Caerlaverock Castle

Caerlaverock Castle stands on the southern coast of Scotland, on low ground beside the Solway Firth, about seven miles south of Dumfries in one account and about eight miles in another. It is a moated fortress of triangular plan, first laid out in the thirteenth century and kept by the Maxwell family until the seventeenth. The triangle is unique among British castles and is one of only a small number of that plan in Europe. A water-filled ditch, a twin-towered gatehouse, and earthwork ramparts surround a courtyard that once held ranges of stone buildings.

The place sits on the flood plain of the River Nith, on ground that was formerly swamp, which is unusual for a defensive work in this part of Scotland. It has been called the finest castle in the south-west of the country. The curtain-wall bases still show the outline set down in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, even after several demolitions and rebuildings.

The name is Brittonic. Its first element is the word for an enclosed, defensible site, the same element as Welsh caer, a fort or city. The second element may be a personal name, Llywarch, or a lost stream name formed from a word meaning talkative, with a suffix meaning having that quality. The form used now has been shaped by the Scots word laverock, a skylark.

A Roman fort stood on Ward Law Hill, and a British hill fort in the district was in use around 950, long before either of the Maxwell castles. A twelfth-century Welsh chronicle records that King Gwenddoleu ap Ceidio died at the Battle of Arthuret in Cumbria in 573, in a fight over a place called Caer-Laverock. His death was said to have driven his bard, Myrddin Wyllt, out of his mind and into the woods. That figure was later recast as Merlin.

Welsh tradition treats Myrddin Wyllt as a chief bard, the wild or mad Myrddin, and places his madness after the Battle of Arfderydd, the same fight, in which Rhydderch Hael of Strathclyde defeated Gwenddoleu. He was said to have lived with the beasts and received the gift of prophecy. Geoffrey of Monmouth later made this prophet into the court magician of Arthur. Gerald of Wales refused to treat them as one man, and kept Merlinus Ambrosius apart from Merlinus Celidonius, also called Merlinus Sylvester, the counterpart of Myrddin Wyllt.

A northern figure called Lailoken, in a twelfth-century life of Kentigern, resembles him closely.

The Maxwells can be followed back to Undwin and his son Maccus in the eleventh century. Maccus gave his name to the barony of Maccuswell, or Maxwell. His grandson, John de Maccuswell, who died in 1241, was the first Lord Maxwell of Caerlaverock. The baronies of Maxwell and Caerlaverock then passed down the male line, sometimes to a collateral branch.

The earliest mention of the lands themselves is around 1160, when they were granted to the monks of Holm Cultram Abbey. Around 1220 Alexander II of Scotland granted them to Sir John Maxwell and made him Warden of the West March. Sir John was also Chamberlain of Scotland from 1231 to 1233, and he began the first castle. One account calls that first building square, one of the earliest stone castles in Scotland, with a moat and a bridge facing north, of which only foundations and the remains of a wooden enclosure survive.

Another account calls it lozenge-shaped, set on a low mound inside a silted moated ditch, stone-built and possibly carried on oak piles, with banks and ditches of yards to the south-west and north-east. The site of a harbour lies to the south-west, in woods between the old castle and the present edge of the Solway.

That early castle may have been unfinished when it was given up for a rock outcrop some 200 metres, about 660 feet, to the north. Another account places the later castle about 600 feet uphill and says the old work was abandoned only about fifty years after it was built. Sir John's brother, Sir Aymer Maxwell, began the castle that still stands. Aymer was Chamberlain in 1258 and 1260, and Justiciar of Galloway in 1264.

One account says the new castle was finished in the 1270s and occupied by Herbert Maxwell, nephew of John Maxwell. Another says work on the triangular fortress began in 1277. The old castle is said to have been left about 1270, when the present one was erected. The family were wardens of the West March in the later Middle Ages, and the castle watched the Solway crossing and the trade that moved along this coast.

It has been said that the castle was built to control trade.

Digging the moat of the second castle was probably itself a quarry for building stone. David M. Wilson, an archaeologist of Anglo-Saxon and Viking material who later directed the British Museum, set this down with John G. Hurst in notes on medieval Britain for 1956, published the next year.

Their notes for 1958, published in 1959, add that the gatehouse stands on natural rock while the rest of the castle was raised on a clay platform made for the purpose. The early masonry is red sandstone taken from near Bankend. Recent environmental work, begun in July 2021 around the old castle, used mapping from laser height data, sediment cores, grain-size study, diatoms, luminescence, and radiocarbon. It found that the later prehistoric and early historic coast here was a low degraded cliff in soft sediment, with a strand plain building seaward from about 200 BC, not because the sea was falling but because storms delivered extra sand and gravel.

