# Dunnottar Castle

ruined castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK

Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1400 CE

## Story

• Dunnottar Castle is a ruined medieval fortress on a rocky headland about two miles south of Stonehaven, with cliffs dropping about 160 feet to the North Sea.
• The standing buildings are largely of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on a site whose Pictish and early medieval use is argued from chronicles and from excavation that found nothing older than the late twelfth century.
• The Keith family, Earls Marischal, held it from the fourteenth century until the tenth earl forfeited it after the Jacobite rising of 1715.
• In 1651 the Honours of Scotland were hidden here from Oliver Cromwell’s army and smuggled out to Kinneff, where they stayed until the Restoration.
• The stripped ruin was repaired after 1919 and is open to the public under the family that bought it then.

## Visiting

The castle is open daily from 1 April to 30 September, from 09:00 to 18:00, and last entry is at 17:00. From 1 October to 24 October it is open from 10:00 to 17:00, and last entry is one hour before closing. From 25 October to 31 January the castle is open from 10:00 to 15:00. Through February it is open from 10:00 to 16:00, and through March it is open from 10:00 to 17:00.
On 6 November 2026 and 9 November 2026 the castle opens at 10:30 rather than 10:00. The castle is closed on 16 December 2026, 25 December 2026, and 26 December 2026, and it is closed on 1 January 2027 and 2 January 2027. The castle is closed on 25 December, 26 December, 1 January, and 2 January each year. In high winds, heavy snow, or ice, visitors may not enter and the castle may be closed at short notice.
Tickets may be bought at the ticket kiosk on arrival or booked in advance, and only card payments are accepted. Until 31 March 2027 an adult ticket is £13.50, a concession ticket for a visitor over 65 or a student with photographic identification is £12, and a child ticket for ages 5 to 15 is £6.25. A family ticket for two adults and two children is £36, and a family ticket for one adult and two children is £24. An adult annual pass bought at the ticket kiosk is £33, a child annual pass is £17.50, and a family annual pass for two adults and two children is £66.
A guidebook at the ticket kiosk costs £5, and admission prices are subject to change.

## History

Dunnottar Castle is a ruined fortress on a rocky headland about two miles south of Stonehaven, in Aberdeenshire. Cliffs fall about one hundred and sixty feet to the North Sea, and a narrow neck of land joins the rock to the mainland. The ruins cover about one and four tenths of a hectare, on a promontory of about one and a half hectares, and they command the coastal route below the Mounth.

The date of the first occupation is not agreed. A sea stack just to the north, Dunnicaer, has a small promontory fort with turf and timber houses, stacked hearths, and Roman pottery and glass. Radiocarbon dates put that fort in the third or fourth century, abandoned in the late fourth or early fifth, and one account instead spreads Pictish use of the stack from five thousand BC to seven hundred AD. By the seventh century Dunnottar itself is described as an elite Pictish centre.

A chapel is said to have been founded here by Saint Ninian in the fifth century, and the castle’s history places his mission around the year four hundred. He is first mentioned only in the eighth century, and there is no unchallenged life of him. The annals record two sieges of Dún Foither, dated either to six eighty-one and six ninety-four or to six eighty and six ninety-three. The earlier has been read as an attack by Brude, king of Fortriu.

Donald the Second, the first man called king of Alba, was killed in nine hundred. The chronicle tradition and the castle’s history place that death here, in a Viking attack that destroyed the buildings. His own life allows that he died the same year in a war that may have been against Harald Fairhair. In nine thirty-four Æthelstan’s invasion of Scotland reached as far north as Dunnottar and forced Constantine the Second to submit.

No battle in that invasion is recorded.

An evaluation trench cut by Leslie Alcock in nineteen eighty-four, and listed under nineteen eighty-five, found nothing older than the late twelfth century. A motte had been suspected under the castle, and one was noted in nineteen seventy. The early name may belong instead to the Bowduns promontory across the bay, though that headland’s banks look like field boundaries, and this rock is the stronger natural fort.

Under William the Lion, Dunnottar was an administrative centre for the Mearns, and by the early thirteenth century it was called a castle. In May twelve seventy-six William Wishart consecrated a church here, and parts of that chapel remain. In twelve ninety-seven William Wallace is said to have taken an English garrison. Blind Harry’s poem, written around fourteen seventy-seven, says he burned four thousand prisoners in the church.

The castle’s history calls it a legend of a chapel fire and of men driven over the cliffs.

In thirteen thirty-six Edward the Third ordered the ruined site rebuilt as a supply base, and he visited in July. Sir Andrew Murray destroyed those works before the year ended. David the Second licensed crenellation in thirteen forty-six. Around thirteen fifty-nine William Keith, who had married a niece of Robert the Bruce, received the barony.

He regained it by exchange in thirteen ninety-two, finished a tower on consecrated ground, and was released from excommunication in thirteen ninety-five by a bull of Antipope Benedict the Thirteenth.

The Keiths became Earls Marischal in the mid-fifteenth century, and James the Second created the first earl in fourteen fifty-eight. James the Fourth stayed on the fifteenth of October fifteen oh four, heard a monochord, and brought Italian minstrels and an African drummer. In fifteen thirty-one James the Fifth spared the earl’s men from ordinary service because the castle was one of the principal strengths of the realm.

