# Dunstanburgh Castle

castle in Craster, Northumberland, England, UK

Craster, United Kingdom

Settlement · Fortification. 1313 CE

## Story

• Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster began this coastal castle in 1313, on an older fortified headland between Craster and Embleton, as a refuge and a display of power against Edward II.
• John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster blocked the great gatehouse in the 1380s and built a new western entrance after the rising of 1381.
• Lancastrian and Yorkist constables traded the castle during the Wars of the Roses, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the walls were already described as badly decayed.
• Painters including Thomas Girtin and Turner made the ruin famous, and the headland still holds the medieval quay, the meres, and concrete from the coastal defence of 1940.

## Visiting

The castle is open on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm, with last entry at 3pm. Last entry is also one hour before the advertised closing time. Tickets booked online until midnight the day before the visit receive a discount of 15 per cent, and a ticket bought on the day is full price. Tickets are valid all day.
Admission is free for members who bring a membership card, and National Trust members enter free with a valid membership card. Dogs on leads are welcome and are allowed to enter. Smoking, vaping, barbecues and naked flames are not allowed. Pushchairs are allowed to enter, though some paths are uneven and there are steps.
Drone flying is not allowed except by contractors or partners with permission.

## History

Dunstanburgh Castle stands on a basalt headland between Craster and Embleton, where Gull Crag falls about 30 metres to the sea. Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster began the stone castle in 1313 on the earthworks of an older promontory fort, inside a barony at Embleton that was small beside his other estates. The enclosure of 9.96 acres is the largest castle circuit in Northumberland.

Work was underway by May 1313 under the mason Master Elias. A contract with him is priced at 224 pounds, while 184 pounds had been spent by the end of that year. Edward II licensed crenellation in 1316, a constable was in place by March 1319, and the castle is also treated as complete in 1322.

Thomas almost certainly saw the castle only once, in 1319, on his way toward the Scottish war. In 1322 he was captured at Boroughbridge while trying to reach this refuge, and he was beheaded at Pontefract on 22 March. A royal garrison then held the headland against Scotland until the castle returned to his brother Henry.

John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster received the castle in 1362 and, after a visit in 1380 and the rising of 1381, turned the great gatehouse into a keep and opened a new gate on the west. A Scottish attack in 1384 failed for lack of siege engines. In 1399 the duchy passed with his son to the Crown.

During the Wars of the Roses, Sir Ralph Percy surrendered the castle in September 1461, changed sides in 1462, and lost it again after a siege. One dating of his capitulation is Christmas Eve 1362, set beside a Christmas surrender in the 1462 campaign and a final Yorkist occupation in June 1464. Sir Thomas Malory served with the besiegers.

Sixteenth-century surveys found only the gatehouse fit to live in. Sir Robert Bowes called the ruin wonderfully decayed in 1550, using the spelling of his own report, and a valuation in 1584 put restoration at 1,000 pounds. Alice Craster lived in the gatehouse from 1594 to 1597.

James I of England sold the castle in 1604, and it passed to the Grey family the next year. Painters took up the storm-beaten ruin from the late eighteenth century, among them Thomas Girtin and Turner, whose first Dunstanburgh picture is dated 1797. Matthew Lewis made the tale of Sir Guy the Seeker widely known in 1808.

Arthur Sutherland bought the estate in 1919. Guardianship is dated both to 1929 and to 1930, and the National Trust is named both as freeholder in 1929 and as recipient of the estate from his son in 1961. In 1940 the headland became an observation post, with pillboxes, a tank ditch and a minefield.

Three artificial meres, covering 4.25 hectares in one total and measured again as separate sheets of 5.6 and 2.25 acres, once ringed the promontory. A field survey of 36 hectares, also given as 35 hectares, found a Bronze Age barrow, the quay, and wartime works. Watching briefs in 2021 and in October 2023 found no significant artefacts.

## Photographs

- [Dunstanburgh Castle — Tim Simpson](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Gatehouse_and_curtain_wall_of_Dunstanburgh_Castle%2C_2009.jpg)
- [Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland. — mattbuck ( category )](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Dunstan_Steads_MMB_15_Dunstanburgh_Castle.jpg)
- [Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland. — mattbuck ( category )](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Dunstan_Steads_MMB_14_Dunstanburgh_Castle.jpg)
- [Castle Point, Dunstanburgh — Chris Gunns](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Castle_Point%2C_Dunstanburgh_-_geograph.org.uk_-_924371.jpg)
- [Castle Point, Dunstanburgh — Chris Gunns](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Castle_Point%2C_Dunstanburgh_-_geograph.org.uk_-_926573.jpg)
- [Beginning of the footpath to Dunstanburgh Castle — Chris Gunns](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Beginning_of_the_footpath_to_Dunstanburgh_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_934503.jpg)
- [Approaching Dunstanburgh Castle from Craster — Nigel Chadwick](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Approaching_Dunstanburgh_Castle_from_Craster_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1059978.jpg)
- [Castle Point — David Brown](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Castle_Point_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1181610.jpg)
- [Along the rocky shore to Craster and Dunstanburgh Castle — Andrew Curtis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Along_the_rocky_shore_to_Craster_and_Dunstanburgh_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1224459.jpg)
- [Arch, Craster Harbour The arch is all that remains of a much taller building which was part of the overhead equipment used to convey the local stone from where — Paul Buckingham](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Arch%2C_Craster_Harbour_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1594195.jpg)