Iron Age and Roman Iron Age surges built at least five barrier beaches. Minimum water depths in those surges were two to three metres above the spring tides of the time, and the coast grew seaward by some 200 metres. Gravel likely came from glacial deposits in the valley of the Nith, two to three kilometres to the west, and was driven east as large spits.

A later, much larger surge cut a bay about 200 metres deep back to that old cliff and partly destroyed the bank and ditch called the park pale, which had been built on earlier salt marsh. Beach gravel was thrown about 20 metres inland, and the bedrock foreshore may have been lowered by about 1.5 metres. The so-called harbour of the old castle sits in a former tidal creek whose mud goes back before 4000 BC. Its probable floor, in the historic period, stood higher than normal spring tides, so it may have been a fish pond rather than a harbour.

Coarse sand and fine gravel from nearby storm beaches do not appear in the harbour mud after about 1200 to 1300, which suggests that people blocked the exit of the Old Castle Burn. The outer ditch of the moat was formed before about 1250. Wood from the old castle has been dated by tree rings to 1229 or 1230, while the basal peat in the moat system dates to between 1287 and 1342, around 1300. One reading is that the timber was used long after it was felled.

Another is that the peat marks a change in how the old castle was used. At least three salt-water inundations hit the moat system: one between about 1300 and 1330, one after about 1330 and before about 1400, one tentatively around 1400, and another around 1475. The earliest of these raised the water surface to at least eight metres above sea-level datum, three to three and a half metres above the high-water spring tides of the day. Whether those earlier surges made the occupants leave is unknown, but it remains possible.

A separate account, from the scientists who led the work, puts the thirteenth-century surges at between fifteen and thirty feet and says the waves were like tsunamis. Richard Tipping said they may not have wrecked the castle, but that they must have frightened people badly. Eileen Tisdall allowed that a damp, exposed moat may also have fallen short of the Maxwells' growing importance, and called the later triangular castle a statement. Surges stopped affecting the old castle's surroundings after about 1600.

The last lagoon was cut off from the waves around 1570.

In the late 1990s, excavation on the hall floor of the old castle found three small fragments of Islamic glass, the only glass of this type and origin yet found by excavation in Scotland. They most likely belonged to a drinking beaker. Arabic letters survive on them, and the largest piece includes part of the word eternal, so the inscription may have been taken from the Qur'an. The glass dates to the twelfth or thirteenth century and may have been made in Syria, Iraq, or Egypt.

It could have arrived by trade, or with someone returning from the crusades. That route is not known. Analysis without damaging the pieces showed soda, lime, and silica, a makeup typical of Middle Eastern glassmaking in the thirteenth century, with traces of blue and white and evidence that red and gold had also been used. The soda may have come from the ash of plants, or from natron, a natural salt from Wadi Natrun in Egypt.

The new castle is a triangle of curtain wall. The gatehouse, at the north apex, is a pair of large round towers with the entrance between them, and it was where the lord's rooms were. Smaller round towers mark the other two angles. Murdoch's Tower, at the south-west, is largely complete.

The south-east tower was reduced to its base in the siege of 1640. A stone bridge, now a drawbridge, crosses the wet ditch from an outer court whose boundary is a low bank, entered through a round-arched stone gate on the north-east. Ranges were built against each curtain. The gatehouse range is the earliest part still standing.

Its towers are faced in ashlar. The west tower is largely of the first build, and the east tower was largely rebuilt in the late fifteenth century. They rise about 15.5 metres above the drawbridge to the machicolations. One account dates those slotted defences to the late fifteenth-century rebuild.

Another dates them to the late 1300s or early 1400s, after the wars with England had damaged the castle. Inside, a portcullis guarded the passage, and a hall above it was later divided into smaller rooms. The west range, of about 1500, is roofless but largely complete: rectangular rooms on two floors, each with a fireplace, most likely lodgings. The south range, a banqueting hall, was cut down to walls only a few metres high by artillery and by deliberate slighting in 1640, though a large fireplace on its north wall still shows the scale of the room.

The Nithsdale Lodging, against the south and east walls, was the last domestic work. It lacks its two easternmost bays, but the remaining front carries carved pediments over nine large windows, three smaller ones, and two doorways, with armorials and symbolic sculpture. Rooms are small because a stack of fireplaces and flues sits in the centre. Kitchens and service rooms were on the ground floor, and the floors above were private apartments.

