Gight and the Gordons

By Alan Hay

The year is 1644 and the Covenanters are on the march. The castle of Gight on Aberdeenshire’s River Ythan is under siege. Its Royalist laird, George Gordon, knows the castle is lost and makes plans to salvage what he can. He orders his treasure tied to the castle yett and sunk in the Hagberry Pot, a prodigious hole in the river, of supernatural reputation, situated just below the castle walls.

The tide shortly turned with the Royalist ‘year of victories’ and the laird felt secure enough to retrieve his assets. A trusted servant was instructed to dive into the Hagberry Pot and attach a chain to the yett, to bring it to the surface. Reluctantly he agreed, mindful of the hellish legends attached to the Pot. At the bottom, he found the Devil and his fallen angels seated at a table and dining off the laird of Gight’s gold plate.

He returned to the surface, in a fragile emotional state, and begged the laird not to send him back. Threats and inducements failed to move him, so the laird resorted to the form of persuasion he knew best - torture. The loyal servant was subjected to unspeakable abuses and, when his fingernails were drawn, he relented with the words, “better to face the Deil than the laird o’ Gight.”

As the laird and his henchmen waited on the river bank, they were aghast to see the Hagberry Pot begin to boil, like a great cauldron. Then, to their unutterable horror, the unfortunate servant’s quartered body sprang to the surface, followed by his heart, impaled on a jeweled dagger.

The tale is not, of course, in any respect believable and, as the late Lord Aberdeen wrote, the Hagberry Pot is nowhere near as deep as the story is tall. However, it became part of local folklore and it nonetheless tells us something instructive about the nature of the Gordons of Gight, surely one of the most appalling families in Scotland’s history.

The River Ythan bisects Aberdeenshire from its rising at Ythanwells, meandering through Auchterless, Fyvie, Methlick and Ellon before decanting into the North Sea at Newburgh. Half way along its course, between Fyvie and Methlick, are the lands of Gight. The grim remains of Gight Castle stand above a dark and spectral section of the river whose features have acquired such chilling names as Corbie’s Crag, Witches’ Peel, Black Stank and Craig Horror. The overall effect, even today, serves as a tangible reminder of the terrible deeds perpetrated here.

The earliest records of Gight refer to its ownership by the Maitland family. Patrick Maitland died leaving an estate heavily burdened by debt and two young daughters who were placed in the Earl of Huntly’s care. Huntly bought the barony of Gight from

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Maitland’s heirs and there installed his third son, William, who became the first Gordon of Gight.

The dynasty made a good start. The first laird died fighting for king and country at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. Thereafter, however, his descendants went immediately off the rails. For close on 300 years, they pursued careers of such lawlessness as beggars belief.

The Gordon historian JM Bullloch enumerates the sticky end to which the first laird’s descendants came. A son was killed at the Battle of Pinkie and a son-in-law was murdered. Of his grandsons, two were killed in battle, in Flanders and Holland, one was executed and another drowned. A grandson-in-law was murdered - by his wife’s brother, the laird of Gight. Two great-grandsons were murdered, one died in prison, another was killed in battle and one (a mercenary) assassinated the Bohemian General, Albrecht von Wallenstein. A great-granddaughter was excommunicated, another great-granddaughter was prosecuted for assault (upon a man) and a great grandsonin-law was poisoned. The pattern continues down the generations and it is difficult to think of another family whose name was such a byword for trouble.

George, the second laird, was born about 1502. Little is recorded of him, but we know he was ordered in 1562 to keep within the burgh of Edinburgh until released by the Queen, along with the other Gordon lairds of Haddo, Abergeldie and Lesmoir. Two years later, he and his eldest son were arraigned before the Privy Council for ‘the crewale invasion of William Con of Auchry and hurting and wounding him in divers parts of his body to the grate effusion of his blude.’ Early in their history, the Gight Gordons were already confirmed disciples of direct action to resolve their grievances.

His son was no better. At the time of his death in 1579, George, third laird, was in trouble for sheltering his cousin William, later fifth laird of Gight, who was ‘at the horn for the cruell slaughter of umquhill Thomas Fraser of Strichen.’ A contemporary account confirms William killed Fraser - his sister’s father-in-law - on the bridge over the River Ugie at Old Deer, with a single blow of his great two-handed sword.

Like many of his family, the third laird came to a bad end. The Master of Forbes had married the Earl of Huntly’s sister, Margaret Gordon. Forbes divorced her in 1574 and a lengthy feud resulted - one in which the Gordons of Gight took an enthusiastic part. The feud was directed by the lady’s brother, Sir Adam Gordon of Auchindoun, notoriously recalled as ‘Edom o’ Gordon’. Auchindoun had killed Lord Forbes’s son Arthur in France, although, in Adam’s defence, Forbes had gone there specifically to kill him. The result was a duel, fought on the shore at Dundee, between Gordon of Gight and

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Alexander Forbes, younger of Towie, during which Gight was killed.

The third laird left an only daughter, who married the Earl of Dunbar, and was succeeded by his uncle. John, fourth of Gight, produced four sons and seven daughters, all of whom played their part in building the family’s fearsome reputation. His second son, also named John, took part in the murder of the Bonny Earl of Moray in 1592. He was grievously injured in the fight, but his wounds were tended so that he could be brought to trial and executed. In mitigation, he claimed to have been there against his will, although he confessed that ‘the Lord had brought him to this shamefull end for his menie other great offences.’

