On Home Ground: Traquair House
Richard Cavendish visits Traquair House, in Peeblesshire
Never bought or sold since 1491, and a home of lost causes, Traquair is perhaps the most romantic mansion in all Britain. Visitors follow in the footsteps of no fewer than twenty-seven Scottish and English kings and queens since the twelfth century. The harled white walls, little windows and miniature turrets, scarcely changed in three hundred years, speak of a vanished, dangerous age and an unfailing, obstinate, heroic loyalty to the royal house of Stuart, maintained against all odds. The iron Bear Gates of the 1730s, the steekit yetts (‘stuck gates’) at the top of the avenue of trees that leads to the house, were closed when Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, left Traquair in the autumn of 1745. He was promised they would never stand open again until a Stuart sat once more upon the throne, and they have never been opened since. Visitors today go in by the ‘temporary drive’, or side lane.
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