The façade has been described as among the most ambitious early classical domestic architecture in Scotland, a sharp contrast with the plain curtain walls.

The Wars of Scottish Independence were the crisis that pulled this border castle into national war. They were two long conflicts, from 1296 to 1357, in which the kings of England tried to take full control of Scotland and failed. The first war ran from 1296 to the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton in 1328. The second ran from 1332 to the Treaty of Berwick in 1357.

Alexander III, king since 1249, died on 19 March 1286 when his horse fell in the dark near Kinghorn as he rode to his queen, Yolande of Dreux, on the eve of her birthday. He left no surviving child. His heir was his granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, then three years old. In 1290 the Guardians of Scotland agreed, in the Treaty of Birgham, that she would marry Edward of Caernarfon, the son of Edward I, on the condition that Scotland stay separate, with its own laws and customs.

Margaret died in Orkney around 26 September 1290, still uncrowned. Thirteen rivals then claimed the crown. The two strongest were Robert de Brus, fifth Lord of Annandale, grandfather of the later king Robert the Bruce, and John Balliol, Lord of Galloway.

John Balliol was born between 1248 and 1250, son of John, fifth Baron Balliol, founder of Balliol College at Oxford, and of Dervorguilla of Galloway. Through his mother he was a great-great-great-grandson of David I, senior by genealogical primogeniture to Bruce, who was closer in blood. The Guardians asked Edward I to judge the dispute and avoid civil war. At Norham in 1291 Edward refused to start until he was recognised as Lord Paramount of Scotland.

Most claimants held English estates and gave way. On 11 June he ordered every Scottish royal castle into his temporary control. Homage was required by 27 July. The pleading, later called the Great Cause, ran through meetings at Berwick.

On 17 November 1292 a majority named Balliol king, and on 30 November he was inaugurated at Scone. On 26 December, at Newcastle, he swore homage to Edward for the kingdom. Edward then treated Scotland as a vassal state, demanded legal authority over the Scottish king, money, and troops for his war in France. Scots called John Toom Tabard, empty coat, either because he seemed an ineffective king or because his arms were stripped from his tabard.

In 1295, pressed by his nobility, he made a treaty with Philip IV of France, later called the Auld Alliance, and renounced his fealty. His son Edward was betrothed to Philip's niece Joan of Valois. Edward I invaded in 1296, sacked Berwick, won at Dunbar, and took Dunbar Castle on 27 April. John abdicated at Stracathro on 10 July 1296 and was sent to the Tower of London.

The Stone of Destiny was taken from Scone to Westminster. Balliol was allowed to leave for France in July 1299. At Dover his baggage held the royal golden crown and the seal of Scotland. Edward kept the seal and had the crown offered at Canterbury.

John lived out his life at Hélicourt in Picardy and died in late 1314, taking no further part in politics. When William Wallace was chosen as a Scottish commander after the rising of 1297, he claimed to act in John's name, but after 1302 John gave the Scots no more personal support.

In 1299 the garrison of Caerlaverock attacked Lochmaben Castle, which the English held. In July 1300 Edward I marched north with an army that included eighty-seven of the barons of England and knights from Brittany and Lorraine, and he besieged Caerlaverock. This was part of a wider campaign. Further English campaigns in 1300 and 1301 ended in a truce in 1302, and another campaign in 1303 and 1304 took Stirling, the last major Scottish-held stronghold.

Among those at Caerlaverock were Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln; Robert FitzWalter; Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford; John, Baron Segrave; Guy de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick; John of Brittany, Earl of Richmond; Patrick, Earl of March, and his son; Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, and his brother Henry; Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel; and Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham. Prince Edward, the future Edward II, was there as commander of the rearguard. He had been born on 25 April 1284, the fourth son of Edward I, and had become heir when his elder brother Alphonso died. The Treaty of Birgham had once promised him to Margaret of Norway.

From 1300 he went with his father on the Scottish campaigns. The Maxwells, under their chief Sir Eustace Maxwell, defended hard and drove the English back more than once. In the end the garrison surrendered. It was then found that only sixty men had held off the whole English army for a considerable time.

Another account says the small garrison gave up within two days of facing the full strength of Edward's army. During the siege, English heralds composed a roll of arms in Old French verse. It named each noble or knight, described his feats, and gave a poetic blazon of his arms.