Mary, Queen of Scots, came in fifteen sixty-two after the Battle of Corrichie and again for two nights in September fifteen sixty-four. James the Sixth stayed ten days in fifteen eighty, held a Privy Council here, and in fifteen eighty-nine watched from nearby Cowie for the earls of Huntly and Erroll. In fifteen ninety-two Captain Carr took the castle for Huntly, and it was restored within weeks.

George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal from fifteen eighty-one, rebuilt the fortress as a palace around a quadrangle and founded Marischal College. A lion is said to have been kept in the Lion’s Den. The gatehouse called Benholm’s Lodging carries tiers of gun ports that may have been as much display as defence, though four brass cannon covered the entrance in sixteen twelve. A Roman distance sculpture from the Antonine Wall hung in the gallery and was repainted in the sixteenth century.

The tower is about forty by thirty-six feet. Tunnels lead from the gate to the tower. A postern climbs from a sea cave. The palace ranges are of the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, and only the dining room and the Silver House still have roofs, both restored in the nineteen twenties.

The chapel keeps thirteenth-century windows. Beneath the King’s Bedroom is the Whigs’ Vault.

The sixth earl died at Dunnottar in sixteen thirty-five. His son, the seventh earl, backed the Covenanters in sixteen thirty-nine, then stayed inside the castle when Montrose changed sides and burned Stonehaven and the barony in sixteen forty-five. The earl later led horse at the Battle of Preston in sixteen forty-eight. After Charles the First was executed, Charles the Second was proclaimed in Scotland, visited Dunnottar in July sixteen fifty, and was crowned at Scone on the first of January sixteen fifty-one.

Oliver Cromwell’s victory at the Battle of Dunbar on the third of September sixteen fifty left his army in Lothian, so the Honours of Scotland could not return to Edinburgh. The Privy Council sent the crown, sceptre, and sword to Dunnottar in June sixteen fifty-one. During the blockade Christian Fletcher, wife of the minister at Kinneff, and Elizabeth Douglas got them out. One account has Fletcher carry them in sacks on three visits.

Another has them lowered to the beach and carried off in a basket of seaweed. They were buried under the church floor at Kinneff.

The garrison surrendered on the twenty-fourth of May sixteen fifty-two, after artillery arrived. The governor and his wife were held until a false story said the Honours had gone overseas. They were returned at the Restoration. Fletcher was voted two thousand merks, which were never paid, and the governor received a baronetcy.

Twenty-one brass cannon were taken from the castle.

In sixteen eighty-five, one hundred and sixty-seven Covenanters, men and women who refused an oath to James the Seventh, were imprisoned in the vault from late May into July. The castle’s history instead ties their refusal to reforms of Charles the Second. Twenty-five escaped, two fell to their deaths, and five or nine died in the cellar. Many of the rest were transported toward New Jersey and died at sea.

In sixteen eighty-nine the castle was held for William and Mary, and suspected Jacobites from Aberdeen were confined here for about three weeks.

George Keith, the tenth and last Earl Marischal, joined the Jacobite rising of seventeen fifteen and is said to have led cavalry at Sheriffmuir. His titles were forfeited in seventeen sixteen. His own life also places him at the head of Jacobite forces in the rising of seventeen nineteen, and afterwards in the service of Frederick the Great. The York Buildings Company bought the castle in seventeen seventeen or in seventeen twenty, at a price given as forty-one thousand one hundred and seventy-two pounds, and stripped the roofs and floors.

Later owners included Alexander Keith, Knight Marischal, and then Sir Patrick Keith-Murray, who sold it in eighteen seventy-three for about eighty thousand pounds. Weetman Pearson, first Viscount Cowdray, bought it in nineteen nineteen, and his wife began the repairs. It remains with that family, run by Charles Anthony Pearson as part of Dunecht Estates. About fifty-two thousand five hundred people came in two thousand and nine, and more than one hundred and thirty-five thousand in two thousand and nineteen.

The headland has been a scheduled monument since April nineteen twenty, with the designation amended in July nineteen seventy. Twelve buildings were listed in nineteen seventy-two, and those listings were removed in two thousand and eighteen. A watching brief in the dining room, published in two thousand and twenty-three, found a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century bowl fragment and modern china in soil laid during the nineteen-twenties repairs. An excavation in two thousand and nineteen was directed by Murray Archaeological Services.

