Everything about Dumbarton Castle totally explained
» For warships of this name see HMS Dumbarton Castle.)
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Dumbarton Castle (
Gaelic Dùn Breatainn, ) has the longest recorded history of any stronghold in
Great Britain. It overlooks the
Scottish town of
Dumbarton, and sits on a plug of
volcanic basalt known as
Dumbarton Rock which is high.
At least as far back as the
Iron Age (and probably much earlier) this has been the site of a strategically important settlement, whose residents were known to have traded with the
Romans. The presence of a settlement here's first recorded in a letter
Saint Patrick wrote to King
Ceretic of Alt Clut, (or Clyde Rock) in the late 5th century.
From the fifth century until the ninth it was the centre of the independent British
Kingdom of Strathclyde. The King of the Britons of Dumbarton in about
AD 570 was
Riderch Hael, who features in
Norse legends. It is said that during his reign
Merlin stayed at Alt Clut. In 756 the first (and second) losses of Dumbarton Rock were recorded. A joint force of
Picts and
Northumbrians captured Alcluith after a siege, only to lose it again a few days later.
By 870 Dumbarton Rock was home to a tightly packed British settlement that served as a fortress and as the capital of Alt Clut. The
Vikings had laid siege to Dumbarton for four months, eventually defeating the inhabitants when they cut off their water supply. The Norse king
Olaf returned to the Viking city of
Dublin in 871, with two hundred ships full of slaves and looted treasures. Olaf came to an agreement with
Constantine I, King of Scots, and
Artgal of Alt Clut.
Strathclyde's independence may have come to an end with the death of
Owen the Bald, when the dynasty of
Kenneth mac Alpin began to rule the region.
In medieval
Scotland, Dumbarton (
Dùn Breatainn, which means 'the fortress of the Britons') was an important royal castle. It sheltered
David II (
Robert the Bruce's son) and his young wife,
Queen Joan, after the Scottish defeat at
Halidon Hill near
Berwick-upon-Tweed in
1333.
Patrick Hepburn, 1st Earl of Bothwell, was Captain of Dumbarton castle on April 1, 1495. In
1548, after the equally disastrous
Battle of Pinkie, east of
Edinburgh, the castle protected the infant
Mary, Queen of Scots for several months before her safe removal to
France.
The castle's importance declined after
Oliver Cromwell's death in
1658. But threats posed by
Jacobites and the French in the
eighteenth century caused new structures and defences to be built and the castle continued to be garrisoned until
World War II.
Today all visible trace of the Dark-Age
Alcluith, literally
Clyde Rock (
modern Gaelic Alt Chluaidh, ), its buildings and defences, have gone and precious little survives from the medieval castle. The most interesting structures today are the fortifications of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which illustrate a painful struggle by military engineers to adapt an intractable site to contemporary defensive needs. The splendid views from the twin summits of White Tower Crag and The Beak remind us why this rocky outcrop was chosen as 'the fortress of the Britons' all those centuries ago.
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