Edward II was king of England from 1307, after his father died on 7 July that year at Burgh by Sands, until he was deposed in January 1327. He died at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327. In the spring of 1301 he was made Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, then took about 300 soldiers north and captured Turnberry Castle. In 1303 he besieged Brechin with his own engine.

In 1304 he negotiated with Scottish leaders for his father and then joined the siege of Stirling. In 1306, after Robert the Bruce killed John Comyn at Greyfriars in Dumfries on 10 February and had himself crowned at Scone, Prince Edward was put formally in charge of a new expedition, knighted at the Feast of the Swans in Westminster Abbey, and bound by a collective oath to defeat Bruce. He received homage from Scottish supporters at Dumfries on 4 August 1307, shortly after his own accession, and then abandoned the campaign. English forces were later pushed back, and he was defeated by Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314.

He finally made a truce with Robert, but he could not settle Scotland. In 1327 he was deposed, and his son Edward III took the throne.

Possession of Caerlaverock was given back to Sir Eustace Maxwell, son of Sir Herbert. At first he took the side of John Balliol. In 1312 he received from Edward II an allowance of twenty pounds for keeping the castle more securely. He later joined Robert the Bruce.

The English besieged the castle a second time and failed. Eustace, afraid that the stronghold might still fall and give the enemy a grip on the district, dismantled it. Bruce paid him well for that service and that loss. The first war did not end at Bannockburn.

In 1318 the Scots retook Berwick. In 1320 Scottish nobles sent the Declaration of Arbroath to the pope, affirming independence. In 1324 Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, persuaded Pope John to recognise Robert as king. Repeated Scottish raids in the north of England, ending at Stanhope Park, pushed Edward III to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton on 1 May 1328.

It recognised Scotland's independence and Robert as king, and it married Robert's son David to a sister of Edward III. Joan of the Tower, daughter of Edward II and Isabella of France, married David at Berwick on 17 July 1328, when he was four and she was seven.

Robert died in June 1329. David II, born at Dunfermline on 5 March 1324, was five, and Randolph governed. Edward III wanted to undo the treaty. He had the help of Edward Balliol, John Balliol's eldest son, born about 1283, and of the Disinherited, men whose Scottish lands Robert had confiscated after Bannockburn when they refused to come into his peace.

They included Henry de Beaumont, David Strathbogie, and Gilbert de Umfraville. Edward Balliol had been a prisoner in the Tower until 1299, after his father's abdication cancelled a French betrothal. Randolph died on 20 July 1332. The Disinherited sailed, landed at Kinghorn on 6 August, and on 11 August defeated the new guardian, the Earl of Mar, at Dupplin Moor.

Henry Beaumont commanded, with dismounted knights in the centre and archers on the flanks. The Earl of Mar, Sir Robert Bruce, an illegitimate son of the late king, many nobles, and about 2,000 Scots were killed. Edward Balliol was crowned at Scone on 24 September 1332. In December nobles loyal to David II surprised him at Annan, on the Solway shore.

Most of his men were killed. He escaped through a hole in the wall and fled, naked, on a horse to Carlisle. In 1333 Edward III openly backed him. They took Berwick and destroyed a Scottish relief army at Halidon Hill, where Archibald Douglas was killed.

Eight lowland counties were ceded to England. David and Joan were sent to France for safety, reaching Boulogne on 14 May 1334, and lived at Château Gaillard. By 1337 Caerlaverock was inhabited again, and Sir Eustace had changed sides once more, this time to Edward Balliol. Around 1355 Sir Roger Kirkpatrick of Closeburn took the castle for David II and partly dismantled it.

David returned in June 1341 to a poor kingdom. In 1346, answering a French appeal after Crécy, he invaded England, won an early success at Hexham, and was defeated at Neville's Cross on 17 October. Two arrows wounded his face. Sir John de Coupland captured him, and David knocked out two of his captor's teeth.

He was held in England for eleven years while his nephew Robert Stewart governed. Edward Balliol came back with a small force and held only part of Galloway, with his power shrinking until 1355. On 20 January 1356 he gave up his claim to Edward III for an English pension of 2,000 pounds a year. He died childless in January 1364 at Wheatley, near Doncaster.

On 3 October 1357 the Treaty of Berwick freed David for a ransom of 100,000 merks, a merk being two-thirds of an English pound, to be paid over ten years. Heavy taxes followed. The Black Death had also hit the country. David later offered the succession to Edward III or one of his sons if the ransom were cancelled.