## Sources

- [Dunstanburgh Castle](https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/north-east/dunstanburgh-castle) — National Trust
- [Dunstanburgh Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunstanburgh_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [History of Dunstanburgh Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/dunstanburgh-castle/history/) — English Heritage
- [Research on Dunstanburgh Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/dunstanburgh-castle/history/research/) — English Heritage
- [Dunstanburgh Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/dunstanburgh-castle/) — English Heritage
- [Facilities at Dunstanburgh Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/dunstanburgh-castle/facilities/) — English Heritage
- [Prices and opening times for Dunstanburgh Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/dunstanburgh-castle/prices-and-opening-times/) — English Heritage
- [Dunstanburgh Castle: Romano-British settlement, 14th century enclosure castle and harbour, and World War II pillbox and foxhole](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1007507) — Historic England
- [Dunstanburgh Castle](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1153477) — Historic England
- [Dunstanburgh Castle, Northumberland. Archaeological, Architectural and Historical Investigations](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/26-2006) — Historic England
- [Dunstanburgh Castle, Northumberland: archaeological watching brief](https://doi.org/10.5284/1116618) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Dunstanburgh Castle, Embleton, Northumberland. Archaeological Watching Brief](https://doi.org/10.5284/1117705) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas,_2nd_Earl_of_Lancaster) — Wikipedia
- [John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Gaunt,_1st_Duke_of_Lancaster) — Wikipedia
- [Edward II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_II) — Wikipedia
- [James I of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_I_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [J. M. W. Turner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._W._Turner) — Wikipedia
- [Thomas Girtin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Girtin) — Wikipedia
- [Matthew Lewis (writer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lewis_(writer)) — Wikipedia
- [Arthur Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Sutherland) — Wikipedia
- [Gatehouse and curtain wall of Dunstanburgh Castle, 2009.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gatehouse_and_curtain_wall_of_Dunstanburgh_Castle,_2009.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Dunstan Steads MMB 15 Dunstanburgh Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunstan_Steads_MMB_15_Dunstanburgh_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Dunstan Steads MMB 14 Dunstanburgh Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunstan_Steads_MMB_14_Dunstanburgh_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle Point, Dunstanburgh - geograph.org.uk - 924371.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Point,_Dunstanburgh_-_geograph.org.uk_-_924371.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle Point, Dunstanburgh - geograph.org.uk - 926573.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Point,_Dunstanburgh_-_geograph.org.uk_-_926573.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Beginning of the footpath to Dunstanburgh Castle - geograph.org.uk - 934503.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beginning_of_the_footpath_to_Dunstanburgh_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_934503.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Approaching Dunstanburgh Castle from Craster - geograph.org.uk - 1059978.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Approaching_Dunstanburgh_Castle_from_Craster_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1059978.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle Point - geograph.org.uk - 1181610.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Point_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1181610.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Along the rocky shore to Craster and Dunstanburgh Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1224459.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Along_the_rocky_shore_to_Craster_and_Dunstanburgh_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1224459.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arch, Craster Harbour - geograph.org.uk - 1594195.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arch,_Craster_Harbour_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1594195.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Dunstanburgh Castle stands on a basalt headland of the Great Whin Sill, on the Northumberland coast between Craster and Embleton. The curtain walls enclose 9.96 acres, the largest castle enclosure in the county, inside a 68-acre site that sits within a wider 610-acre stretch of coastal land. Gull Crag rises as much as 30 metres on the north side. The cliffs are broken by defiles in the black rock, among them the cleft called Rumble Churn. On the south the ground falls gently into bog. The ruins are a scheduled monument, first designated on 10 April 1915 and amended on 5 July 1994, and the standing masonry was listed at Grade I on 31 December 1969. The headland lies in the Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and in a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and part of it is a Special Protection Area for wild birds.

The name was already current when the stone castle was begun. Forms in use then include Dunstanesburghe and Donstanburgh. One reading joins the village name Dunstan to the Old English burh, a fortress. Another reads the fort, burgh, of the town, dun, by the rock, stan. The ending itself has been taken as a sign that people were on the headland before any earl built here. A promontory fort with earthwork defences occupied the same ground at the end of the Iron Age, perhaps from the third century BC into the Roman period. Clearance in the 1920s and 1930s produced prehistoric and Roman pottery, Iron Age millstones, a Roman brooch, and hearths of the first century BC and the second century AD. Digging in 1930 and 1931 also produced sherds of samian and pieces of imported Rhenish millstones. The occupation has been read as a small fort or a signal station, on the ground that in the second half of the second century the Roman frontier ran from the Forth to the Clyde. By the fourteenth century the old defences had long been abandoned and the land was under the plough. A survey that began in November 2003 read an earlier bank, cut by ridge and furrow and still visible as the edge of the dry ditch along the south side, as the rampart of that promontory fort. The same programme of work, published on 26 May 2011, covered 36 hectares and also identified a Bronze Age barrow. Another account of the investigation gives 35 hectares, or 86 acres, and runs the fieldwork from 2003 to 2006.

