Blackness Castle: A Scottish Royal Fortress and State Prison
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- British, Kingdom of Scotland
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Castle
On this page15 sections
History
Blackness Castle is a fifteenth-century Scottish fortress in Blackness, United Kingdom, built probably in the 1440s by Sir George Crichton on or near an earlier fort. Its first recorded appearance, in 1449, shows it serving both as the Crichton family residence and as a state prison. The castle occupied the principal port of Linlithgow, an important residence of the Scottish monarchy, and its position on the Firth of Forth gave it both political and military value.
Crichton Residence to Royal Fortress
The castle’s construction probably took place during the feud between the Crichtons and the Black Douglases. In 1444, that conflict had led to the destruction of the Crichton tower at Barnton in Edinburgh. In 1453, George Crichton transferred Blackness Castle and his associated lands to James II, king of Scotland from 1437 to 1460. George’s dispossessed heir, James Crichton, briefly seized the castle and held it against the king. James II besieged and recaptured it later that year, after which Blackness became a royal fortress.
A keeper administered the castle, and the office was often combined with that of Sheriff of Linlithgow. Blackness also continued to function as a state prison. Its prisoners included Cardinal David Beaton, Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis, Andrew Melville, and Lord Maxwell. Beaton was imprisoned there in 1543. Later prisoners included Covenanters, Scottish religious opponents of royal interference in the governance of the Church, and French prisoners of war held between 1759 and 1815 during conflicts including the Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars.
Royal Visits and Artillery Reform
Blackness was connected to royal diplomacy as well as imprisonment and defence. James IV visited the castle on 11 July 1506 after travelling to the Isle of May aboard the Lion and another ship. In November 1512, the Great Michael and the Margaret lay at Blackness while James IV received the French ambassador Charles de Tocque, Sieur de la Mothe. On that occasion, the king confirmed the Auld Alliance, the long-standing political and military alliance between Scotland and France.
Between 1534 and 1540, Sir James Hamilton of Finnart directed a major programme of artillery fortification. Hamilton was the king’s Master of Works and applied contemporary European principles of artillery defence to Scottish castles. The work continued under the supervision of the parson of Dysart after Hamilton’s execution for treason in 1540, but major construction ended after the death of James V in 1542. The resulting defences included thickened walls, gun ports, and a powerful entrance forework.
Reformation and Civil War
During the Scottish Reformation, the castle was surrendered by negotiation in 1560 to James Hamilton, Duke of Châtellerault, the leader of the Lords of the Congregation. These were Scottish Protestant nobles and their allies who opposed the policies of the Catholic regent Mary of Guise. Two English captains then took possession of Blackness.
After Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to abdicate in 1567, civil war divided Scotland. The Blackness garrison initially remained loyal to Mary, although its keeper, Alexander Stewart, later joined the party of Regent Moray. In 1572, Lord Claud Hamilton recaptured the castle for Mary and used it to harass shipping on the Firth of Forth.
On 27 January 1573, James Kirkcaldy arrived from France with arms and money for Mary’s supporters. His ship was captured the following day. Regent Morton then besieged Blackness, and the castle surrendered within a week. In 1580, Malcolm Douglas of the Mains handed the castle to Lord Robert Stewart after removing the main iron gate of the dungeon, its lock, the prison lock, and timber parapet platforms. These actions weakened the defences. The castle later held the Earl of Huntly in 1592 and John Wemyss of Logie in 1594.
Siege, Garrison, and Military Depot
Improved artillery eventually overcame the castle’s defences. In 1650, during the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, the professional parliamentary army created during that conflict, besieged Blackness. Bombardment from land and sea forced the garrison to surrender, and the damaged castle was abandoned. Repairs began in 1667, after which Blackness again served as a prison and a minor garrison.
Following the Union of Scotland and England in 1707, the castle ceased to function as a state prison. It became one of four Scottish fortresses maintained and garrisoned by the British Army. The garrison numbered about fifteen men in the late eighteenth century, while another record gives forty-one men in 1691.
During the nineteenth century, Blackness changed from a fortress and prison into Scotland’s central ammunition depot. The depot supported coastal batteries established in response to fears of invasion associated with Napoleon III. It closed in 1912, although the army briefly reused the castle during the First World War. In the same year, Blackness passed to the Office of Works and received legal protection as an ancient monument.
