The Castle on the Cliff: Bram Stoker, the Earls of Erroll, and the Hay Tartan

The story of the Hay tartan is tied to one of Scotland’s oldest noble families, the Earls of Erroll, whose ancestral seat at Slains Castle later became linked with one of the world’s most famous Gothic novels. In the summer of 1893, a tall, red-bearded Irishman with a job in the London theatre arrived in a fishing village on the Aberdeenshire coast, took rooms at the Kilmarnock Arms, and went for a walk.

His name was Bram Stoker. He was business manager to the great actor Henry Irving at the Lyceum, and he had come to Cruden Bay because a friend had told him the air was good and the place was quiet. He walked north along the top of the cliffs, past the fishing cottages of Port Erroll and the harbour, until he came to a headland where a castle stood on the very edge of the rock, granite walls rising straight out of the grass above a drop into the North Sea.

It was Slains, the seat of the Earls of Erroll, chiefs of the Hays. Stoker came back to Cruden Bay every summer for years afterwards, and it was there, in 1895, that he wrote a good part of a novel that he published two years later. It was called Dracula.

The octagon room

Nobody can prove that Slains is Castle Dracula, and the claim has been made for several other buildings. But the case for it is better than most. Stoker was in Cruden Bay during the years he was writing the book. He knew the castle, and by some accounts was entertained there by the Hays. And the description of Dracula’s castle in the novel, standing on a great rock with a sheer fall beneath its windows, matches the position of Slains exactly.

One detail is more particular. Jonathan Harker, exploring the count’s castle, finds a great octagonal room with no windows. Slains had an octagonal hall. Visitors to the ruin can still stand in it.

The castle was sold in 1916, unroofed in 1925, and has been a shell since, one of the most dramatic ruins on the east coast of Scotland. People walk out to it from Cruden Bay on autumn afternoons, as Stoker did, and watch the sea come in below.

Serva jugum

The family that built it were the Hays, and they had been great men in Scotland for six hundred years before Stoker ever saw their house.

Their origin story is one of the best in the Highlands, and almost certainly untrue. In the year 980, or thereabouts, the Danes landed in Angus and put the Scottish army to flight at Luncarty, near Perth. A farmer named Hay was ploughing nearby with his two sons. Seeing the Scots run, the three of them tore the yokes from their oxen, stood in a narrow pass, and beat the fleeing soldiers back into the fight until the Danes were routed. The King rewarded the farmer with as much land as a falcon could fly over, and the falcon flew from Kinnoull Hill to the Hawk Stane at St Madoes. That is why the Hay crest is a falcon, why the motto is Serva jugum, keep the yoke, and why two rustic figures carrying ox-yokes stand as supporters on the chief’s coat of arms.

What is certain is that the Hays were Norman knights who came north in the twelfth century, and that they rose fast. In 1314, after Bannockburn, King Robert the Bruce made Sir Gilbert Hay hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, and the office has remained in the family ever since. The Lord High Constable is the sovereign’s principal officer in Scotland, responsible for the King’s safety when he is in the country, and at a coronation the Earl of Erroll stands with the royal party. The present earl, Merlin Hay, holds the office today. The family were made Earls of Erroll in 1452. Their clan centre is at Delgatie Castle, near Turriff.

The bloody Hays

The Hays had no tartan until the nineteenth century, and theirs came, like so many, from the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842, that splendid and unreliable book. But the family embraced it thoroughly. In December 2002 the Earl of Erroll himself recorded the thread count with the Court of the Lord Lyon, which puts the sett beyond argument.

It is a strong red tartan, and an unusual one. The ground is scarlet, crossed by bands of a dark, slightly olive green, and through the design run fine lines of yellow, black and white. The white line is set on the red in such a way that from a distance the cloth seems to have a pale seam running through the blood. It is well suited to a family whose lands once looked out on a castle in a horror story.

Those looking for Hay tartan will find it offered in Modern colours, where the scarlet is at full strength, and in Ancient, where it fades towards brick and the green to moss. Retailers make it to order as kilts, skirts, waistcoats, ties and scarves, or sell it by the yard. Hay, Hays, Hayes and a number of sept names, Gifford, Leith and MacGaradh among them, are traditionally connected with it.

Cruden Bay, the second week of October

Daniel Hay is thirty-seven, writes crime novels, lives in Toronto, and has read Dracula eleven times. His father’s family came from Turriff. This year he has come to Aberdeenshire to walk in Stoker’s footsteps, and, since he is a man who likes to do a thing properly, to do it in the family tartan.

The kilt is eight yards of scarlet and green. What he had not thought about until the week before the flight was the sporran, and it turned out to matter, because the sporran is where a writer keeps his notebook.

His first instinct was the one every beginner has: the sporran with the fur front and the silver top, the one in the wedding photographs. He learned fast that this is evening dress. It looks wrong with a tweed jacket on a cliff path, and it is nearly useless as a pocket, because the metal cantle narrows the opening to the width of a card holder.

What he wanted was the older thing, the plain leather pouch that Highlanders hung from their belts for centuries before the army decorated it. Outfitters call that a day sporran. Scottish Kilt, which had made his kilt, keeps its day sporrans together on one page: plain and lightly tooled leather, black or brown, with or without tassels, and the guidance that this is the most versatile kind and the right first sporran for almost everyone. He chose brown, to go with a brown tweed jacket and brown brogues, with a small Celtic knot tooled on the flap and three plain tassels, and a gusset deep enough to take a pocket notebook and a pencil. Black, he had read, is the safer choice if one sporran has to do evening duty as well, but he has no evenings planned that a tweed jacket cannot cover, and brown leather on a red kilt with a green band looks, to his eye, like something out of a Victorian shooting party.

On the morning he walks north from the Kilmarnock Arms along the cliff path, with the wind off the North Sea flattening the grass and the kilt swinging against his knees. He is glad of the hose. The sporran rides a hand’s width below his belt buckle, on a leather strap rather than a chain, and does not bounce.

Slains comes into view at the top of the headland, roofless, granite, the colour of the sky, on the lip of the rock. He goes in through what was the front door and stands in the octagon room with the wind coming through the empty windows. He takes the notebook out of the sporran and writes for twenty minutes. Then he puts it back, closes the flap on its stud, and walks on to the harbour.

At the bar that evening a retired trawlerman asks him, in the way of the coast, what his tartan is.

“Hay.”

“Erroll’s folk. That was their castle you were up at.” The old man nods at the window, towards the dark headland. “You’ll ken about the writer.”

“That’s why I came.”

“My grandmother’s mother used to see him. Walking. Big man, red beard, wouldn’t speak to anybody.” The old man takes a drink. “Wrote it all down in a wee book, she said. Just like you.”

Keep the yoke

Stoker’s count is fiction, and the ploughman with the ox-yoke at Luncarty almost certainly is too. What is true is that a family of Norman knights became the hereditary guardians of the King of Scots, built a house on the edge of the sea, and kept it long enough for an Irish theatre manager to walk beneath its walls and imagine the worst thing he could.

Their tartan is red with a pale line through it, and it looks well on a cliff path in October, over a plain leather pouch with a notebook inside. The Hays kept the yoke. A writer keeps the notebook. Both are a kind of holding on.