The headland lay in the barony of Embleton, inland to the west, and that barony was held by the earls of Lancaster. No castle stood there through the early Norman period. Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster ordered the work in 1313. He was born about 1278 and died on 22 March 1322. He was the eldest son of Edmund Crouchback, himself a son of Henry III, and of Blanche of Artois, dowager queen of Navarre and a niece of Louis IX. Edmund’s dates are given as 1245 to 1296. Through his mother, Thomas was a half-brother of Joan I of Navarre. From 1296 he was Earl of Lancaster, Leicester and Derby. From 1311, by right of his wife, he was also Earl of Lincoln and Salisbury, and the marriage contract left those two earldoms in his own right after his father-in-law’s death rather than only in his wife’s. He was hereditary sheriff of Lancashire. He spent much of a decade fighting in Scotland for Edward I, and he was in Edward I’s wing at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298. His marriage to Alice de Lacy produced no children. He had two illegitimate sons, John and Thomas. In 1317 Alice was abducted from her manor at Canford in Dorset by Richard de St Martin, a knight of John de Warenne, 7th Earl of Surrey. Thomas seized two of Surrey’s castles, and Edward II forced an uneasy truce.

Thomas was the second richest man in England after the king, with great estates in the north Midlands and Yorkshire. The Embleton lands were small beside them, and until 1313 he had paid them little attention. He was also a cousin and a leading opponent of Edward II. Edward II, also called Edward of Caernarfon, was born on 25 April 1284 and died on 21 September 1327. He was the fourth son of Edward I and became heir after his elder brother Alphonso died. He was king from 1307 until he was deposed in January 1327. In 1308 he married Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France. At his coronation on 25 February 1308, Thomas carried Curtana, the sword of Edward the Confessor. At the start of the reign Thomas supported the king. The favourite Piers Gaveston mocked him as the Fiddler and swore revenge when Gaveston demanded that one of Thomas’s retainers be dismissed. The precise tie between Edward II and Gaveston is left uncertain: they may have been friends, lovers, or sworn brothers. Thomas was one of the Lords Ordainers. His men helped separate the king from Gaveston, and Thomas was one of the judges who condemned Gaveston. In April 1312 Thomas and other earls led an army against Edward II and Gaveston. The king escaped by sea. The earls took Gaveston at Scarborough and had him killed on Thomas’s land in Warwickshire while he was being taken towards London. Edward II issued a formal pardon and still had reason to seek revenge. After the English defeat at Bannockburn in June 1314, Edward II submitted to Thomas, who in effect ruled England for about four years and could not stop Scottish raids. In 1318 Thomas was persuaded to accept a diminished authority.

Why the castle was begun is not certain. The site is strong, but it stands away from the villages and from the main routes. The border lay only about 25 miles to the north, and war with Scotland had already broken out before Thomas inherited, yet he seems to have been less concerned with the border than with a refuge of his own if politics in the south turned against him. He also seems to have wanted a mark of wealth that would bear comparison with the royal castle at Bamburgh, nine miles along the coast. He may have hoped to plant a town in front of the gate and to move the people of Embleton. One reading calls the result a bolt-hole rather than a residence, and not the centre of the baronial fee, and not a castle built to hold the Scottish Marches. Another calls it a show castle, modelled on the Arthurian Joyous Garde, meant above all to stand for his opposition to Edward II. He used the name King Arthur in secret letters to the Scots. The meres that turned the headland toward an island have been compared with Kenilworth, a castle of Simon de Montfort, and with later images of Avalon and of Lancelot’s Joyous Garde. The huge gatehouse has also been read against the gatehouses of Edward I, Thomas’s uncle, while its plan, without the lengthwise division found at Harlech, Beaumaris, St Briavels and Kildrummy, sits closer to thirteenth-century baronial gates such as Tonbridge and Caerphilly.

Work had started by May 1313, and a damaged account covers the year that began in the spring of 1313. Labourers dug a ditch on the west and began the buildings. Some of the outer wall may have been raised by men of Embleton as part of their dues. The mason was Master Elias, possibly Elias de Burton, who had worked at Conwy. A contract with him was for 224 pounds in silver. By the end of the year 184 pounds had been spent. Iron, coal from Newcastle, and Scandinavian timber were brought in. Scottish raids after Bannockburn, and famine in 1315 to 1317, do not seem to have stopped the work. Edward II licensed the castle to be crenellated in 1316. One account treats the walls and the gatehouse as complete by that licence. A constable was appointed in 1319 to keep the castle and the manors of Embleton and Stamford. Robert of Binchester was named the first constable in March 1319, and the place is described as finished, or at least able to be used, by then. Another account holds the castle probably complete in 1322, or probably completed soon after Thomas’s fall. In August 1319 Thomas passed through on his way to the siege of Berwick. That journey, or a journey the same year toward Edward II’s Scottish campaign, is treated as almost certainly the only time he saw the new castle.

