Dunbar Castle

The best-known episode is the siege of 1338. Agnes Randolph, Countess of Dunbar, known as Black Agnes, defended the castle against an English army led by William Montagu, Earl of Salisbury. The defence succeeded. The famous story that her attendants dusted the battlements after bombardment belongs to the tradition surrounding that achievement. It is a memorable image of defiance, but its theatrical details should be distinguished from the well-established fact of the failed siege.

Another celebrated account describes the defeat of a covered siege engine, the sow. Such stories are part of the castle’s historical memory, and later retellings have sharpened their dialogue and drama. They can be enjoyed without imagining that every reported gesture survives as a contemporary eyewitness record. Agnes’s real importance does not depend on accepting all the anecdotes attached to her name as equally certain.

The castle continued to change after her lifetime. The Crown acquired a stronger hold over Dunbar, and a parliamentary order of 1488 called for its destruction. That was not the end of the site: James IV subsequently rebuilt it, and a substantial artillery blockhouse belongs to the following century. The surviving remains therefore include work much later than Black Agnes. The gun openings and separated rocky positions speak particularly clearly about the demands of artillery-age defence.

Mary, Queen of Scots, took refuge at Dunbar after the murder of David Rizzio in 1566. In 1567 Bothwell brought her here during the crisis preceding their marriage; the circumstances of that episode are disputed, and a simple description of another voluntary visit would be misleading. Parliament ordered the castle’s demolition later in 1567. The site’s political and military usefulness had become bound up with the struggle over Mary’s rule and Bothwell’s position.

Further losses came with construction of Victoria Harbour in the nineteenth century. The new entrance was cut through part of the castle remains, and the harbour opened in 1844. This is why the present relationship between water, rock and ruined walls cannot be projected unchanged back into the medieval period. The working harbour is itself historic, but it reshaped the older stronghold. Look across the entrance and compare the separated fragments rather than expecting a continuous circuit of walls.

The red sandstone catches changing light, and the harbour offers a strong sense of scale without entering the dangerous ruins. Keep the castle’s artillery blockhouse distinct from the later battery on Lamer Island: they are different structures from different defensive eras. Dunbar’s most rewarding story lies in these successive transformations: a lordly seat, a celebrated defence, a royal fortress and a ruin altered for maritime trade. The legends add character when clearly named as traditions, and the surviving fabric supplies the quieter evidence of a place repeatedly adapted to new forms of power.