Braco Castle

Braco Castle is a large country house which sits within private grounds on an east-facing slope overlooking the confluence of the Keir Burn and the River Knaik in Strathallan. This confluence, about halfway between Dunblane and Auchterarder, has long been of strategic significance, as just the other side of Braco village is the Roman fort of Ardoch, which I have identified with the “town” of Lindum named by Ptolemy.

The lands of Braco fell within the earldom of Strathearn, which had fallen to the Crown following the death of the elderly Maurice de Moravia in 1346 at Neville’s Cross. Although he had a daughter the imprisonment of King David II after the battle allowed Robert the Steward to greatly increase his power and estates – and Strathearn was one to fall to his ambition. It was possessed by the Steward to his son David when he ascended the throne as Robert II in 1371, and then to his daughter Euphemia in 1386. Euphemia’s son Malise Graham succeeded in 1415 aged just five, and was deprived of the peerage in favour of Walter Steward, another son of Robert II – who was executed in 1437. In 1442, Braco was granted to the Bishop of Dunblane. At the Reformation, Braco was nepotistically granted to relatives of the bishops.

In 1576 Andrew Graham, the then bishop, granted Braco to John Graham, 3rd earl of Montrose, by which time it seems likely that an L-plan tower-keep had been founded here, perhaps by the Chisholm relatives of an earlier bishop. This tower is retained at the NW corner of the castle, which was greatly extended in the 17th century, after the Grahams of Braco were ennobled as baronets. It was garrisoned by Jacobites in 1715, and extended again in the 1730s and again by William Graham, 2nd Duke of Montrose, to create a U-shaped mansion. Subsequently it became a dower house for the family, and was altered yet again in the 19th century. The estate passed through several pairs of hands before the estate was broken up in the 1960s. The castle was purchased by the current owners in 1990, who restored it. Today the castle is a private home, although the gardens are sometimes open through the Scotland’s Gardens Scheme.

HES Canmroe database entry