The third son, Alexander, was a soldier in Holland, ambushed and killed on his return home in 1585. Of the daughters, Margaret married Alexander Chalmers of Strichen, stepson of the Thomas Fraser who was murdered by Margaret’s brother William. Catherine married John Keith of Clackriach, likewise murdered by that same brother in 1585, ushering in a bloody feud with the Keiths.

The fifth laird was arguably the worst of his line, although his son would try hard to emulate him. We have already seen that he murdered two of his in-laws. He further murdered the son of Leslie of Warthill, apparently for no better reason than that Leslie had intervened to resolve a dispute between Gight and Troup of Bryshall. In 1587, he was ordered to restore Cairnbanno House, having had his men despoil it.

Two years later, he was instructed, as a rebel, to surrender Gight Castle within two hours. In a towering rage, Gight had to be forcibly prevented from killing the Sheriff ’s Officer on the spot. Instead, he seized the documents the court officer was carrying, ‘kaist them in a dische of bree’, making a soup of the unfortunate lawman’s papers and forcing him to ‘sup and swallow thame.’

The fifth laird died in 1605. His daughter Elspeth, who was cut from the same cloth, married James Cheyne, of the lawless Esslemont family. This pair enriched themselves by robbing their tenants and running a protection racket. When one of them, James Petrie, remonstrated with her, she attacked him, putting ‘violent hands upon him and shamefullie and unhonestlie strak and dang him with her hands and feet in sindra parts of his body.’

Of the sixth laird, also called George, it is written that ‘his life was one long struggle against the forces of law and order.’ As we have seen, his father had killed his brother-in-law, Keith of Clackriach, but the odd murder was not allowed to disrupt family relations for long. Proving that blood is thicker than water, the family was reunited to

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The poet Lord Byron

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wage a sustained campaign of violence against the Leasks of that Ilk, when the sixth laird of Gight was joined by William Keith, the murdered Clackriach’s son, and their mutual cousin John Gordon of Ardlogie.

The death of his violent brother Adam at the hands of his erstwhile friend, the equally unpleasant Francis Hay, led to Hay being hunted down by Gight and his remaining brothers and killed with a veneer of legitimacy in the form of a sham trial. The resulting feud between the Gight Gordons and the Hays of Brunthill was described by JM Bulloch as ‘unprecedented even in the history of the Gordons for its ferocity.’

For the rest of his life, the sixth laird continued to wreak havoc wherever he went, but perhaps his worst excesses were reserved for his mother-in-law, Lady Saltoun, whom he attempted to blackmail as she lay dying, with the assistance of his son. He died in prison in 1640.

The last of the old Gordons of Gight, Catherine Gordon, mother of Lord Byron

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Subsequent generations continued in similar vein. The eighth laird even tried to eject his own father from Gight, on the basis that the latter had never been properly enfeoffed. The male line came to an end with the death of the ninth laird in 1695. He was succeeded by his daughter Marie, who married a lawyer named Alexander Davidson, of the Davidsons of Newton. Davidson quickly learned the ways of the Gordons and had suitably disgraced himself by his early death in 1716, chiefly by reneging on his debts.

Marie and Davidson had seven children, of whom the youngest, Alexander, succeeded his mother in 1740. Alexander Gordon, 11th of Gight struggled with his happiness and ultimately drowned in the River Ythan in January 1760. The official explanation of his death is that he was bathing in the river. However, as JM Bulloch observes, Scotsmen of the 1760s had not yet become such slaves to the tub as to take baths in freezing rivers in the depths of winter. The conclusion is that the mental instability which had been evident in the Gordons for so many generations took a different direction in the case of the tragic 11th laird.

Alexander left 14 children by his wife, Margaret Duff, of whom all but the eldest took the Davidson name. He was succeeded by his son George, in whose life his father’s sad story repeated itself. Distraught at the death of his youngest daughter, he drowned in Bath Canal in 1779.

His daughter Catherine was the last of the line, born in 1765. Generations of reckless mismanagement combined with Catherine’s disastrous marriage to Captain John ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, who saw her as a meal ticket, ensured the estate was thoroughly insolvent by 1787.

At about that time, the herons left the Ythan at Gight and flew over the hill to Haddo House, seat of the covetous third Earl of Aberdeen, known to some as the ‘wicked earl’, and to others as ‘Lord Skinflint.’ The Factor at Haddo ordered the birds shot before they raided the Earl’s fish ponds. Mindful of an old prophecy attributed to Thomas the Rhymer, the Earl told him to let them be, ‘for the land will soon follow.’

He was right. This Earl knew how to make money. He could see his rent roll rising year by year and understood there were good opportunities to be had by landlords who had the ready cash to take over the property of their less prudent peers. He bought Gight in 1787 for £17850 and Catherine ended up living in Aberdeen with her baby son, who in the fullness of time would become the sixth Lord Byron and achieve immortal memory as one of the greatest of our romantic poets.

The Earl’s son, Lord Haddo, had recently married and Gight Castle was renovated for the heir and his young family. They did not enjoy it for long. In the fulfilment of another alleged prophecy, Haddo was killed in 1791, falling from his horse, which had been startled by a servant’s sudden movement when drawing water from a well on the Greens of Gight.

After this tragedy, the wicked old Earl showed emotion for perhaps the only time in his long and misspent life, and turned his back on Gight, the place that had cost him his son. Gight remains part of the Marquess of Aberdeen’s estate, but the castle was abandoned and left to fall into inexorable decline. Today, only a crumbling ruin in the corner of a field survives to remind us of a family that, generation by generation, was the terror of its neighbourhood.

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