Looking back on the history of Herbertshire Castle, Dunipace

Not long ago I was talking to an old Denny exile who was reminiscing about the pranks of his youth.

In particular, he recalled visiting an old ruined castle on the Dunipace side of the Carron which he said was haunted by the ghosts of children lost in a fire.

Now I’m not too keen on supernatural ‘happenings’, but castles I do like and the one he was talking about, Herbertshire, was certainly the site of a disastrous fire in 1914.

Charles Forbes, of Callendar House, with his wife and six children had gathered for Christmas, with 15 staff and two guests when fire broke out in the small hours of December 20. The family escaped via the roof but the guests, sisters Cynthia and Clare Graham, aged 14 and 16, from Aithrey Castle, and the children’s governess, Rachel Littlejohn, were trapped in their bedrooms and perished in the flames.

Despite the efforts of the staff, the people of Denny and the fire brigade the castle was gutted and stood in a ruinous condition for decades before it was demolished in the early 1950s when the Barnego Road housing estate was built.

It was a double tragedy, for as well as the loss of life, it signalled the beginning of the end for the lands of Herbertshire which had a long and interesting history dating back well before the castle was built in the 15th Century.

It is difficult to be certain about the early period, but we know in the early 1200s a Herbert de Camera possessed the land and may have erected a first wooden ‘fortalice’ or motte on top of the hill where the stone castle was eventually built.

For a time the lands were owned by the celebrated Douglas family before passing to the Sinclairs, Earls of Orkney, around 1407. They were in occupation for the next two centuries, building the ‘new’ castle in 1474.

The Sinclairs were of course the famous family who just 30 years earlier had founded Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, with all its intriguing associations with the infamous Knights Templar, ‘stars’ of the best selling yarn spun by Dan Brown 20 years ago.

The Templar Order had been disbanded a century before the Sinclairs came to Dunipace but many Templar holdings had passed to another related order of Christian Knights, the Hospitallers, whose main place in Scotland was at Torphichen.

Interestingly, they did hold some lands in the Denny area, preserved in the names Dryburgh and Temple-Denny, which at one time encompassed almost a third of Denny parish. Unfortunately there is no surviving evidence linking Herbertshire with either the Templars or Hospitallers, but it is an intriguing thought.

At a later period the Stewart Kings used the Dunipace area for hunting and falconry and on those occasions Herbertshire Castle would no doubt have become a royal residence for the duration. Around 1600, the Livingstons, of Callendar, bought the lands and castle and they were followed in 1632 by the Stirlings who were in occupation for over a century.

The original L-shaped tower house was extended with all kinds of odd additions creating a cocktail of turrets, towers and side buildings we can see in surviving photos.

In 1768 a new family arrived, the Moreheads, from London, whose ancestors were Muirheads from Hamilton. During their period the castle was used as a residential school for boys before it was purchased by William Forbes, of Callendar, in 1835. It seems to have been used 
as a family dower house during the 19th Century until that tragic night in December, 1914, when those lives were lost, along with a fascinating part of our local history.