Inside the courtyard

When you walk around the hollow corridors and cold empty rooms of Linlithgow Palace, you could be forgiven for glancing over your shoulder into the dark corners and listening for footsteps on the stairs.

Often overlooked by visitors to Edinburgh and Stirling castles, Linlithgow doesn’t have quite the same groomed magnificence (it’s a burnt-out shell, after all) but it certainly has the history.  Built in 1425 by James I, its walls have seen generations of Scottish monarchs come and go – their births, marriages and deaths, their hopes, joys, fears, victories and losses.

Looking down to the courtyard

Queen Margaret’s Bower

It was at Linlithgow Palace, in April 1512, that the future James V of Scotland was born;  a year later, his father, James IV, faced the Earl of Surrey’s army at the Battle of Flodden Field while his mother, Margaret Tudor, watched from the high north-west…