Dumbarton Castle

Dumbarton Castle, on a basalt plug 240 feet (73 m) high, has the longest recorded history of any stronghold in Scotland. Iron Age finds mark it as a strategic settlement whose people traded with Rome; its first written notice is a letter Saint Patrick sent to King Ceretic of Alt Clut in the late 5th century. From the 5th century until the 9th the rock was the centre of the independent Brythonic Kingdom of Strathclyde, and its Brythonic name became a byword for the kingdom itself. Its king in about AD 570 was Riderch Hael, and Merlin was said to have stayed there.

The first datable losses come in 756, when a joint Pictish and Northumbrian force took the fortress after a siege and lost it again within days.

By 870 the rock carried a tightly packed British settlement that was both fortress and capital of Alt Clut. In 871 the Irish-based Viking kings Amlaíb Conung and Ímar laid siege to it. Dumbarton held four months, and fell when its water supply failed. The kings sailed back to Ireland with 200 ships and a host of British, English and Pictish captives, who may have included the ruling family; its king, Arthgal ap Dyfnwal, was slain the next year. The rock then vanishes from record until the 13th century, Strathclyde's capital having apparently shifted up the Clyde towards Partick and Govan.

Medieval Dumbarton — Dùn Breatainn, the fortress of the Britons — was an important royal castle, believed to be where Sir John Menteith took the captured William Wallace on the road to London. Its governor in 1333, Malcolm Fleming of Fulwood, had been tutor to the young David II; after the defeat at Halidon Hill on 19 July he sheltered the king and his wife, Joan of the Tower, then conveyed them to safety in France. Fleming returned and held the castle against an English siege, and David II made him first Earl of Wigtown, the first new Scottish earldom in more than a century. He was still governor in 1361, when the Black Death swept into Scotland again and a third of the garrison died.

In 1425 James Mor Stewart — "James the Fat", youngest son of Murdoch Stewart, Duke of Albany — rebelled against the crown, marched on Dumbarton and burned the town. The castle held: Sir John Colquhoun kept it against him, and James I rewarded him with the governorship, which he held until his death in 1439.

James IV used the castle as his west-coast base for the navy and for campaigns against the Western Isles, and gave it to Margaret Tudor the day after their wedding in 1503. In 1544 munitions and ten thousand French crowns of the sun were landed at its harbour for Matthew, Earl of Lennox, who then went into England and offered Henry VIII both Dumbarton and the Isle of Bute in return for English land and a royal marriage. The keeper George Stirling of Glorat shut him out, declaring he would hold the rock in the name of the young queen alone. Lennox's men tried to storm it in May 1545; Regent Arran then besieged the rock with artillery borrowed from the Earl of Argyll, and Stirling surrendered on terms after twenty days.

The Rough Wooing brought the child queen here. Mary, Queen of Scots was lodged in the castle by 22 February 1548 and kept there for months. She embarked for France on 13 July, though adverse winds held the fleet until 7 August, and the ships sailed round the west of Ireland to avoid the English vessels under Edward Clinton.

After her defeat at Langside in 1568 Mary tried to reach Dumbarton, and went to England instead. Her keeper John Fleming, 5th Lord Fleming, held the rock for her through the Marian civil war; the first siege lifted when Regent Moray was assassinated in January 1570, and the assassin, James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, was welcomed at the castle. In October 1570 Fleming strengthened the defences with stone from churches and houses pulled down in Dumbarton and Cardross. In the early hours of 2 April 1571 the forces of Regent Lennox, led by Thomas Crawford of Jordanhill and John Cunningham of Drumquhassle, scaled the rock with ladders and surprised the garrison. Fleming escaped by sea and died a year later, accidentally wounded by his own side as he supervised the supply of munitions at Edinburgh Castle.

The Scottish Parliament judged in 1644 that the castle was likely to be more hurtful than useful to the country, and its strategic importance declined after Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658. Jacobite and French threats brought new defences in the eighteenth century, and the rock remained garrisoned until the Second World War.