Dudhope Castle

Dudhope sits on the southern face of Dundee Law, and the first castle there was raised in the late 13th century by the Scrymgeour family, a smaller tower house than the building that stands now. That first tower was replaced around 1460. The family held the castle alongside the office of Constable of Dundee, a post they kept for some 370 years; between them, four families in all held the Constableship and the occupancy of Dudhope.

James V visited in April 1540. In 1580 the castle was extended for James Scrimgeour and Magdalen Livingstone into the L-plan structure it keeps today, with circular angle towers added to it, though those towers were pulled down in the 18th century. Some dormer windows carried stone pediments dated 1600 with the initials DML, for Dame Magdalen Livingstone. James VI was at Dudhope on 23 April 1602 and again on 20 May 1617.

John Scrimgeour, thirteenth or fourteenth Constable and first Earl of Dundee, died in 1668. A rightful heir existed in John Scrimgeour of Kirkton, but Charles II ignored his claim and granted both Dudhope Castle and the office of Constable to Charles Maitland, a younger brother of the 1st Duke of Lauderdale.

Maitland later fell into financial difficulty and sold Dudhope in 1684 to John Graham of Claverhouse, better known as Bonnie Dundee. It was from Dudhope that Claverhouse departed for Killiecrankie in 1689, the victory that cost him his life. In 1694 the castle was granted to Archibald Douglas, and the Douglases proved the last family to live in it, remaining until about 1790.

In 1792 the castle was rented in an attempt to work it as a woollen factory, a scheme that never came to fruition. In 1795 the park and grounds were leased to the Board of Ordnance, and from 1796 Dudhope served as a barracks. Fresh buildings went up around it, among them a hospital, officers' quarters, stables and guard-rooms, while the castle itself was turned over to accommodation for 400 soldiers. The garrison use ran to 1879, and the Board of Ordnance finally abandoned the castle in 1881.

Dundee's town council had already taken a sub-lease on the castle grounds in 1854, for use as recreational facilities, at an annual rent of £25 for thirty-five and a half years, running to 1 November 1890. The Earl of Home intended to develop the ground into terraced housing. Instead the council acquired the grounds for £31,700, raising £20,000 itself while the remainder was raised from generous citizens by Lord Provost Mathewson. Sir James Low opened them as a park on 28 September 1895.

The building was later occupied by the Ministry of Works and went back to military use as a barracks through both the 1914–18 and the 1939–45 wars. A time gun once stood in the grounds and was fired daily at one o'clock; it ceased to be used in 1916 so as not to disturb patients suffering from shell-shock at the nearby Dundee Royal Infirmary.

The castle passed to the corporation of Dundee, which made an attempt to demolish it in 1958. It survived, and has been protected as a category A listed building since 12 July 1963. Between 1985 and 1988 it was redeveloped for use as offices and a conference centre, and to house the University of Abertay Dundee's Dundee Business School.

The restoration set one of the main rooms aside as the Scrimgeour room, furnished with wall hangings pertinent to the family and with window drapes made from Scrimgeour tartan, arranged by the Scrimgeour Clan Association that was officially organised on 5 June 1971. In March 1998 the association held a dinner there in memory of the 700th anniversary of a charter to the Scrymgeours signed by William Wallace on 29 March 1298 and later reaffirmed in a further charter signed by Robert the Bruce on 5 December of that same year. After Abertay's use ended the building passed back to Dundee City Council as offices and training space, and in 2022 it went to The Circle Scotland, which uses it to provide affordable office space to the third sector in the city.