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The story was, and is, that in the Castle of Glamis is a secret chamber. The mystery was told to the present writer some 60 years ago, when he was a boy, and it made a great impression on him. According to a correspondent to the journal Notes & Queries, writing in 1908, The first reports of Glamis’ unknown prisoner appear to date to the 1840s. Yet, within half a century of his visit, it had begun to be rumored that the room concealed an unknown captive-a prisoner who had been held there all his life. The novelist wrote nothing to suggest that the castle’s hidden chamber had an occupant. In one sense, however, the most interesting thing about Scott’s account is what it doesn’t say.
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Its location was known only to the Earl, his factor and his heir. “I must own,” he wrote in an account published in 1830, “as I heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to consider myself as too far from the living and somewhat too near to the dead.” What was more, the great novelist added, Glamis was said to hide a secret room-a useful addition to any residence in 15th-century Scotland, where violence was seldom far away. Scott became the first of several writers to note the castle’s oppressive atmosphere. In their absence, Glamis was left in the care of a factor, or estate manager, and it was to this factor that a young Walter Scott applied in 1790 to spend a night in one of its rooms. Glamis has been the family seat of the Strathmore Earls since then, but by the late 18th century it lay largely empty, its owners preferring to live somewhere less drafty, less isolated and less melancholy. But the present castle was constructed only in the 15th century, around a central tower whose walls are, in places, 16 feet thick. Glamis Castle is mentioned by Shakespeare-Macbeth, that most cursed of characters, was Thane of Glamis-and in 1034 the Scottish King Malcolm II died there, perhaps murdered. Sir Walter Scott, the popular 19th-century novelist, was the first man to tell of the 'secret' of Glamis.