## Photographs

- [Dunnottar Castle — Anne Burgess](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Dunnottar_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_8057610.jpg)
- [A c. 1714 map of Scotland with inset map of the Orkneys and Shetland Islands, many notes on the commercial fishing areas, and illustrations along the side — Herman Moll](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Moll_-_The_north_part_of_Great_Britain_called_Scotland.png)
- [A plan of Dunnottar Castle, Aberdeenshire, Scotland Key: A Gatehouse and Benholm's Lodging · B Tunnels · C Tower house · D Forge · E Waterton's Lodging · F — Jonathan Oldenbuck](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Dunnottar_castle_plan.png)
- [Dunnottar Castle — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Jacobite_broadside_-_Dunotyr_Castle_in_Merns.jpg)
- [Dunnottar Castle — Bewahrerderwerte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/2018_07_09_Schottland_%28102%29.jpg)
- [Dunnottar Castle — Bewahrerderwerte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/2018_07_09_Schottland_%28100%29.jpg)
- [Dunnottar Castle — Bewahrerderwerte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/2018_07_09_Schottland_%28103%29.jpg)
- [Dunnottar Castle — Bewahrerderwerte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/2018_07_09_Schottland_%28104%29.jpg)
- [Dunnottar Castle — Bewahrerderwerte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/2018_07_09_Schottland_%28105%29.jpg)
- [Dunnottar Castle — Bewahrerderwerte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/2018_07_09_Schottland_%28106%29.jpg)

## Sources

- [Dunnottar Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunnottar_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [History](https://www.dunnottarcastle.co.uk/history) — Dunnottar Castle
- [Opening Times](https://www.dunnottarcastle.co.uk/opening-times) — Dunnottar Castle
- [Tickets](https://www.dunnottarcastle.co.uk/book-now) — Dunnottar Castle
- [Dunnottar Castle scheduled monument](https://www.trove.scot/designation/SM986) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Dunnottar Castle](https://www.trove.scot/place/36992) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Earliest Pictish fort at Dunnicaer](https://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/13042/) — University of Aberdeen
- [Excavation 1925, Dunnottar Castle](https://her.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/Event/EAB109/) — Aberdeenshire Council
- [Excavation 1985, Dunnottar Castle](https://her.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/Event/EAB110/) — Aberdeenshire Council
- [Excavation 2019, Dunnottar Castle](https://her.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/Event/EAB13936) — Aberdeenshire Council
- [Watching brief in the dining room at Dunnottar Castle](https://doi.org/10.5284/1103100) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Tracking trajectories: a Roman relief from Dunnottar Castle](https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/273430/) — University of Glasgow
- [Excavations at Dunnottar, Kincardineshire, 1984](https://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/psas/article/view/9440) — Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
- [Dunnottar Castle - geograph.org.uk - 8057610.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunnottar_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_8057610.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Moll - The north part of Great Britain called Scotland.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moll_-_The_north_part_of_Great_Britain_called_Scotland.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Dunnottar castle plan.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunnottar_castle_plan.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Jacobite broadside - Dunotyr Castle in Merns.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacobite_broadside_-_Dunotyr_Castle_in_Merns.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2018 07 09 Schottland (102).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_09_Schottland_(102).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2018 07 09 Schottland (100).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_09_Schottland_(100).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2018 07 09 Schottland (103).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_09_Schottland_(103).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2018 07 09 Schottland (104).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_09_Schottland_(104).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2018 07 09 Schottland (105).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_09_Schottland_(105).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2018 07 09 Schottland (106).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_09_Schottland_(106).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Dunnottar Castle is a ruined medieval fortress on a rocky headland of the north-east coast of Scotland, about two miles south of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire. The Scottish Gaelic name is Dùn Fhoithear, a fort on the shelving slope. An older form, Dun Fother, has also been read as a fort in the low country, the Mearns east of the Grampian Highlands between Montrose and Stonehaven. A narrow neck of land joins the headland to the mainland. Steep cliffs drop about 160 feet to the North Sea, and the sea surrounds the rock on three sides.

The rock is a conglomerate known as pudding stone. Pebbles sit in a cement so tough that cracks run through the stones rather than between them and the binding material. The rock was forced up during the Silurian period. The sandstone of the buildings weathers faster, and the walls show a honeycomb where that stone has worn away. The ruins cover about 1.4 hectares, and the promontory itself has been measured at about 1.5 hectares. From the land, the place controlled the coastal terrace between the sea cliffs and the hills of the Mounth, a little over two miles inland, and with it the route into the north-east.

How early people used the rock is disputed, and the dates do not agree. On the sea stack of Dunnicaer, just north of the later castle, archaeologists from the University of Aberdeen found a promontory fort with turf and timber buildings, preserved floors, and hearths built one above another. The stack measures at most about 20 by 12 metres, and parts of the houses already stand on the cliff edge, so much of the settlement has fallen into the sea. Roman pottery and glass were found there. The radiocarbon dates place the occupation in the third or fourth century, with abandonment in the late fourth or early fifth century, and the carved stones found on the stack in 1832 may be among the earliest Pictish symbol stones. Youths from Stonehaven climbed the stack that year, and some of the stones they found were thrown into the sea and later recovered. The excavators thought the stack had been larger when it was lived on, and that the settlement may have shifted to Dunnottar, which was an elite centre of Pictish society by the seventh century. A separate account of the same neighbouring stack says that carbon dating shows the oldest Pictish fort yet found, and that Pictish settlement there falls somewhere between 5000 BC and 700 AD. The word dun is given in that account as the Pictish word for a fort. Those two spans cannot both be the date of one occupation, so both are recorded here.

