Melville Castle

Melville Castle stands above the River North Esk at Lasswade, in Midlothian just south of Edinburgh, on a site with a documented history stretching back further than the current building itself. The earliest record dates to 1155, under a landholder named Galfrid de Malle, and the property passed to Sir John Ross in 1371. A persistent local tradition connects the earlier fortified house on this site to Mary Queen of Scots and her Italian secretary David Rizzio — one of several such associations that recur across Midlothian's castle landscape, reflecting the density of sites connected, whether firmly or loosely, to the queen's turbulent mid-16th-century reign.

The mansion visitors see today, however, is a distinctly later building, with origins in 18th-century commercial wealth rather than medieval nobility. Sir David Rannie, who had made his fortune with the East India Company, purchased the original estate in 1762. The property subsequently passed by marriage to Henry Dundas — Rannie's son-in-law — who would go on to become one of the most powerful and controversial figures in late 18th-century British politics, a dominant force in Scottish patronage networks and eventually 1st Viscount Melville. Dundas commissioned the Edinburgh architect James Playfair to design an entirely new castellated mansion, built between 1786 and 1791, replacing whatever earlier structure had stood on the site and giving Melville Castle its current late-Georgian form — castellated in silhouette, in the fashion of the period, without being a genuine defensive structure.

The Dundas family retained Melville Castle well beyond Henry Dundas's own lifetime, holding the property until after the Second World War. In the mid-20th century the castle took on institutional functions distinct from its origins as a private mansion, serving for a period as an army rehabilitation centre before a subsequent period of use as a hotel. That hotel use did not last indefinitely: the castle fell into disuse in the early 1980s, entering a period of decline that lasted over a decade.

The turning point came in 1993, when the Hay Trust purchased Melville Castle and undertook an eight-year restoration, returning the building to a condition suitable for reopening as a hotel in 2003. The castle has continued to evolve since then: a further renovation saw it reopen again in 2021 under the Original Collection group, refreshing the property for its current era of operation while retaining the Georgian mansion's essential character.

For visitors who don't want to book a room, Melville Castle's Brasserie restaurant and its Afternoon Tea service are both explicitly open to the public without any requirement to stay overnight. The Afternoon Tea runs from 13:00 to 16:00 and follows the traditional three-tier format, offering a mix of sweet and savoury items — a straightforward, well-established way to spend an afternoon inside a genuine Georgian mansion a short distance from Edinburgh, and a natural pairing with a visit to nearby Dalhousie Castle, which sits close by in the same corner of Midlothian and offers a similar public-facing dining arrangement in a considerably older building.