Fast Castle is a ruined coastal fortress on a promontory with cliffs about forty five metres high, about four miles north west of Coldingham. Robert Logan of Restalrig gained the castle through his mother's marriage to a Lord Home. In 1594 he contracted the mathematician John Napier of Merchiston to search out treasure there, offering him a third of any that was found. No discoveries are recorded.
Later tellings say the castle could be reached from the sea by a basket and pulley from the rocks below, or by a tunnel to a cave at sea level. Sir Walter Scott probably drew on Fast Castle for the Wolf's Crag of The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), so the more gothic details in popular accounts may owe more to fiction than to local belief. Logan was later implicated in the Gowrie conspiracy, which was tried in 1608.
The ruin is reached by a steep path from Dowlaw farm.
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