In the early 1970s, electricity and central heating were added and workers cut into the 13-foot-thick stone walls to create bathrooms. Massive Edwardian furnishings, including a good number of four-poster beds, suit the scale and feel of the stone-walled rooms and add a luxurious touch.

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For guests, though, one of the best features of a stay at the castle is a tour, after a lavish five-course dinner, through the castle’s public rooms and bedrooms, including the Queen’s bedchamber and the Red Room, decorated with red paint and red flocked wallpaper.

The Red Room has spooked so many people that the owners called in an Edinburgh priest to exorcise its lingering spirits. Legend says that a young servant girl bore an illegitimate Borthwick son in the room. Mother and baby, potential threats to the title, were quickly put to the sword. In other era, the Borthwick family chancellor used this room, and the niches for his safes remain in the stone wall to this day. According to gossip, the Borthwicks discovered their chancellor was embezzling money from the family coffers. Eschewing the nicety of a performance review, they intercepted the chancellor on his way home from Edinburgh one evening and cancelled his contract by burning him to death.

The ghosts of the young servant girl and the fired chancellor still wander the stony spiral staircases of Borthwick, some people say, and even the most stalwart visitors admit to feeling invisible presences in the Great Hall.

Indeed, a pinch of suspense is all a part of a Borthwick stay. How can you become part of such an unbroken chain of history, if only for a night, without being open to the full sweep of its amazing past?

One such episode was the dramatic confrontation on 18th November, 1650, when Cromwell ordered Lord Borthwick to give up the castle, informing him: ‘that if you please to walk away with your company, and deliver to the House to such as I shall send to receive it, you shall have liberty to carry off your arms and goods, and such other necessaries as you have.

‘You have harboured such parties in your house as have basely and inhumanely murdered our men: if you necessitate me to bend my cannon against you, you may expect what I doubt you will not be pleased with.’

Borthwick initially resisted, but Cromwell’s cannon quickly demonstrated that the castle walls were not the impregnable form of defence they had once been, and Borthwick quickly came to terms, exchanging his castle for the lives of its defenders. Cromwell’s letter hangs today, 300 defiant years later, in the Great Hall.

Reminders of the cruel realities of medieval life at Borthwick await visitors as well. The small stone cells of the dungeon honeycomb the basement, and the iron manacles that have become part of Borthwick folklore are displayed upstairs.

The jailers often gave prisoners a choice: starve to death in the dungeon or try to leap for freedom. Those who chose the athletic option were led to the top of one of the five-storey towers, and told that if they could leap the 12 feet across to the other tower, they would be freed. The Borthwicks had just two conditions: the prisoner had to start from a standing position, and his hands had to be manacled behind his back.

‘Did anyone ever make it?’ a guest asks one of the staff hopefully.

He stares back in amazement. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

But Borthwick did have one famous escapee, perhaps the most famous in Scottish history. A full-length portrait of her, in royal regalia, hangs next to her pageboy’s window, along with the coda to the tale: a copy of her arrest warrant, signed by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.

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