What he had ordered was a large enclosure on the cliff, with a stone curtain, a great gatehouse and six towers, and a harbour on the south so that men could arrive by sea. Northumberland was then full of thieves and of schavaldours, border brigands, many of them from the household of Edward II, so the sea may have been safer than the roads. The quay that survives is 246 feet, or 75 metres, of basalt boulders. It can have been used safely only in good weather. One stretch of kerb lines up with the great gatehouse and may belong to Thomas’s first build, which would fit a note that the earl kept a boat at Embleton. A ditch dug in 1314 from the harbour to Embleton Bay, about 4 metres deep and 24 metres wide, is said to have made the castle and the ground down to the harbour into an island, crossed by a drawbridge. The harbour inlet later carried the name Nova Scotia, also spelled Novia Scotia.

In 1321 Thomas again led armed opposition, this time against Hugh le Despenser, 1st Earl of Winchester, and Hugh Despenser the Younger. He and his men meant to fall back on Dunstanburgh, the remotest strong place he held. Sir Andrew Harclay intercepted them. At the Battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322 Thomas was captured. A tribunal that included the two Despensers, Edmund Fitzalan, 9th Earl of Arundel, and Edward II condemned him for treason. He was not allowed to speak, nor to have anyone speak for him. Because of his royal blood the sentence was changed from hanging, drawing and beheading to beheading alone. He was beheaded on 22 March 1322 near his own castle of Pontefract. His titles were forfeited. He had sought Scottish help in the rising, chiefly to weaken the English war, and the Scots used his death.

Edward II took Dunstanburgh as a useful fort against Scotland. Robert de Emeldon, a Newcastle merchant, managed it at first. The garrison is given both as 40 men-at-arms and 40 light horsemen and as 40 foot soldiers and 40 hobelars. Roger Maduit, a former follower of Thomas who had been brought back into favour, became constable, then Sir John de Lilburn, a Northumberland schavaldour, in 1323, and then Roger Heron. John de Lilburn is also called joint constable in 1322 and 1323. Maduit and the garrison fought at the Battle of Old Byland in North Yorkshire in 1322. The garrison was then raised to 130 men, mostly light horsemen. By 1326, and by one account by April 1326, the castle had been returned to Thomas’s brother Henry, 3rd Earl of Lancaster, who died in 1345, and Lilburn was constable again. The Lilburn Tower, looking over Embleton beach and Gull Crag, carries John’s name. It may have been raised under Thomas, or finished by John while he was constable, or built about 1325 for him. It is a high-status lodging, given as 59 feet high, 30 feet square, with walls 6 feet thick and a guardroom below, and also as a three-storey tower with corner turrets above a flat roof, one apartment to a floor, fireplaces on each floor, projecting garderobes on the upper two, and a passage in the east wall at first-floor level joining the wall-walks. A postern lies to the north of it.

The second quarter of the fourteenth century stayed tense on the border, especially after David II took the Scottish throne in 1341. His capture at Neville’s Cross in October 1346 brought little quiet. An account of the early 1350s says the castle had sheltered people and their goods in a Scottish raid, probably the people of Embleton and the neighbouring townships. The enclosure was large enough. The same account is among the earliest to name a barn and a hall and chamber for the constable, almost certainly the footings still visible by the Constable’s Tower. A hall and chamber inside the south wall are also placed before 1351.

John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster acquired the castle in 1362 through his marriage to Blanche, granddaughter of Henry of Lancaster. He was born on 6 March 1340, most likely at Saint Bavo’s Abbey in Ghent, and he died on 3 February 1399. He was the fourth son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, and the third surviving son. The castle is also said to have come to Edward III’s third son, and to Edward III’s fourth son. The name Gaunt is an English form of Ghent. It was not used of him after he was three, and it was later spread by Shakespeare’s Richard II. He was the father of Henry IV and the founder of the royal House of Lancaster. His second wife, Constance of Castile, brought a claim to Castile, and for a time he styled himself king there. By Katherine Swynford he had the children later surnamed Beaufort, legitimised after he married her. His daughter Philippa’s marriage to John I of Portugal sealed the Anglo-Portuguese alliance of 1386. Through Joan Beaufort he was an ancestor of the Yorkist kings Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III, and through Margaret Beaufort an ancestor of Henry VII. He did little to Dunstanburgh until 1380, when, as lieutenant of the Scottish Marches, he visited and found the defences wanting. The castle was not on the main roads and was not a first target for a Scottish army, but it was kept garrisoned, and Embleton had suffered raids. Land around the walls may have been brought back into cultivation then, either to feed the garrison or to keep the crops from being burned.

