KELLIE CASTLE 



Kellie Castle in Fifeshire, very near Balcaskie, is another house of the 

 finest type of old Scottish architecture. The basement is vaulted in 

 solid masonry, the ground-Hoor rooms have a height of fourteen feet ; 

 the old hall, now the drawing-room, is nearly fifty feet long. A row of 

 handsome stone dormers to an upper floor, light a set of bedrooms, 

 which, as well as the main rooms below, have coved plaster ceilings 

 of great beauty. 



There is no certain record of the date of the oldest part of the castle. 

 It is assigned to the fourteenth century, but may be older. The earliest 

 actual date found upon the building is 1573, and it is considered that 

 the mass of the castle, as we see it now, was completed by that date, 

 though another portion bears the date 1606. It belonged of old to the 

 Oliphants, a family that held it for two and a half centuries, when 

 it passed by sale to an Erskine, who, early in the seventeenth century, 

 became Earl of Kellie. In 1797, after the death of the seventh Earl, it 

 was abandoned by the family and soon showed signs of deterioration 

 from disuse. About thirty years later the Earldom of Kellie descended 

 to the Earl of Mar, and the family seat being elsewhere, Kellie was 

 allowed to go to ruin. 



In 1878 the ruined place was taken, to its salvation, on a long lease 

 by Mr. James Lorimer, whose widow is the present occupier. It has 

 undergone the most careful and reverent reparation. The broken roofs 

 have been made whole, the walls are again hung with tapestries, and 

 the rooms furnished with what might have been the original appoint- 

 ments. 



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