Midhope Castle

Where it sits. Midhope Castle stands alone in the farmland of the Hopetoun estate, in the hamlet of Abercorn about four kilometres west of South Queensferry and a short distance inland from the Firth of Forth. There is no village around it, no shop and no signposted high street — just a farm track off the estate road, a field gate, a cluster of steadings and then a tall, roofless, five-storey block of harled rubble rising straight out of the grass. The Forth bridges are ten minutes away by car, Blackness Castle is four kilometres west along the shore, and Hopetoun House sits between the two.

A tower house and its lairds. The lands of Midhope belonged in the fourteenth century to Henry Graham of Mannerstoun, and passed through his daughters to the Livingstones and the Martins. John Martin, laird in 1438, is thought to have built the first tower here. In 1537 Sir James Hamilton of Finnart — James V's Master of Works and the man who modernised Blackness and Linlithgow — acquired a half share of the lands. By the later sixteenth century the castle belonged to Alexander Drummond of Midhope, whose marriage to Marjory Bruce is commemorated by a stone cut AD 1582 MB; Drummond was trusted enough by the Earl of Huntly to hand Mary, Queen of Scots' jewels back to Regent Morton at Holyrood in August 1573. A painted ceiling from the tower survives in state care in Edinburgh, patterned with cinquefoils, and fragments of another show gold stars on blue with the family motto ad astra per ardua. In 1678 the house was modernised: an entrance tower came down, the eastern extension was raised and lengthened, a new doorway was cut, and a walled courtyard roughly 35 by 19 metres was laid out to the south. A big two-chambered dovecot of the same period stands about 140 metres to the south-east.

What you actually see today. Midhope is a shell, and that is the point of the visit. The building is Category A listed, structurally unsound and permanently fenced at the doors and windows, so nobody goes inside; what visitors get is the courtyard, the great blank face of the tower with its irregular window openings, the arched entrance and the surrounding fields. It reads as far more romantic than it would if it were roofed and furnished, which is exactly why a television production picked it.

On screen. Since 2014 Midhope has been Lallybroch, also called Broch Tuarach — the Fraser family home in Outlander, where Jamie Fraser grew up and to which the story returns again and again across the series. The archway, the courtyard and the approach through the field appear in some of the show's most quoted sequences, from Jamie and Claire's arrival to the later returns after Culloden. Every interior at Lallybroch, however, was built at the production's studios at Wardpark in Cumbernauld: the kitchen, the hall, the bedrooms and the famous staircase exist nowhere in this building. Visitors who expect to step into Jenny Murray's kitchen are always surprised, and it is worth knowing before the drive out. The contrast between the two — a hollow ruin and a fully dressed sound stage — is one of the clearest lessons in how screen locations actually work.

Getting there and timing. Access is controlled by the Hopetoun estate, which charges a small admission for parking and entry to the courtyard, generally through the main visitor season and in daylight hours only; arrangements change from year to year, so checking before setting out saves a wasted trip. The final approach is an unsurfaced farm track that turns muddy after rain, and there is no cafe, no toilet and no shelter at the castle itself. Firm shoes and a plan for weather are sensible. Photographers should aim for early morning, when the sun comes round onto the south-facing courtyard wall, or late on a summer evening when the harling goes warm and the fields behind fall into shadow.

What else is close. Abercorn's parish church, a few minutes away, is far older than the castle and repays a stop: this was the seat of a short-lived Northumbrian bishopric under Trumwine in 681, abandoned after the Northumbrian defeat at Nechtansmere in 685, and the church now shelters an outstanding collection of early Christian and Norse-influenced carved stones, including hogback grave markers. Hopetoun House, Blackness Castle and the shoreline stretch of the John Muir Way are all within a few kilometres, and the three of them together make a full and coherent day out along this quiet, under-visited edge of the Forth.