In June 1381 the Peasants’ Revolt singled Gaunt out. He was in the north and did not trust Dunstanburgh as a refuge. He turned to Alnwick, which would not let him in, for fear that his presence would draw an attack. Over the next years the constable Thomas of Ilderton and the mason Henry of Holme, also called Henry Holme, blocked the old gate passage and turned the gatehouse into a keep, later called the donjon. The sequence is also told in three stages. John Lewyn, the best-known northern builder of his day, first raised a mantlet, a wall given as 6.5 metres high and 1.3 metres thick, and also as about 20 feet or 6.1 metres high, making a courtyard on the north side of the great gatehouse for Gaunt’s own rooms and cutting them off from the rest of the castle. From December 1381 Henry Holme added a tower and gateway in that wall, and six houses or service buildings inside the enclosure. Only in 1383, or in 1382 to 1383, was the new western entrance made, with barbicans and a drawbridge, and the old carriageway blocked. A gate may already have stood on that western site under Thomas. Another account places the blocking of both ends of the passage between 1372 and 1383, and a new gate-tower in the west curtain, with a barbican and a later mantlet ending in a second gateway against the south-west tower of the keep. The inner ward held a vaulted inner gatehouse about 30 feet square, and ranges for guests, men-at-arms and services. A large oven marks a bakehouse in the north range. The west range held a kitchen. The inner court is given as about 50 by 75 feet, or 15 by 23 metres. The great gatehouse’s own barbican, of which only rubble about 2 feet 4 inches high survives, is given as 31 feet long, and the later western barbican as 82 feet. One account says the earlier barbican was largely taken down in the later fourteenth-century alterations.

In 1384 a Scottish army attacked and, lacking siege engines, could not take the place. The attack is also placed before the alterations were finished. Gaunt then gave up the lieutenancy and lost interest. The castle stayed with the duchy. In 1399 his son took the throne as Henry IV, the duchy was annexed to the Crown, and Gaunt’s estates were at first treated as forfeit. Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s heir, had been exiled and returned with an army to recover his inheritance and to depose Richard II. He reigned as Henry IV from 1399 to 1413.

The Scottish threat did not end. In 1402 the constable, probably with the garrison, fought at the Battle of Homildon Hill. Henry VI inherited in 1422. His reign is also closed at 1461. Through the next decades buildings and outer defences were repaired. Surviving accounts put the king’s hall and great chamber, and presumably the earl’s rooms of the fourteenth century, on the top floor of the old gatehouse. They also show the castle as part of the wider barony: mills, a dovecote in Embleton, and the house of pleas, the forerunner of the moot hall of 1586 that still stands in the village. An oak barn of the home farm is recorded as built in 1454 and last repaired in 1470. Other farm buildings were of stone. The constable Sir Ralph Babthorpe died at the Battle of St Albans in 1455, fighting for Henry VI.

The castle was one of the forts on the eastern approach toward Scotland. In 1461 Edward IV tried to break the Lancastrian hold. Sir Ralph Percy, one of the joint constables, born in 1425, held Dunstanburgh for Henry VI even after the Yorkist victory at Towton in March 1461. He surrendered to the Yorkists in September 1461, a brief submission also placed later that year. In 1462 he changed sides again for Margaret of Anjou, who had landed at Bamburgh with a French army. That November a Yorkist force under Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester, and Sir Ralph Grey besieged the castle. Sir Thomas Malory fought under Warwick and Worcester. The castle surrendered that Christmas. One account dates Percy’s capitulation to Christmas Eve 1362, in the same narrative that places the final Yorkist recovery in June 1464. Percy was left in charge as part of an attempted reconciliation, changed sides again, and died at the Battle of Hedgeley Moor in 1464. Warwick reoccupied Dunstanburgh that June after a short siege. The castle is also said simply to have fallen to Warwick in 1464 after a siege, and never to have been fully repaired. A rectangular earthwork south of the walls, with banks over 3 feet 3 inches high, may be a siegework of 1462, which would be a rare survival in England. About 50 metres south of the keep, a roughly square enclosure with the footings of a range on two sides of a court has been read either as an outwork on the approach or as a later farmstead. Ridge and furrow crosses it, and it has not been decided which is the later.

The wars probably damaged the fabric. Apart from small repairs in 1470, little was spent. In 1470 the castle was used as a base for piracy. By the 1520s lead from the roofs was taken for the castle at Wark-upon-Tweed, and more lead and timber for the moot hall at Embleton. A report of 1538 to Henry VIII called it a very ruinous house and of small strength, and found only the gatehouse still fit to live in. Sir William Ellerker, the king’s receiver, patched the walls, but a survey of 1543 still found them poor. The north curtain is said to have been badly damaged by the sea as early as 1543. Surveys of 1538 and 1543 also found lead roofs partly gone. In 1550 Sir Robert Bowes, warden of the Middle and Eastern Marches, wrote that Dunstanburgh was in wonderfull great decaye. A report of 1584 put the cost of restoration for Elizabeth I at 1,000 pounds and argued that the castle was too far from the Scottish border to be worth it. From 1594 to 1597 Alice Craster, a wealthy widow, lived in the castle, probably in the gatehouse, repaired it, and farmed the estate. For much of the sixteenth century local farmers paid sixpence a year to pen cattle in the outer bailey when the Scots raided.

