Garth Castle

King James IV

King James IV then came north to sort out the affair. Neil kept his head by surrendering his captive once he had extracted a document in which the prisoner forgave his captor. Having been deprived of control of much of his estates Neil's later years are obscure but he survived into very ripe old age, dying in 1554. He was suspected of murdering his wife by dropping a rock on her head when she was down in the burn below the castle. Tradition has it that his last nine years after her death were spent in the dungeon of his own castle.

It is interesting to compare this, the oral tradition's vilification of Neil, with documented history. The dispute was about land and Neil was supported by the Stewarts of both Grantully and Bonskeid. Three years after the burning of the Menzies stronghold, the king confirmed Neil in the lands he inherited. And the Menzies never did win possession. The earl of Huntly, married to Neil's sister-in-law, became titular lord of the disputed estates but Neil retained control. His second wife was killed by a stone falling from above but the man responsible is named as Alexander Stewart and the use of 'negligently' in the contemporary report would, at worst, indicate a culpable homicide rather than murder. The tradition that Neil lived his last nine years in his own dungeon would seem to be a confusion with his ancestor the Wolf who built Garth Castle and did indeed spend a considerable time imprisoned by his royal father after the burning of Elgin cathedral. The Wolf himself did his penance and now lies in Dunkeld cathedral, his tomb topped by an effigy of himself in full armour.

Once fortifications would have covered the site of Garth Castle but now only the central keep remains. Brutally plain and functional, it is built of unhewn boulders, its height twenty metres, its two metre-thick walls containing the staircase. It sits on a promontory that juts out over the gorge containing the Keltney burn. The neck of the promontory was then broken which made the building virtually impregnable before the days of gunpowder and sufficient of a nuisance afterwards for Cromwell's soldiers to render it unusable after Glencairn's Rising in 1653. The castle remained a ruin for three hundred years but its inaccessibility and the size of the stones with which it is constructed preserved it from the fate of most of the little clachans which dotted Atholl. These have vanished, mined by Victorians to turn into drystone dykes, shooting lodges, barns, and paved yards.

The castle was restored in the 1950s although the architect, curiously, left it with a flat roof instead of the gables with which it had once been more elegantly endowed.