In January 1570 James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh shot the Regent, the Earl of Moray, from a window in Linlithgow. Tradition says Moray's favourite seized Hamilton's house and turned his wife out naked in the fields on a cold night, and that she was furiously mad before morning. Her ghost is said to have haunted both the old Woodhouselee tower and a later mansion partly built from its stones, appearing in white and carrying her child.
Mysterious Britain gives the primary sources as John Ingram's 1897 book and Groome's Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland of 1882 to 1884. It also notes that Isobel actually survived to 1609, when she was legally restored to her lands, which undermines the tragic basis of the tale.
The pin is approximate, since the site of the old tower and the later house lie in the Glencorse area near the city boundary.
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