A chapel at Dunnottar is said to have been founded by Saint Ninian in the fifth century. The castle’s own telling places his arrival around 400 and says he set up a place of worship where the castle now stands and converted the Picts of Dunnottar. Saint Ninian is first mentioned in the eighth century as an early missionary among the Pictish peoples, and he is remembered as the apostle of the southern Picts, with his major shrine at Whithorn in Galloway. Nothing is known of his teaching, and there is no unchallenged account of his life. His name has been identified with other early holy men, so the chapel tradition at Dunnottar is a claim about the rock, not a settled biography.

The earliest writing that may refer to this headland is in the annals, which record two sieges of Dún Foither. One reading of those entries gives the years 681 and 694. Another reading of the same annals gives 680 and 693. The earlier siege has been interpreted as an attack by Bridei, or Brude, the Pictish king of Fortriu, extending his power over the north-east coast. A later chronicle says that the oppidum of Fother was destroyed by Vikings. King Donald II, Domnall mac Causantín, son of Constantine I, ruled the Picts or Alba from 889, after he took the throne from his cousin Giric. He is called Dásachtach, the madman, in the Prophecy of Berchán. He fought Vikings in the north. He was killed in 900. The chronicle tradition, and the history kept at the castle, place that death at Dunnottar during a Viking attack that went on to destroy the buildings. His own life account says he was killed in 900 at war, possibly against Harald Fairhair, and names his successor as his cousin Constantine II. He is remembered as the first ruler to be called king of Alba. Alan Orr Anderson, the Scottish historian who turned the early non-English chronicles from 500 to 1286 into English, is the compiler through whom that early written tradition has usually been read.

In 934 the English king Æthelstan invaded Scotland by land and sea with a large force. No record of a battle during that invasion survives, and he returned to England later the same year. The invasion is said to have reached as far north as Dunnottar. Æthelstan, son of Edward the Elder, was king of the Anglo-Saxons from 924 and king of the English from 927, the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of the whole of England after he took the Viking kingdom of York. The campaign of 934 forced Constantine II of Alba to submit. In 937 Constantine and his allies came south again and were defeated at Brunanburh. Æthelstan died in 939 without children and was succeeded by his half-brother Edmund.

Whether those early references belong to this rock was tested by excavation. W. D. Simpson thought a motte might lie under the later castle, and an oval motte was noted on the site in 1970. In 1984 Leslie Alcock cut an evaluation trench across the earthworks at the north-west edge of the promontory. The council’s event list records the same director, working for the University of Glasgow, under the year 1985. The trench found no deposits and no artefacts from before the late twelfth century. The excavators treated that as a limited result on a headland of this size, and they considered that the name Dún Foither might belong instead to the Bowduns promontory across Castlehaven Bay, looking toward Dunnicaer. A bank in the gully at Bowduns was marked as a rampart on a nineteenth-century map and later dropped from the maps. Later inspection judged those banks to be field boundaries on a cultivated summit. The castle rock, joined to the cliffs by a narrow spine, is the stronger natural stronghold, which is why the early name has also been kept here. The dig did not settle the question.

In the reign of William the Lion, from 1165 to 1214, Dunnottar was a centre of local administration for the Mearns. Warrants for the Mearns were returnable there. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the place is named as le castiel de Dunostre. The early thirteenth-century romance Roman de Fergus sends its hero to Dunnottar to fetch a magic shield. That is a literary appearance, not a record of a siege. In May 1276 William Wishart, bishop of St Andrews, consecrated a church on the site. Parts of that stone chapel remain. The parish church stood on the rock by the thirteenth century.

During the wars with England the rock changed hands more than once. Sir William Wallace, a leader of the first war of independence, is said to have taken Dunnottar from an English garrison in 1297. Wallace, born about 1270, defeated an English army with Andrew Moray at Stirling Bridge in September 1297, was guardian of Scotland until his defeat at Falkirk in 1298, and was executed in London in August 1305. Blind Harry, the minstrel who lived from about 1440 to 1492, wrote a long poem on Wallace’s life around 1477, more than a century and a half after Wallace’s death. Blind Harry relates that Wallace imprisoned 4,000 English prisoners in the church and burned them alive. The account kept at the castle calls this a legend: Wallace is said to have set fire to the chapel where soldiers had taken refuge, and to have driven others over the cliffs, with no survivors. The poem and the legend agree on a fire and on deaths inside the church. They do not agree on a number, and the poem was written long after the year it describes.

In 1336, during the second war of independence, English forces took the place again in support of Edward Balliol’s claim to the Scottish throne. Edward III, king of England from 1327 to 1377, ordered William Sinclair, eighth baron of Roslin, to sail eight ships to the partly ruined site, with 160 soldiers, horses, and a corps of masons and carpenters, and to rebuild it as a forward base for the northern campaign. Edward himself came in July. Before the end of the year Sir Andrew Murray, regent and guardian of Scotland, took the place and destroyed the new defences. Murray, also called Moray, held the lordships of Avoch, Petty, and Bothwell, married Christina Bruce, a sister of Robert the Bruce, in 1326, and was guardian from 1335 until his death in 1338. He spent that guardianship defending the young David II against Edward Balliol and Edward III. David II, son of Robert the Bruce, had been king since 1329, a child crowned at Scone in 1331. After the English victory at Halidon Hill in 1333 he was sent to France, and he did not return until 1341. In 1346 he invaded England, was captured at Neville’s Cross, and remained a prisoner for eleven years.

