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Cortachy Castle stands on the South Esk, guarding the mouth of Glen Clova in northern Angus. Today it is the seat of the Earls of Airlie, but its earliest significance lies in its place within the Strathearn patrimony inherited by Joanna de Moravia, whose marriage to Archibald the Grim, 3rd Earl of Douglas, briefly brought Cortachy under Douglas authority.
The first castle on the site, built c.1330, belonged to the Stewart Earls of Strathearn. Joanna, sole heiress of that line, held Cortachy in her own right and exercised feudal authority there before her Douglas marriage, issuing charters that confirm her control of the barony. Through her union with Archibald Douglas in 1362, Cortachy passed de jure uxoris into Douglas hands, forming part of the broad Moray–Strathearn inheritance that underpinned the rise of the late‑fourteenth‑century Black Douglases.
Although the Douglases never resided at Cortachy, their tenure marked the period in which the barony was tied to Bothwell, Drumsagard, and the wider territorial consolidation achieved by Archibald the Grim. Douglas influence faded in the early fifteenth century as the Moray inheritance fragmented.
In 1473, James III granted Cortachy to Sir Walter Ogilvy, beginning the long Ogilvy/Airlie association. The surviving structure—much altered over centuries—retains three of its original round towers, including one with a distinctive corbelled watch‑room. The castle endured damage in 1641 at the hands of Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyll, and was burned in 1651 by Oliver Cromwell following the Ogilvys’ support for Charles II, who had lodged there the previous year.
The Ogilvy estates were forfeited after the Jacobite rising of 1745, occupied by government troops, and restored within a generation. The Earldom itself was not recovered until 1826, after which Cortachy was remodelled and later extended in 1871 by David Bryce, whose baronial wing was destroyed by fire in 1883. During the Second World War the castle served as a military hospital, and Bryce’s wing was subsequently removed.
Local tradition holds that Cortachy is haunted by a drummer, whose sound is said to foretell a death in the Ogilvy family.
Details of the Barony can be found here>>>
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