Keith Marischal

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Keith Marischal is an estate house lying in the parish of Humbie, East Lothian, Scotland. The original building was an "L-shaped" Tower house, built before 1589 when it was extended into a "U-shaped" courtyard house. In the nineteeth century the courtyard was filled in presenting the building one can see today.

In legend the lands of Keith were granted to Marbhachir Chamius (or Camus Slayer), in recognition of his valour at the Battle of Barrie in 1010, the mythological ancestor of the Keith family.

The lands of Keith were possessed in the reign of King David I by Simon Fraser of Keith, the first of that surname to appear on record in Scotland. Fraser presumambly was one of the Normans invited and granted land by King David during his programme of Normanicisation. Fraser was made Sherriff of Tweeddale. He is recorded in a charter gifting some lands and dedicating a church to the Tironensian Brothers at Kelso Abbey.

It is unclear however, how the policies at Keith were transferred to another Norman, Harvei the King's Marischal. It is likely that the lands formed part of a dowry. Harvei, certainly held the lands at Keith when he erected a Church there at the end of the twelfth century obeying a royal decree to that effect. Latterly Harvei's progeny took their name from their estate as was common at the time

The parish of today's Humbie was split into the divisions of "Keith Harvey" and "Keith Hundeby" and formed the major part of the estate of the Keiths, until they were granted the rock of Dunnottar in Aberdeenshire at the close of the fourteenth century. Harvei's son was made hereditary Marischal of Scotland in 1176.

The house was built as an L plan tower before 1589 by George Keith, 5th Earl Marischal on the remainder of a previous construction which is heavily obscured, only just discernable in the massive thickness of the southern ground floor internally. Within the grounds, there is evidence of a Barmekin and earthworks in the adjoining cattle meadow which would indicate a mediæval or earlier settlement or castleton.

Following its sale in the seventeenth century to the Earls of Hopetoun, who were eventually to amass massive estates in the area, it is they who carried out the conversion and extension to form a courtyard form house incorporating the original tower. Before 1889, it was sold to the Fraser Tytler family who constructed an extension that filled in the courtyard that provided corridors in the building rather than the more archaic passage from room to room. In 1953 the property was acquired by the architect Sir Robert Hogg Matthew and is still in private hands.

There is a ruined chapel in the grounds of the House, a scheduled ancient monument, which is of early Norman Gothic style. Although unsympathetically restored and stabilised in the nineteenth century as a folly, there is still a wealth of detail that points to its antiquity. These include spiro-form carvings on the Ogee window, and the unidentified tombstone of a crusading knight. It is possible that this is a memorial to Sir William Keith, a companion of the Black Douglas on his campaign to take the heart of Robert the Bruce to the Holy Land. Upon that failed mission Keith brought back the heart of Bruce to Melrose Abbey, and the body of Douglas to St. Bride's Church, Douglas.