In the fourteenth century Dunnottar was granted to William de Moravia, fifth earl of Sutherland, who died in 1370. In 1346 David II issued a licence to crenellate. Another tower on the rock is mentioned in a papal bull of 13 July 1394. Around 1359 William Keith, marischal of Scotland, married Margaret Fraser, a niece of Robert the Bruce, and received the barony of Dunnottar. Robert I, king of Scots from 1306 to 1329, had fought the first war of independence, won at Bannockburn in 1314, and secured recognition of an independent kingdom before he died. Keith later gave Dunnottar to his daughter Christian and her husband William Lindsay of Byres. In 1392 an exchange returned Dunnottar to Keith, and Lindsay took lands in Fife. The castle’s own history dates the first stone castle, the keep, to that year, 1392. Other descriptions put the tower house in the late fourteenth century, or call the keep the early fifteenth-century core of what still stands.

Keith finished the tower house on ground that had been consecrated for the parish church. He had already provided a new parish church closer to Stonehaven, but he was excommunicated for building on the consecrated ground. He wrote to Benedict XIII, who issued a bull in 1395 lifting the excommunication. Benedict XIII was Pedro Martínez de Luna, an Aragonese nobleman and antipope during the Western Schism, and Antipope Benedict XIII is the name under which that bull is tied to Dunnottar. The castle’s own history calls him pope. Both names refer to the same intervention in 1395.

Keith’s descendants were made earls marischal in the middle of the fifteenth century. In 1458 James II created Sir William Keith the first Earl Marischal, a hereditary royal office as well as a title. Clan Keith, a Highland and Lowland clan, held the office that became Great Marischal and then Earl Marischal, and the family held Dunnottar until the eighteenth century. The title Earl Marischal was a peerage of Scotland for the Keith who served as great marischal.

James IV came to Dunnottar on 15 October 1504. A child played a monochord for him. He gave money to poor people. He had brought his Italian minstrels and an African drummer known as the More taubronar. James IV, king from 1488, was killed at Flodden in 1513. Through the sixteenth century the Keiths enlarged both Dunnottar and Keith Marischal in East Lothian. In 1531 James V exempted the earl’s men from military service because Dunnottar was one of the principal strengths of the realm.

Mary, Queen of Scots, visited in 1562 after the Battle of Corrichie, and she returned in September 1564. The castle’s account says she spent two nights on that second visit. Before the 1564 stay she sent a messenger boy to ask the Earl Marischal to gather provisions. Mary had been queen of Scots from her infancy in 1542, was widowed of the French king in 1560, and came back to Scotland in 1561. The Battle of Corrichie was fought on 28 October 1562 on the Hill of Fare in Aberdeenshire, between George Gordon, fourth earl of Huntly, and Mary’s forces under her half-brother James Stewart, earl of Moray. Huntly’s charge with swords failed against Moray’s pikes. Huntly died, apparently of apoplexy, after he was captured. Mary had come north to confront the Gordons. Her later reign ended in forced abdication in 1567, captivity in England, and execution at Fotheringhay in 1587. The two nights at Dunnottar belong to the earlier years, when she was still ruling in person.

Her son James VI stayed for ten days in 1580 during a progress through Fife and Angus. A meeting of the Privy Council was held at Dunnottar. A representative of Aberdeen’s council made a speech urging the young king to rule well and recalling the reign of Robert the Bruce. James had been king of Scots since 1567, when he was a little over a year old, and he did not have full control of his government until 1583. He came again on 17 April 1589 and spent the night at Cowie, watching for the Catholic rebel earls of Huntly and Erroll. In 1592, during a rebellion of Catholic nobles, Captain Carr took Dunnottar for the earl of Huntly. It was restored to Lord Marischal within a few weeks. In 1603 James also became king of England and Ireland. He returned to Scotland only once after that, in 1617.

George Keith became fifth Earl Marischal on 7 October 1581, on the death of his grandfather, William Keith, fourth Earl Marischal. He began a large rebuilding that turned the medieval fortress into a more comfortable house, and the castle’s history dates further building to 1593. He founded Marischal College in Aberdeen. A pet lion is said to have been kept at Dunnottar in the place later called the Lion’s Den. He valued the rock for its situation as well as for its security. A palace of ranges around a quadrangle was built on the north-eastern cliffs, with living rooms looking over the sea. The thirteenth-century chapel was restored and brought into the quadrangle. A stone gatehouse, now called Benholm’s Lodging, was built with several tiers of gun ports toward the approach. Those ports are likely to have been fashionable display rather than a serious battery, though an inventory of 1612 records four brass cannon covering the entrance. The earl had a set of Samson tapestries which may have expressed his religious outlook. He died in 1623.