A restoration programme carried out from 1926 to 1935 removed almost all of the nineteenth-century work and reconstructed features in a medieval style. Some of these reconstructed elements may not accurately reproduce their originals. The castle is now a scheduled monument, a legally protected site of archaeological or historic significance, in the care of Historic Environment Scotland.
Traditions and Associations
Blackness has popularly been characterized as “the ship that never sailed” because its narrow form projects into the Firth of Forth. Folklore describes unexplained knocking from unused rooms, an apparition of an angry knight, and a supposed underground passage linking the castle with the House of the Binns.
Remains
Blackness Castle stands on a rocky spit projecting into the Firth of Forth and follows a north-south alignment. Its elongated stone plan consists of a curtain wall, the enclosing defensive wall, with integrated north and south towers and a separate central tower in the courtyard. The form has often been compared to a ship moving towards the northeast, giving the north and south towers their traditional names, the Stem and Stern, while the central tower is known as the Main Mast.
Walls and Entrance Defences
Fifteenth-Century Core
The original fifteenth-century complex comprised the curtain wall, the north tower, and a central tower standing separately within the courtyard. A hall range may have occupied the south side. A rock-cut ditch protected the castle, which was originally entered through a gate in the east wall.
Southwest Spur
The sixteenth-century spur projects to the southwest and protects the main entrance. It contains a dog-leg passage and a caponier, an enclosed passage from which defenders could fire along the approach and into the backs of attackers who had passed through the gate. The entrance was approached across the rock-cut ditch by a drawbridge. Its latticed iron yett, a heavy Scottish iron gate, dates from 1693 and remains in place. The spur was heightened later in the seventeenth century, when gun batteries were added above it.
The curtain wall was thickened internally along the south and east sides. In places, its thickness increased from about 1.5 metres to more than 5 metres, and gun ports were inserted. The south wall was raised to enclose the new south tower. The caponier is one of only three surviving examples in Scotland, the others being at Craignethan Castle and Stirling Castle. Together with the thickened walls, gun ports, and artillery positions, it formed part of one of Scotland’s most advanced sixteenth-century artillery fortifications.
North and South Towers
North Tower, or Stem
The small North Tower, or Stem, originally had three storeys. In 1693, it was reduced to two storeys to provide three gun platforms. Its upper chamber contains a fireplace. The lower chamber is a pit prison entered only through a trapdoor above, and sea water reaches it through a drain at high tide.
South Tower, or Stern
The South Tower, or Stern, dates largely from the mid-sixteenth century and may have replaced an earlier hall block. Sixteenth-century masonry was built onto the battlements of the fifteenth-century curtain wall, preserving an earlier alternating pattern of low and high sections. The tower stands above thick-walled basement artillery positions defending the southern and eastern approaches. Its basement gun loops are up to about 1.5 metres wide at the mouth.
The South Tower contained the principal accommodation, chambers in its northwest wing, and a large hall on the upper storey. The hall was subdivided when the castle became an ammunition depot and later reinstated. During the seventeenth century, its large south-facing window was used as a gun emplacement.
Central Tower and Courtyard
The five-storey Central Tower, or Main Mast, was built in the fifteenth century and heightened in the sixteenth. It measures approximately 11 by 9.8 metres, with walls about 2.3 metres thick at the base. Each storey contains a large room with a fireplace, a garderobe, or medieval privy, and additional chambers within the walls.
The storeys were originally linked by a narrow spiral stair. A larger stair tower was added at the east corner in the seventeenth century. The basement is vaulted, and the roof is also built over a stone vault. The parapet was rebuilt in the twentieth century, while its projecting corbel course is original. A fifteenth-century well lies outside the tower.
Water Access and Later Military Buildings
A water gate lies on the northwest side of the castle. Another gate near the southwest corner leads to the nineteenth-century pier. The former east gate, once the main entrance, was blocked at the end of the 1530s.
The pier was built in 1868 from cast iron and includes a gate and drawbridge. It is described as one of the last drawbridges constructed in Britain. Nineteenth-century soldiers’ barracks and officers’ quarters stand outside the castle walls. During the ammunition-depot period, the courtyard was roofed over and the ground to the east was levelled. A separate area south of the castle was arranged with barracks on its southern side and officers’ quarters to the west. These buildings, together with the pier, survived the twentieth-century restoration, which removed most of the other nineteenth-century additions and rebuilt some medieval-style elements.
