Duffus Castle sits on a man-made mound of gravel in Moray, looking like a sandcastle a giant might have built. That impression is not far off the truth.
The first castle here went up around 1150, made entirely of wood, started by a Flemish mercenary called Freskin and finished by his son William, who swapped his surname for de Moravia, “of Moray.” Stone did not arrive until after 1305. Nobody, it seems, thought hard enough about putting a great stone tower on top of an old gravel mound built for something much lighter. The north wall slid, the tower cracked and slumped down the hill, and the lord had to shift his household into the bailey instead. Building a castle on soft ground is a bit like building a sandcastle above the tideline and hoping the sea has forgotten how tides work.
Now for the good part, the story that makes Duffus worth more than a pile of interesting rubble.
In 1695, a scholar named Dr James Garden wrote to the English antiquary John Aubrey with a tale about a forebear of Lord Duffus. The man had been out walking in his fields nearby when he was suddenly swept up into the air. He turned up the next day in the French king’s cellar in Paris, a silver cup in his hand.
Questioned by the king, he explained himself fully: name, home, and the exact day he had heard a whirlwind and voices shouting “Horse and Hattock,” the password the fairies use, apparently, whenever they are on the move. Being a man who liked to join in, he shouted it back, and was instantly hauled up into the sky. He drank well with his airborne hosts, fell asleep, and woke to find the company gone and himself deposited in the king’s cellar. The king, presumably deciding this was too strange to punish, gave him the cup and sent him home.
That cup, so the story goes, stayed as a family heirloom, known as the Fairy Cup, though sadly with nothing engraved on it beyond the family arms. No fairy autograph, then. Rather a disappointing gift, when you think about it.
The second Lord Duffus, asked later what he made of the tale, called it fabulous, though he admitted the story had come down through his own father and grandfather. A family legend that even the family half doubts is somehow more convincing than one nobody questions at all.
A schoolmaster named Mr Steward, tutor to the young Lord Duffus, claimed he had witnessed something similar himself as a boy in Forres, whipping tops in the churchyard with his friends on a still day. A small cloud of dust rose and turned, moving toward them, at which point one bolder boy shouted “Horse and Hattock with my top,” and the whole group watched the top lift clean off the ground and vanish, carried off, they assumed, on the same invisible wind. They searched everywhere and eventually found it in the churchyard, on the far side of the church.
The lesson offered, with a nod that reads as pure knowing wit rather than genuine alarm, is that using a charm without proper experience is a dangerous business, rather like any apprentice sorcerer discovers sooner or later. Quite right too. A flying top is a mild scare. A flying schoolboy would have been a rather worse afternoon.
Duffus Castle stands now as a cracked stone tower sliding gently downhill, which is either a monument to poor foundations or a monument to a family who once, according to their own tutor, watched a wooden top fly off the ground on a windless day. Whatever fairy traffic once used this stretch of Moray as a runway, RAF Lossiemouth is less than a mile up the road, and the many jets taking off today made enough noise and vibration to have put paid to that sort of thing for good. The fairies, one imagines, have found somewhere quieter to keep their horses and hattocks.
Sources
- Duffus Castle. Interpretative information boards. Viewed 9 Sept 2026.
- Westwood, Jennifer and Sophia Kingshill. The Lore of Scotland: A Guide to Scottish Legends. 2011. Arrow Books.
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