The order of the palace ranges is not agreed. One reading puts the west range first, possibly before 1580, then the north and east ranges, and the north-east wing last, in 1645. Another makes the north-east wing contemporary with the east range and puts the north range later. Charles McKean, the Scottish historian and writer on architecture, set out that second sequence. A third suggests that the work ran from east to west. The long, low plan has been compared with English houses of the same years, against the Scottish habit of building tall towers. Seven matching lodgings line the west range, each opening on the quadrangle, with windows and fireplaces. Above them was a gallery about 120 feet long, with an elaborate oak ceiling. A Roman tablet taken from the Antonine Wall was displayed in that gallery. The tablet is now in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. It is one of the distance sculptures of the Antonine Wall, reliefs that marked the Roman frontier across central Scotland. It was set into Dunnottar in the sixteenth century and was recorded as having been repainted then. A later study of its pigments found both colours that may belong to the Roman period and colours that were available only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it offered a digital reconstruction of the relief as a sixteenth-century audience would have seen it.

The approach is overlooked by outworks on the Fiddle Head, a promontory on the west side of the headland. The main gate sits in a curtain wall that fills a cleft in the cliff. It had a portcullis and has been partly blocked. Beside it, Benholm’s Lodging rises five storeys, cut into the rock, with a prison below and rooms above. Three tiers of gun ports face outward from its lower floors, and four more gun ports inside the gate face the entrance. One description calls these defences the strongest in Scotland. A later description doubts them, because the ports in Benholm’s Lodging face across the approach rather than along it, and because the ports inside the gate may have been hard to use. Past the gate the passage turns sharply left and runs underground through two tunnels, coming out near the tower house. A second way in climbs from a rocky cove on the north side, where a small boat could be brought into a sea cave, up to a postern on the cliff, and then through the Water Gate in the palace. Earthwork batteries cover the north-west corner toward the land and the south-east toward the sea. A small sentry box stands by the eastern battery.

The tower house measures about 40 by 36 feet and rose about 50 feet to the gable. It has a stone-vaulted basement and originally three further storeys and a garret. The principal rooms were a great hall and a private chamber, with bedrooms above. Beside it are a storehouse and a blacksmith’s forge with a large chimney. A stable block runs along the southern edge of the headland. Waterton’s Lodging, also called the Priest’s House, was built around 1574, possibly for William Keith, son of the fourth earl, who died in 1580. It is a small house with a hall and kitchen below and private rooms above, and a spiral stair on the north side. It takes its name from Thomas Forbes of Waterton, an attendant of the seventh earl.

In the palace, the basement of the north range holds kitchens and stores, with a dining room and a great chamber above. The Water Gate, at ground level between the north and west ranges, leads to the northern postern. A rectangular stair links the east and north ranges. The east range has a larder, a brewhouse, and a bakery at ground level, and rooms for the countess above. A north-east wing holds the earl’s apartments, including the room called the King’s Bedroom, where Charles II stayed. A carved stone in that room shows the arms of the seventh earl and his wife and the date 1645. Below those rooms is the Whigs’ Vault, a cellar about 52 by 15 feet, with a large east window and a lower vault reached by a trapdoor. Of all the palace rooms, only the dining room and the Silver House still have roofs. Both were restored in the 1920s. The Silver House has a broad stair and a treasury above, and it gave one way into the gallery. A circular cistern, or fish pond, in the middle of the court is about 50 feet across and 25 feet deep. A bowling green lies to the west. At the south-east corner of the quadrangle the chapel, consecrated in 1276 and largely rebuilt in the sixteenth century, keeps medieval walling and two thirteenth-century windows, with a graveyard to the south. A stone vessel from the site is held by the National Museums of Scotland.

William Keith, sixth Earl Marischal, died at Dunnottar on 28 October 1635. His eldest son, William Keith, seventh Earl Marischal, lived from 1614 to 1670 or 1671. In 1639 the seventh earl supported the Covenanters, the Presbyterian movement that opposed the Episcopal church and the changes Charles I was trying to impose on the Scottish church. Charles I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1625, believed in the divine right of kings. His attempt to bring the Church of Scotland closer to English high-church practice led to the Bishops’ Wars and helped bring on the civil wars. With James Graham, first marquess of Montrose, the earl marched against the Catholic James Gordon, second viscount Aboyne and earl of Huntly, and defeated a royalist attempt to seize Stonehaven. When Montrose changed sides and marched north for the king, the earl stayed in Dunnottar even after parliament gave him command of the area, and even after Montrose burned Stonehaven. The castle’s history dates that destruction to 1645: Montrose came to negotiate, the earl refused, and the royalist army wasted Stonehaven and the barony of Dunnottar.

The earl then joined the Engagers, who had made a deal with the king, and led a troop of horse to the Battle of Preston in 1648 on the royalist side. That battle was fought on 17 August 1648. Oliver Cromwell, with about 9,000 parliamentarian soldiers, many of them veterans of the New Model Army, struck the flank of a much larger royalist and Scottish army under James Hamilton, duke of Hamilton, while that army was strung out on the march. The royalists broke. The survivors were beaten again at Winwick, and most of the Scottish infantry surrendered. Charles I was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. The defeat at Preston was followed by the Whiggamore Raid, a march on Edinburgh by the Kirk party of the Covenanters, who took power from the Engagers. The name Whig was shortened from Whiggamore, likely from a Scots term for mare-drivers, and it stuck to that Kirk party.