In 1603 the union of the crowns removed the last royal need for the fort. James I of England, who was James VI of Scotland, was born on 19 June 1566 at Edinburgh Castle, the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. He became king of Scotland on 24 July 1567 and king of England and Ireland on 24 March 1603, when he succeeded Elizabeth I. He died on 27 March 1625 and was succeeded by his second son, Charles I. The year after the union, in 1604, he sold Dunstanburgh to Sir Thomas Windebank, Thomas Billott and William Blake, who sold it the next year to Sir Ralph Grey of nearby Howick. Ralph’s son, William Grey, 1st Baron Grey of Werke, was confirmed as owner in 1625. A lawsuit in 1704 took the castle into the line of Lady Mary Grey. Wheat, barley and oats were grown in the outer bailey and round the walls, and stone was robbed for other buildings. A small settlement, Nova Scotia or Novia Scotia, grew on the harbour, perhaps of Scottish immigrants. In 1695 the harvest inside the walls was put at 240 Winchester bushels of corn and several cartloads of hay.

Francis Place’s sketch of 1678 shows the harvest in the fields to the west and several features since lost: stretches of the western curtain with the mural tower sometimes called Huggam’s House, or Huggam’s Hoose, the lowest storey of John of Gaunt’s gatehouse, parts of the east tower of the mantlet, and the battlements of the great gatehouse. The same drawing shows a barbican, or something like one, at the outer end of the drawbridge by Egyncleugh Tower. Samuel and Nathaniel Buck engraved the castle in 1720, not very accurately. Francis Grose drew it in 1773 and William Hutchinson in 1776. Hutchinson’s visit of 1776 dwells on the setting and still records useful points of the architecture.

Mary’s descendants, the earls of Tankerville, kept the estate until the indebted Charles Bennet, 6th Earl of Tankerville, sold it in 1869 for 155,000 pounds to the trustees of the late Samuel Eyres. The purchaser is also named as Samuel Eyres of Leeds, buying from the earl of Tankerville in that year. There had been some restoration early in the nineteenth century. The passage through the gatehouse was altered and reopened in 1885. A photograph of 1884 still shows two stone walls blocking that entrance. Cadwallader John Bates did fieldwork in the 1880s and published a full account in 1891. He treated the castle’s reason for being as English politics rather than the Scottish border, copied documents, and suggested that Thomas’s Arthurian enthusiasm might explain the design. A measured plan of the ruins followed in 1893. In 1898 a representative of the estate told the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne that much of the stone was in poor repair, and that the preservation work then under way mattered.

From the end of the eighteenth century the ruin was a subject for painters. Thomas Girtin, born on 18 February 1775 and dead on 9 November 1802, toured the north and painted the castle. He was a friend and rival of J. M. W. Turner, apprenticed to Edward Dayes, and from 1794 an exhibitor at the Royal Academy. The north country pushed him toward a palette of warm browns, slate greys, indigo and purple. An art historian, Souren Melikian, has described Girtin’s Dunstanburgh as the forces of nature unleashed, with wild waves and dark cloud around the ruins. J. M. W. Turner, born Joseph Mallord William Turner on 23 April 1775 and known in his lifetime as William Turner, died on 19 December 1851. He first painted the castle in 1797, under Girtin’s influence, and he too set wind and waves against the ruins, shifting the view so that the isolation and the former grandeur read more strongly. He returned to the subject in oils, watercolours, etchings and sketches into the 1830s, until the castle was among the commonest subjects in his work. Thomas Allom painted a ship in a heavy sea off the headland. Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote a poem to an engraving of that picture, titled Dunstanburgh Castle, in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book of 1839.

The legend of Sir Guy the Seeker has been tied to the castle since at least the early nineteenth century. A knight arrives, a wizard leads him in, and he finds a noble lady in a crystal tomb, watched by a sleeping army. Offered a sword or a hunting horn, he chooses the horn. The knights wake. He is outside the walls and spends the rest of his life trying to get back. Similar tales are told at Hexham and at the Eildon Hills. Matthew Lewis (writer), Matthew Gregory Lewis, born on 9 July 1775 and dead on 16 May 1818, and often called Monk Lewis for his novel The Monk of 1796, popularised the story in the poem Sir Guy the Seeker in 1808. W. G. Thompson versified it in 1821 and James Service in 1822. It is still told locally. Another tale has a child prisoner escape and throw the dungeon key into a field, sometimes an outcrop north-west of the castle, which would not bear a crop afterwards. Another concerns a man called Gallon, left in charge by Margaret of Anjou with a store of valuables. Taken by the Yorkists, he escaped and later recovered six Venetian glasses. Receivers and bailiffs named Galoun are recorded at the castle in the fourteenth century, and the personal name may belong with that story. Stories of tunnels to Craster Tower, to Embleton, to Proctor Steads, and from the castle well toward the west, may belong with the stone drains that fed the meres.