Parliament refused. He died in February 1371. By the end of these wars Scotland was independent again. The longbow had become a major weapon in the fighting, and the border castles, Caerlaverock among them, had been taken, slighted, and retaken as each side tried to hold the Solway.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the Maxwells had Caerlaverock again. Sir Robert Maxwell rebuilt much of it between 1373 and 1410. Robert de Maxwell of Maxwell, Caerlaverock, and Mearns, who died in 1409, is the rebuilder in the family descent, and Herbert Maxwell of Caerlaverock, who died in 1420, succeeded him. Further work by Robert, second Lord Maxwell, in the middle of the fifteenth century probably included a reconstruction of the gatehouse.

A new west range was added inside the walls around 1500. The Catholic Maxwells took up the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots, after her forced abdication in 1567. In 1570 an English Protestant force led by the Earl of Sussex besieged Caerlaverock and partly demolished it, destroying the gatehouse with gunpowder. By 1593 John, eighth Lord Maxwell, was repairing the castle again and building the gatehouse up for defence against the Johnstones of Annandale, with whom the Maxwells were feuding.

The eighth lord was killed by the Johnstones at Dryfe Sands. In 1613 the ninth Lord Maxwell was executed for the revenge murder of Sir James Johnstone.

In 1619 Robert, tenth Lord Maxwell, married Elizabeth Beaumont, a cousin of the Duke of Buckingham, a favourite of James VI. He was made Earl of Nithsdale and appointed to the Privy Council of Scotland. To match that rank he built the south and east ranges known as the Nithsdale Lodging. They were finished around 1634.

In August 1637 he was at Caerlaverock and wrote to Sir Richard Graham asking for dogs for hunting and breeding. Religious conflict then turned against the Catholic Maxwells. Covenanters were a seventeenth-century Scottish movement for a Presbyterian Church of Scotland and for the authority of its own leaders in religion. The quarrel had begun under James VI, who held that the king was head of the church and governed it through bishops he appointed, and it sharpened under his son Charles I.

In 1636 Charles replaced the Scottish Book of Discipline with a new Book of Canons and excommunicated anyone who denied royal supremacy in church matters. In 1637 a Scottish prayer book, close to the English Book of Common Prayer, caused riots. At St Giles in Edinburgh, Jenny Geddes was said to have thrown a stool at the minister, though some historians have argued that the protests were planned. In February 1638, under Archibald Johnston and Alexander Henderson, representatives of Scottish society signed the National Covenant, pledging to resist the liturgical changes.

The document said nothing about bishops, but the General Assembly at Glasgow in December 1638 expelled them. Charles tried to impose his authority in the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640, the first of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. His defeat left the Covenanters in control of the Scottish government. The Maxwells' loyalty to Charles I, and their Catholicism, made Caerlaverock a target.

In 1640 a Protestant Covenanter army besieged the castle for thirteen weeks and forced a surrender. This was the last siege. Sir Henry Vane reported that the Earl and Countess of Nithsdale and their page were allowed to leave, and that forty defenders called Maxwell were put to the sword. The castle was stripped of valuable fixtures and fittings.

The great south curtain wall, and the south tower, were demolished so that Caerlaverock could not be used for defence again. It was never repaired or reoccupied. Two inventories of its contents were taken after the earl's forced departure. What the siege changed was the end of the castle as a Maxwell house and as a border fortress.

The triangular plan survived the slighting. The lodging, unfinished at its east end, still stands inside the broken south side.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the castle was in the possession of William Constable-Maxwell, tenth Lord Herries of Terregles, who lived from 1804 to 1876 and was heir of the fifth Earl of Nithsdale. L. G. Pine, a genealogist and herald, recorded that descent.

In 1831 J. M. W. Turner sketched the castle in graphite while touring Scotland to illustrate the poetical works of Sir Walter Scott.

A watercolour of about 1832, 8.3 centimetres high and 14.5 centimetres wide, shows the moated fortress. Edward Goodall engraved the view on steel in 1834 for that edition of Scott. The castle lies in the Nith Estuary National Scenic Area, and it is recognised as a landmark of that protected landscape. It stands at the northern edge of the Caerlaverock National Nature Reserve, which covers 55 square kilometres of saltmarsh, mudflats, and grazing land and is an internationally important wintering ground for waterfowl and wading birds, including the barnacle goose.

The grounds themselves hold fifteen habitats, among them semi-natural ancient woodland, swamp, ponds, and unimproved grassland, and many rare animals and plants. In 2011 the castle was used as a location for the romantic comedy film The Decoy Bride. It remains a protected monument, partly ruined, and open to visitors, with conservation work at times closing the west range and two of the towers.