Clan OgilvyA Fin

The Lands

Angus, and
the glens behind it

The Ogilvy country is a narrow, beautiful strip of eastern Scotland: fat farmland running north from the Tay, then three long glens cutting up into the Grampians. Here is where to stand if you want to stand where they stood.

Airlie Castle — Angus

The Bonnie House

Airlie Castle

Built in 1432 by Sir Walter Ogilvy of Lintrathen, Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, on a rock promontory where the Melgam river meets the Isla. Water guards three sides; a great curtain wall was thrown across the fourth.

Burned by Argyll’s Covenanting force in 1640 and mourned in the ballad that carries its name, it was rebuilt and remains in the family to this day. Substantial portions of the original fifteenth-century wall still stand.

Airlie Castle is a private home. Its gardens have occasionally opened to visitors under Scotland’s Gardens Scheme — check current listings before travelling.

Cortachy Castle — the chief’s seat

The Seat

Cortachy Castle

At the mouth of Glen Clova, where the South Esk comes down out of the hills, Cortachy has been the principal residence of the Earls of Airlie for centuries — a tower house grown, over generations, into a great Scottish country house.

It is the seat of the Chief of the Name and Arms of Ogilvy. If there is a single address that the clan considers home, it is this one.

Cortachy is a private family home and estate. The surrounding estate roads and paths in Glen Clova are open to walkers under Scotland’s access rights; the house itself is not.

Forter Castle — Glen Isla

Restored

Forter Castle

A tall sixteenth-century Ogilvy tower house at the head of Glen Isla, burned alongside Airlie in 1640 and left roofless for three hundred and fifty years.

It was rescued and fully restored in the late twentieth century, and now stands complete again above the glen — one of the few Ogilvy strongholds a visitor can actually sleep in, since it operates as a private letting.

Glen Clova, Glen Prosen & Glen Isla

The Angus Glens

Clova, Prosen, Isla

Three long glens run north from the Angus farmland into the Grampian plateau, and all three are Ogilvy country. This is where the clan’s tenants lived, where its regiments were raised, and where most of its emigrants were born.

Above Dykehead, on the shoulder of Tulloch Hill, stands the Airlie Monument — a tower raised in memory of the 9th Earl of Airlie, killed leading his regiment in South Africa in 1900. It is a short walk up, it is open to anyone, and the view down the glens from it is the best short introduction to the clan’s country there is.

The barony of Ogilvie, parish of Glamis

Where It Started

The ground itself

The original barony of Ogilvie lay in the parish of Glamis, a few miles north of Forfar. There is no Ogilvy castle there to visit — the family moved its centre of gravity north-west into the glens long ago — but the fields are the fields, and the name on the map is the name on your birth certificate.

Glamis Castle, which stands nearby and is open to the public, is the seat of the Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne — a Lyon house, not an Ogilvy one. The connection is the parish, not the castle.

And Everywhere Else

The other Ogilvy country

Most of the name no longer lives in Angus. It lives in the Carolinas and Ontario, in Otago and Victoria, in Ulster and in every American state — and those places are Ogilvy country too.

Find your line

Emigration records, parish registers, and the spelling drift that happens at every border crossing. Members get help working a line back from a US census entry to an Angus parish.

Walk the ground

We are planning group visits to Angus — the Airlie Monument, the glens, the castles, the kirkyards. Going with people who share the name is a materially different experience from going alone.

Gather at home

Highland games, Burns suppers, Tartan Day and the annual clan dinner. The society exists so that there is somewhere for an Ogilvy to turn up.

Become a founding member →