Descriptive Gazetteer Entry for Lee Castle

Lee Castle, a mansion in Lanark parish, Lanarkshire, near the left bank of Lee Burn, 3 miles NNW of Lanark town. As renovated in the early part of the present century after designs by Gillespie Graham, it is a castellated two-story edifice, with a dozen round corner turrets and a loftier square central tower, whose twelve windows, three on each side, give light to the great Gothic hall that replaces the open quadrangle of the old house. The interior is rich in paintings, tapestry, and other heirlooms, the portraits including Cromwell, Claverhouse, and Prince Charles Edward; whilst the grounds are beautiful with terraces and wooded slopes. One oak, the 'Pease Tree,' supposed to be a survivor of the great Caledonian Forest, is 68 feet high and 28½ in girth at 6 feet from the ground-it thus being very much thicker than any other oak in Scotland. Cromwell and a party of his followers are said to have dined within its hollow trunk, the entrance to which is yearly growing smaller. The barony of Lee appears to have been acquired towards the close of the 13th century by William Loccard, whose son, Sir Simon, set out with the Good Sir James Douglas to bear the Bruce's heart in battle against the Saracens (1330), and in Spain, from a captive's wife, obtained the `Lee-Penny,' a heart-shaped, dark-red jewel, now set in a shilling of Edward I., with a silver chain and ring attached. Water wherein one had dipped this amulet-the Talisman of Sir Walter Scott's romance-was believed to cure every ailment of man and beast, and so ` late as 1824 a gentleman arrived from Yorkshire and carried off a quantity of the medicated water, with the view of curing his cattle, which had been bitten by a mad dog.' Among the more eminent of Sir Simon's descendants were Sir James Lockhart, Lord Lee (1596-1674); Sir William Lockhart (1620-75); who married Cromwell's niece, and who, says Hill Burton, was `one of the Commonwealth's best generals, and by far its best diplomatist; 'Lord President Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath (1630-89); and George Lockhart (1673-1732), a zealous Jacobite. Sir Simon Macdonald Lockhart, present and fifth Bart. since 1806 (b. 1849; suc. 1870), holds 31,556 acres in the shire, valued at £21,919 per annum.—Ord. Sur., sh. 23, 1865.


(F.H. Groome, Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1882-4); © 2004 Gazetteer for Scotland)

Linked entities:
Feature Description: "a mansion"   (ADL Feature Type: "residential sites")
Administrative units: Lanark ScoP       Lanarkshire ScoCnty

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