After the execution, the Engagers gave their allegiance to Charles II, the dead king’s eldest surviving son. The Parliament of Scotland proclaimed him king on 5 February 1649. He arrived in Scotland in June 1650 and visited Dunnottar in July 1650. On 1 May 1650 the Scottish authorities had recognised him as king of all of Britain, and England sent the New Model Army north under Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell, born in 1599, had risen as a parliamentarian cavalry commander, had pressed for the execution of Charles I, and later ruled as Lord Protector from December 1653 until his death in September 1658. His army crossed into Scotland on 22 July 1650 with over 16,000 men. David Leslie’s Scottish army would not be drawn into a battle while Cromwell was short of food, and at the end of August Cromwell fell back on Dunbar. On 3 September 1650, at the Battle of Dunbar, Cromwell’s army broke Leslie’s force on the north-eastern flank. Between 300 and 500 Scots were killed, about 1,000 were wounded, and at least 6,000 were taken prisoner from an army of about 12,500 or fewer. Edinburgh and Leith fell to the English. Charles II was crowned at Scone Palace on 1 January 1651, and the Honours of Scotland were used at that coronation.

The Honours of Scotland are the crown, the sceptre, and the sword of state, the regalia worn by Scottish monarchs at their coronations and the oldest surviving set of crown jewels in the British Isles. The crown, in its present form, dates from 1540. The sword and sceptre were made in Italy as gifts to James IV from the pope. They were used together from the coronation of Mary in 1543 until the coronation of Charles II in 1651. With Cromwell’s troops in Lothian, the Honours could not be taken back to Edinburgh. The Earl Marischal, as marischal of Scotland, had formal charge of them. In June 1651 the Privy Council decided to place them at Dunnottar. Katherine Drummond brought them to the castle hidden in sacks of wool. Sir George Ogilvie of Barras was made lieutenant-governor and was given the defence of the rock.

In the summer of 1651 the English crossed the Forth, beat a Scottish force at Inverkeithing, and pushed Leslie and Charles II to march south. On 3 September 1651, a year to the day after Dunbar, Cromwell destroyed that army at Worcester. Charles fled to the continent and spent nine years in exile. The Scottish government left behind surrendered. Dunnottar was still holding the Honours. In November 1651 Cromwell’s troops called on Ogilvie to surrender. He refused. During the blockade, Elizabeth Douglas, Ogilvie’s wife, and Christian Fletcher planned to get the Honours out. Christian Fletcher, born in 1619 or 1620, was the wife of James Granger, the Presbyterian minister of Kinneff. The king’s papers were taken out first by Anne Lindsay, a kinswoman of Elizabeth Douglas, who walked through the besieging troops with the papers sewn into her clothes.

Two accounts are given of the Honours themselves. Christian Fletcher stated in 1664 that on three visits in February and March 1652 she carried away the crown, the sceptre, the sword, and the sword case, hidden among sacks of goods. Another account, given in the eighteenth century by a tutor to the Earl Marischal, says the Honours were lowered to the beach, collected by Fletcher’s servant, and carried off in a creel of seaweed. Both accounts end the same way. Fletcher and her husband buried the Honours under the floor of the old kirk at Kinneff. Her own life account says the pieces were delivered to her on three occasions and that she buried them in Kinneff church, and that the exact manner of the smuggling has more than one version.

By May 1652 Colonel Thomas Morgan, commanding the blockade, had the artillery needed to reduce the castle. Ogilvie surrendered on 24 May on condition that the garrison could go free. The Honours were gone. Ogilvie and his wife were held in the castle until the next year, when a false story was put about that the Honours had been taken overseas. Much of the castle’s property was removed, including twenty-one brass cannon, and the earl had to sell further lands to pay fines imposed by Cromwell’s government. At the Restoration in 1660 the Honours were taken up from Kinneff church and returned. Ogilvie quarrelled with the earl’s mother over who should have the credit. He was eventually rewarded with a baronetcy. In 1661 parliament awarded Christian Fletcher 2,000 merks. The sum was never paid. In 1663 she married James Sandilands, first Lord Abercrombie. She died in February 1691. Charles II returned to London on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660, and reigned until his death on 6 February 1685. The Honours were locked away after the Union of 1707 and were found again in Edinburgh Castle in 1818.

Religious conflict returned to the rock in the next generation. In 1685, during the rebellion of the earl of Argyll against the new king James VII, 167 Covenanters were held in a cellar at Dunnottar. They were 122 men and 45 women, associated with the Whigs, and they had refused an oath of allegiance to the new king. The castle’s own history says they refused religious reforms imposed by Charles II, and it places more than 167 prisoners in the vault. Charles II had died in February 1685, and James VII, his Catholic brother, was king by the time the prisoners were brought in. They were held from 24 May until late July. Twenty-five escaped. Two of those were killed in a fall from the cliffs, and fifteen were recaptured. Five prisoners are said to have died in the vault. Another account says nine died from the conditions. Thirty-seven were released after they took the oath. The rest were transported to Perth Amboy, in New Jersey, under a colonisation scheme devised by George Scot of Pitlochie. Many, including Scot, died on the voyage. The cellar under the King’s Bedroom has been called the Whigs’ Vault since that summer.