A golf course was laid out beside the castle in 1900. The estate was sold in 1919 to Sir Arthur Sutherland, Arthur Munro Sutherland, a shipowner. He was born on 2 October 1867 and died on 29 March 1953. He opened a further course at the castle in 1922, designed by the golfer James Braid. The cost of upkeep defeated him. After eight years of clearance in the 1920s he placed the castle in the guardianship of the state in 1930, and the Commissioners of Works took it. His own life is also said to record that he donated it to the nation in 1929, and he is called the last private owner. Another account puts the ruins into the guardianship of the Office of Works in 1929, on behalf of the freeholder, already named as the National Trust. Clearance by the ministry in the 1920s and 1930s is the context of the early finds. H. Honeyman, also H. L. Honeyman, exposed more of the main gatehouse in 1929. Robert Bosanquet, also named Robert Carr Bosanquet, with John Charlton, dug in 1931, and work continued under Bosanquet in the 1930s. Walter Aitchison took aerial photographs. In 1961 Arthur’s son, Sir Ivan Sutherland, also Sir Benjamin Ivan Sutherland, passed the estate to the National Trust. The castle is now owned by the National Trust and managed as a visited ruin.

Soon after war began in 1939, the east coast was feared as a landing ground. The occupation of Norway in the summer of 1940 sharpened that fear. The bays just north of the castle were open to an amphibious landing, and in 1940 the headland was folded into the coastal line associated with Edmund Ironside. A detachment of the Royal Armoured Corps used the castle as an observation post. The soldiers seem to have trusted the stone walls rather than trenches, and, unusually, no new loopholes were cut in the masonry. Beaches were wired. Slit trenches and square weapons pits were dug. Concrete pillboxes stood north and south of the castle, at least partly the work of the 1st Battalion of the Essex Regiment. A ditch 20 feet, or 6.1 metres, wide was cut at the north end of the moat to stop tanks using the track south past the castle. A minefield 545 by 151 feet, or 166 by 46 metres, was laid to the south-west so that infantry could not slip round the castle into Craster. After the war, Italian prisoners of war cleared the wire from the beaches. Two pillboxes, the remains of the anti-tank ditch, and some trenches and weapons pits are still there. A pillbox and a foxhole lie just north of the point where the old ditch met the harbour. The 36-hectare survey also recorded Second World War anti-invasion defences and a Cold War spy trawler.

Geophysical survey by Durham University in 1985, 1986 and 1989 found structures inside the south curtain, some of them likely to belong with the constable’s house, and others nearer Egyncleugh Tower. The constable may have had his own enclosure, with that tower as its entrance. The November 2003 survey of earthworks, with soil cores from the wet ground to the west, and further study of the fabric and of poems and descriptions through 2006, showed the castle to be larger than the stone circuit alone. Three freshwater meres, fed from a spring 2,000 feet inland by an underground stone channel, made a ring of water north and south of the ditch whose digging is documented in 1313, and turned the promontory toward an island. Their combined area is given as 4.25 hectares, or 10.5 acres. They were partly defensive, partly larders, and perhaps above all ornamental, reflecting the walls. An outer rampart enclosed more ground than the stone castle, with a large open space south of the great gatehouse. A planned town there remains unproven. The meres and the rampart formed the outermost perimeter, entered by gates on the north, west and south. The main land approach came from Embleton through the west gate.

The North Mere covers 5.6 acres, or 2.3 hectares. A sod-cast bank closes its north end beside the site of the north gate. Its southern half is a moat 331 feet, or 101 metres, long, recorded in the Middle Ages as 18 feet, or 5.5 metres, deep, and it ends at the west gate. The northern part still floods in some years. The moat section usually holds a little water. The West Mere, 2.25 acres, or 0.91 hectares, runs from the west gate and is stopped by a small stone dam. Three rectangular fishponds lie beside it. The smallest was probably a stew pond for young fish, fed from the mere. An earthen bank, probably once palisaded, runs about 490 feet, or 150 metres, on either side of the west gate, where a gatehouse was probably built. The South Mere, also 2.25 acres, has the south gate at its eastern corner. The boundary bank and ditch of the meres is now eroded, and stands up to 3 feet 3 inches, or 0.99 metres. Coring of the wet ground also bore on the landscape after the ice. West of the castle is a later shieling, the earthwork of a longhouse.

The buildings inside the curtain formed, possibly from the start and certainly by the 1380s, three groups: one for the earl, one for the constable, and one for the administration of Embleton. Strip farming still shows inside the bailey in winter. The south and west walls were faced with ashlar sandstone, mostly from Howick, over a core of basalt rubble. Much of the western facing has been stripped. Toward the east the sandstone gives way to small limestone blocks, first carried only 11 feet, or 3.4 metres, high, with a parapet of 4 feet 11 inches, or 1.50 metres, and later raised in basalt, probably during the Wars of the Roses. It is uncertain whether a stone curtain ever ran along the cliff top. The east side is also described as a flat-topped earthwork faced with stone, above a cliff of 30 metres, with three garderobe chambers later set into it for the men on the wall-walk, and a stone wall added on top of the bank in the fifteenth century. A postern in the eastern wall is placed in the 1450s. A further gateway at the north-east corner opened onto Castle Point and Gull Crag.

