Fotheringhay Castle, founded around 1100 and deliberately demolished in the 1630s so that only its earthworks survive visible today, carries a genuine and striking reputation for misfortune among nearly everyone connected to it, a reputation earned most dramatically through its two most famous residents. Richard III was born there in 1452, only to be killed at Bosworth in 1485, his reign ending in violent defeat on the battlefield, while Mary, Queen of Scots was later imprisoned and finally executed at the very same castle in 1587, one doomed monarch's birthplace becoming, more than a century later, another's place of death.
Local tradition holds that the site itself was cursed as a direct result of this extraordinary string of disasters associated with it, as though the castle's own ground had somehow absorbed the tragedy of both figures who passed through it at the most fateful moments of their respective lives.
The Scottish thistles that still grow wild across the surviving earthworks today are known locally as Queen Mary's Tears, a piece of genuinely evocative botanical folklore that ties the plant itself directly and permanently to her execution there, transforming an ordinary wild plant into a living, growing memorial to one of English history's most famous royal deaths, still blooming on the same ground centuries later.
Comments