James VII was deposed in the revolution of 1688 and 1689. In 1689, during Viscount Dundee’s campaign for the deposed king, Dunnottar was garrisoned for William III and Mary II, and Lord Marischal was appointed captain. Seventeen suspected Jacobites from Aberdeen were held in the fortress for about three weeks, among them George Liddell, professor of mathematics at Marischal College.

In the Jacobite rising of 1715, George Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, took an active part with the rebels and is said to have led cavalry at the Battle of Sheriffmuir. The rising began on 27 August 1715 at Braemar, when the earl of Mar raised James Francis Edward Stuart’s claim. James was the son of the deposed James VII. On 13 November the earl of Mar’s army met a government army under the duke of Argyll at Sheriffmuir. The result was indecisive, and the next day the Jacobites were defeated at Preston in England. James landed in Scotland in December 1715 and left for France in February 1716. Sheriffmuir is a high moor between Stirling and Auchterarder, on the north edge of the Ochil Hills. After the rising failed, the tenth earl left Britain. His own life account says he led Jacobite forces in the failed rising of 1719, then joined the Prussian army, became a close confidant of Frederick the Great, and served as Prussian ambassador to Spain, France, and Great Britain. The castle’s history calls him French ambassador for Frederick the Great after the 1715 rising. He was the tenth and last Earl Marischal, and he lived until 1778. In 1716 his titles and estates, including Dunnottar, were declared forfeit to the crown. The fortress is also described as in use until 1718.

The forfeited estates were sold to the York Buildings Company, which stripped the castle. One account dates the sale to 1717 and says floors, ceilings, and furniture were taken, leaving a shell, after about four centuries of Keith ownership. Another dates the purchase to 1720 and gives the price as £41,172, and says the company dismantled much of the building. A further account says the roofs and floors were removed and sold after the forfeiture of 1716. In 1761 the earl came back to Scotland briefly, bought Dunnottar again, and five years later sold it to Alexander Keith, an Edinburgh lawyer who lived from 1736 to 1819 and served as Knight Marischal of Scotland. Alexander Keith’s son, Sir Alexander Keith, lived from 1768 to 1832. In 1852 the castle passed to Sir Patrick Keith-Murray of Ochtertyre, who sold it in July 1873 to Major Alexander Innes of Cowie and Raemoir for about £80,000. Andrew Jervise, a Scottish antiquarian, compositor, and drawing teacher, is the writer who recorded that sale.

Weetman Pearson, first Viscount Cowdray, bought Dunnottar in 1919. He was an English contractor and Liberal politician who had built an international engineering firm and an oil company in Mexico, and he sold that oil interest in the same year, 1919. His wife began repairs. The castle has stayed in the family and has been open to the public since those works. The Hon. Charles Anthony Pearson, younger son of the third Viscount Cowdray, born in 1956, owns and runs it as part of Dunecht Estates, an estate of about 210 square kilometres. In 1923 the Black Hill was given by Lord and Lady Cowdray for the Stonehaven war memorial, an unfinished circular temple designed by the Stonehaven architect John Ellis. The castle drew about 52,500 visitors in 2009 and more than 135,000 in 2019. In October 2019 the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay were shown round. Parts of the 1990 film Hamlet were shot here, and the castle was used as the model for Merida’s home in the film Brave.

The headland was designated a scheduled monument in April 1920, a secular castle. The day is given as both 27 April and 28 April. The designation was amended in July 1970, on a day given as both 28 July and 29 July. One account treats 1970 as the year of designation. In 1972 twelve structures on the site were listed. Three of them, the keep, the entrance gateway, and Benholm’s Lodging, were graded of national importance, and the others of regional importance. In 2018 those listings were removed, and the scheduled designation was left to protect the buildings and the headland.

Excavation and repair in the twentieth century have been piecemeal. Systematic repair and excavation of the ruins began in 1925, and an excavation is recorded for that year. The 1984 trench, noted above, is the dig that looked for the early fort and did not find it. A watching brief during drainage works in the floor of the seventeenth-century dining room, published in February 2023, found that the floor makeup was a mix of clay and topsoil brought from elsewhere on the promontory. It produced three sherds of pottery: a fragment of a bowl of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and a sherd of early twentieth-century china. That mix suggests the surface was laid during the Pearson restoration of the 1920s. The dining room stands at first-floor level above barrel-vaulted cellars. An excavation in 2019 was directed by Murray Archaeological Services. The event record names the director and the year and does not list the finds.

What stands now is the accumulated work of the Keith centuries: a fourteenth-century tower, a sixteenth-century palace and gatehouse, a chapel with thirteenth-century fabric, and the cellar in which the prisoners of 1685 were held. The place was a local court, a royal lodging, a store for the Honours, a prison, and then a stripped ruin. It was rebuilt enough in the twentieth century to be walked through, and it remains a private castle open to visitors, still in the family that bought it in 1919.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/dunnottar-castle