The great gatehouse is the dominant building, two drum towers of ashlar, three storeys, originally about 79 feet, or 24 metres, high. The curved fronts are also described as five storeys, standing two storeys above the main block, each with a corbelled stair turret, and with further turrets at the northern corners reached from the wall-walk. Historians Alastair Oswald and Jeremy Ashbee have called it one of the most imposing structures in any English castle. It was influenced by the Edwardian gates of north Wales, such as Harlech, and it has features of its own, including the frontal towers. The passage had a portcullis and possibly wooden doors, and it was rib-vaulted. Two guardrooms on the ground floor, each about 21 feet, or 6.4 metres, wide, had fireplaces, latrines and, in one reading, small chambers in the thickness of the curved walls used as porters’ lodges. Spiral stairs rose to well-lit rooms with fireplaces, probably for the officers, and then to the second floor, where the great hall, an antechamber and a bedchamber were meant for Thomas and his family. The lord’s hall is also said to have been divided from his solar by wooden partitions. A chamber over the passage held the portcullis windlass and murder holes. Four towers rose two further storeys above the lead roof. The arrangement may have influenced the gatehouse Henry IV built at Lancaster. John of Gaunt’s gatehouse, immediately west, was originally two or three storeys and now barely rises above its footings. It held a porter’s lodge and was closed by a portcullis as well as by the long barbican.

The Constable’s Tower, square, stands on the south wall at what became the south-east corner of a middle ward. It offered comfortable rooms, with stone window seats facing south, and it is placed both before the middle of the fourteenth century and in the later fourteenth century, and as three storeys. Beside it are the footings of a hall and chamber, part of a complex about 60 feet square for the constable’s household. Buildings at the north-east corner of the tower have been read as his hall, chambers and offices, and footings along the north side of the middle ward as kitchens and workshops. West of the tower a small turret projects from the upper wall, an unusual feature also seen at Pickering, with a mural garderobe. East of it a small oblong turret holds a single chamber 10.75 by 7.5 feet, or 3.28 by 2.29 metres. Egyncleugh Tower, a name taken to mean eagle’s ravine in the local dialect, is a three-storey square of about 25 feet, or 7.6 metres, at the south-east corner above Queen Margaret’s Cove. It housed an official and had a small gateway and a drawbridge, either for the constable or for local people. It is also given opposing gates, front and back, and identified with the water gate named in a document of 1386. The drawbridge crossed a rock-cut moat. Above the gate were two floors, each a single apartment with a fireplace and a garderobe. The tower is placed in the same period as the Lilburn Tower.

Along the inside of the curtains are the footings of a yard about 200 by 100 feet, or 61 by 30 metres, and a large rectangular building usually called a grange or a barn, probably serving the Embleton estate and including the auditor’s chamber. A possible barn toward the east side is the only known structure still not exposed. A chamber of the auditor and receiver of Embleton may have been one of the rooms in the gatehouse. A chapel, a byre and other houses of husbandry are named in documents and not yet located. Stables and a forge were almost certainly there and are not named. Inside most of the enclosure the grass is left long, and the greater part looks empty. The appearance of the interior has changed little since the clearances of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1949, building foundations of possible medieval date were found under the later ridge and furrow in the ground enclosed by the harbour ditch.

Early writing on the castle stressed its strength. Later work has stressed the display. It was clearly not an inconspicuous hiding place. The great gatehouse faces south-east, away from the main road, so that its architecture is hidden from that approach and is instead seen from the harbour, where the most important visitors were expected. The Lilburn Tower, set on natural basalt pillars that were awkward to build on, was framed in the gatehouse entrance and was plainly visible from Edward II’s castle at Bamburgh. The reflection of the towers in the meres was meant to be both frightening and beautiful. The same reading ties the watery circuit to Camelot and to Thomas’s claim of authority over a failing king.

A risk assessment of erosion, issued in June 2020, looked at the eastern curtain and at the northern end of the western curtain, and included a geophysical survey. It did not publish a list of objects. In 2021 a watching brief on the groundworks for two composting toilets found no archaeological deposits and no artefacts. In October 2023, hand-dug pits for new signs and for a fence along the north cliff found nothing of significance. A sign warning of the sheer drop, just north of the Lilburn Tower and outside the east curtain, needed footings only 300 millimetres deep. Two pits on the fence line met dolerite bedrock at 0.26 metres and at 0.50 metres, and the bedrock shows at the surface between them, so the chance of remains surviving along that fence is regarded as low.

The land outside the walls has been kept wet for amphibians and birds, and the interior is kept from grazing animals so that birds can nest. Seabirds use the cliffs in spring and summer, and skylarks nest in the grass. The ruins have received a Bronze Green Impact Award. The castle remains a ruin on the cliff, with the great gatehouse, the Lilburn Tower, the Egyncleugh Tower and the line of the meres still readable, and with the wartime concrete still in the ground beside the medieval quay.

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