Dunstanburgh Castle

Dunstanburgh was begun in 1313 by Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster — the second richest man in England after the king, and a ringleader in the killing of Edward II's favourite Piers Gaveston the year before. The castle rose on a prominent Northumberland headland, over the earthworks of an Iron Age fort. Thomas probably intended a secure retreat at a safe distance from Edward's forces in the south — and a statement of wealth challenging the king's own, its Lilburn Tower positioned to be provocatively visible from royal Bamburgh nine miles up the coast. Thomas, who used the pseudonym "King Arthur" in his correspondence with the Scots, may even have meant the water-ringed fortress as an allusion to Camelot.

The work was overseen by Master Elias, a mason who had worked on Conwy Castle; £184 had been spent by the end of the first year, and Edward II issued a licence to crenellate in 1316. By 1322 the castle was probably complete: a curtain wall enclosing 9.96 acres — the largest castle in Northumberland — with six towers, a harbour, and a massive three-storey Great Gatehouse.

Thomas may have visited it only once, in 1319. When civil war broke out in 1321, he fled the south for Dunstanburgh but was intercepted by Sir Andrew Harclay at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, captured, and executed. The castle passed to the Crown, which found it useful against the Scots: garrisoned with 40 men-at-arms and 40 light horsemen, its men fought at the Battle of Old Byland in 1322, and the garrison was raised to 130. By 1326 it had been returned to Thomas's brother Henry, 3rd Earl of Lancaster.

John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, acquired Dunstanburgh in 1362 through his marriage to Blanche, granddaughter of Henry of Lancaster. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 exposed the castle's limits: hated by the rebels and stranded in the north, Gaunt judged Dunstanburgh insufficiently secure to shelter in and turned instead to Alnwick — which refused to let him in. Over the next two years his constable Thomas of Ilderton and the mason Henry of Holme expanded the defences, blocking the entrance of the Great Gatehouse to turn it into a keep and adding a new gatehouse beside it. In 1384 a Scottish army attacked but, lacking siege equipment, could not take the walls. When Gaunt's son took the throne as Henry IV in 1399, the castle passed with the Duchy of Lancaster to the Crown.

Dunstanburgh formed part of a chain of fortifications guarding the eastern route into Scotland, and in the Wars of the Roses it was held for Lancaster; its constable Sir Ralph Babthorpe died fighting for Henry VI at St Albans in 1455. Sir Ralph Percy, one of the joint constables, held out until September 1461, when he surrendered the castle to the Yorkists — then declared for Lancaster again after Margaret of Anjou landed at Bamburgh with a French army in 1462. A Yorkist army under the Earl of Warwick besieged the castle that November and took its surrender at Christmas; left in charge as a gesture of reconciliation, Percy changed sides once more. He died at Hedgeley Moor in 1464, and Warwick reoccupied Dunstanburgh that June after a short siege.

The castle never recovered. Its roof was robbed of lead by the 1520s, by 1538 a royal report called it "a very ruinous house and of small strength", and in 1550 the Warden of the Marches, Sir Robert Bowes, found it "in wonderfull great decaye". A 1584 report judged it too far from the border to be worth the £1,000 of repairs; local farmers paid six pence a year to shelter cattle in the outer bailey during Scottish raids.

After the union of the crowns in 1603, James I sold the castle in 1604; within a year it passed to Sir Ralph Grey, a nearby landowner, and it descended through the Greys and their heirs the Earls of Tankerville until 1869. The ruin drew artists: Thomas Girtin painted it amid wild waves, and J. M. W. Turner painted it repeatedly from 1797 into the 1830s, making it one of the most common subjects in his work.

Sir Arthur Sutherland, a shipowner who bought the estate in 1919, could not sustain the castle's upkeep and placed it in state guardianship in 1930. In 1940, with German invasion feared, the headland was fortified once more: Royal Armoured Corps observers occupied the castle itself, while barbed wire, trenches, pillboxes, an anti-tank ditch and a minefield were laid across the beaches and approaches around it. Sutherland's son passed the estate to the National Trust in 1961, and the castle is run today by English Heritage.