the time the de facto stepfather and enemy of the king. Eventually, even royal might overcame the fortress’s pride, and Tantallon fell. Yet somehow, even in defeat, it never truly surrendered.
Perhaps its most ruinous encounter came in 1651 when Oliver Cromwell’s forces laid siege during their campaign to subdue Scotland. Cromwell’s cannons pounded the walls with indifferent fury, at last breaching the southwest tower. What remained was not just structural decay but a sense that the living soul of the castle had fled, disgraced by the ignobility of modern war.
Today, it stands fragmented but not obliterated—its curtain wall still obstinate, reddish-brown in the sun like dried blood. Visitors can still climb the spiral stairs, peer through arrow slits once used to pour death on advancing soldiery, and gaze out over Bass Rock gleaming like a bone in the chiselled sea. The wind whirls through the broken halls as if rehearsing dirges.
Except, of course, during the bus tours.
It began innocuously on a fat gray Tuesday in July—an unfortunate weather that made the gannets bark instead of cry. A woman named Laurel Delphinia Cowper-Steinmeyer arrived wearing a laminated badge that read “EARTH REIKI LEVEL TWO,” accompanied by a Maltese in a turtleneck named Scalpel.
She arrived during the 2:15 guided tour and immediately knelt at the base of the surviving curtain wall, whispering, “I feel the Core Memory here.” At first, the guide nodded politely. It had become common in recent years for American alternative healers to “commune” with the site by crouching or humming softly to the masonry. Nothing too alarming.
But within thirty minutes, Laurel had stripped to a biodegradable bamboo sports bra and had affixed a row of quartz crystals across the gunloops. “Energetic blockages,” she muttered, as crimson sandstone met hand sanitizer. When a concerned Australian couple asked what she was doing, she replied gravely, “Reopening the Liver Meridian of Albion.”
It escalated from whimsical to concerning when she declared the castle was a past-life entity named “Bertroon, Lord of Syllabics” who had been misunderstood during the Siege of Cromwell and “unjustly gaslit by parliamentary forces.” She began a ritual, singing Mariah Carey tunes in slowly ascending keys, climaxing in an operatic version of “Emotions” inside the dungeon, which echoed with tragic sincerity.
Then came the pamphlets. Box after box of self-printed leaflets declaring, “Stone Is Sentient: End Masonry Abuse!” were distributed among other tourists who, whether out of boredom or spiritual vacancy, joined Laurel in chanting by the battlements. A dozen middle-aged women wearing Tibetan scarves locked arms around the curtain wall and began a forgiveness dance.
The final, irreversible threshold came when Laurel—with the solemnity of a pagan priest—approached the shattered portcullis and produced a betrothal certificate professionally laminated in rhombus form. “I name thee Spikey, and my eternal,” she said, before attempting to place a tofu ring on a jagged rusted hinge. She kissed it. There were photos. It went viral.
Bertroon, the castle, did not react in any obvious way. But those close to the masonry swore they heard a groan—ancient, embarrassed, hollow as a dry well.
Now, hanging on its weathered parapet, flapping like a weary flag in the sea air, is a single item: a light blue shirt bearing the phrase “CASTLES GET KICKED IN THE BRICKS.” It was put there by an anonymous custodian, who whispered that it wasn’t just cotton—it was warding. Sacrament. The only thing standing between Bertroon and the next exorcism proposal from Boulder, Colorado.
