a HISTORICAL COMPANION TO

DUMBARTON ROCKby John Watson

Dumbarton Rock from the East

Dumbarton Rock is a hump-backed dome of rock stuck conveniently on a spit of land at the confluence of the River Leven and the Clyde, where the larger river empties out into a deep seafaring estuary. Its strategic position is immediately obvious and it is no surprise that its twin peaks (The White Tower and The Beak) balance precarious battlements and hide secretive walls amongst its craggy and impenetrable summit. It is the perfect natural garrison. The north face of this dome is especially precipitous with looming overhangs propped up by sheer cliffs up to the 74m summit of the outcrop. It is only accessible on its southern flank where the castle walls rise in height around a narrow natural corridor leading up to the grassy alps of the higher rock. Currently occupied by Historic Scotland, it is the lower Clyde’s most historic nub of rock and is recorded as the longest-occupied fort in Britain. Its flag-like main face stands out proud of the waters like a giant warning palm to any traveller entering the bounds of the Clyde.

‘The North Face’

Geology

Around 350 million years ago Scotland was an embedded piece of the larger continent of Pangaea, sweating it out in equatorial regions, not having drifted to our current chilly latitude of 55 degrees north. Early ‘tetrapod’ amphibians flopped around like in the Guinness adverts and huge plants such as Giant Horsetails populated a rather steamy and frightening landscape as vents of lava poured from the troubled continental crust. Scotland was violent with earthquakes and exploding volcanoes and leaking faults. Magma was bleeding everywhere and through the geological eras from the Carboniferous to the Tertiary, lavas created our west coast archipelago.

We drifted north and the Atlantic began to flood into the valleys of the Clyde and Forth. It must have been like a scene out of Mordor, with black spumes and fire and lightening in the clouds. The most vigorous igneous activity which birthed Dumbarton Rock occurred during the Visean Epoch (342–327 Ma). Somewhere in those millions of years the crust spat out a great extrusion of magma which cooled to form the double-humped dome of Dumbarton Rock. The cooling of the rock formed steep massively fractured faces and cracked walls, with a distinctly ‘cubist’ feel.

Under the castle on the north shore, like scattered pieces of a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, lie five massive volcanic boulders calved from the main crag. They can just about be re-imagined into place against the square-cut overhanging north face and may have been much later geological features plucked from the crag by giant sheets of ice during one of the many Tertiary period Ice Ages. This was the childhood of our ‘central belt’, our backdrop to the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. It is almost a nod to this vibrant geology that our heavy industries fired metal and quarried rock and built great ships in these cities - it is a burly land of steel and strength, of industrial focus, dense and hard and everywhere cradled by this basic philosophy of stone.

Dumbarton Rock North Face and Battlements

Ptolemy’s Dumbarton

The first human habitation on the ‘Rock’ was probably Neolithic as it was too good a vantage point for early hunter-gatherers not to use. The boulder caves would have provided shelter and the gentle sweep of the River Leven on its north side under the crags would have given an easy harbour between sea and river. No early archaeological evidence has been found apart from pottery shards dated to around 300 BCE which suggest trading with the Mediterranean was well under way in the late Iron Age and the Bronze Age. European travellers would have sailed up the Clyde with the granite peaks of Arran on their left, they would have swung right once through the gap between the islands of Cumbrae and Bute, eventually to see the beckoning dome of Dumbarton Rock. Fingers would have been raised and boats hauled up on the gravelly shores around the Rock. By this era there was already a fort on the dome and the Romans knew the area as Alt Clut (Clyde Rock). The rock was noted as a geographic feature by Ptolemy, the Alexandrian geographer. In his ‘Geographia’ he notes many occupied Roman sites in Southern Scotland, with the west-most being Alauna, which is thought to have been Dumbarton Rock, sitting on the river he called Clota. He noted the indigenous people who lived here were the Damnonii, possibly of Pictish descent, who would have been encountered by the Romans in Agricola’s campaign of 81 CE.

Dumbarton Rock Trig Point 74m

Ptolemy’s Map of Scotland and ‘Clota’ estuary

The Brythonic Kingdom

The Britons arrived next. They were an old Welsh culture, or Cumbric, who had settled the valley of Strath Clyde and called it Ystrad Clut. The Britonnic language was Cumbric, now a lost tongue, and their old tales of warfare and warrior culture were told by poets such as Myrddin (Merlin). He is reputed to have stayed in the fort in its Britonnic heyday in 576, no doubt muttering dark poetry and weaving his persuasive spell on Rhydderych Hael, the most famous King of Strathclyde who fought wars with the kingdom of Dal Riada. The nearby Clochodrick Stone in Renfrewshire is anglicized after this warrior king (Clach Rhydrych).

The great epic Y Goddodin, written by Aneirin, telling the tale of the disastrous raid on the Angles by the Edinburgh Britons, was possibly written here in this time of Dark Age sorcery and Arthurian legend. However, we know Rhydderych Hael was also a political beast who understood the popular evangelism of Christianity and courted the favour of his contemporary St. Kentigern (aka. St Mungo), the founder of Glasgow. Maintaining pacts with powerful groups was the key to maintaining the seat of power at Dumbarton and it didn’t really matter what they believed. Christians and pagan wizards in the court together must have been some sight!

The earliest written reference to the Rock is from a mention of Petra Cloithe (Clyde Rock) in Adomnan’s Life of St Columba. Alt Clut is also mentioned in a 5th Century letter from St.Patrick to Coroticus (Ceretic Guletic of Alt Clut), rebuking him for his persecution of Christians and bloodthirsty paganism:

Soldiers whom I no longer call my fellow citizens, or citizens of the Roman saints, but fellow citizens of the devils, in consequence of their evil deeds; who live in death, after the hostile rite of the barbarians; associates of the Scots and Apostate Picts; desirous of glutting themselves with the blood of innocent Christians, multitudes of whom I have begotten in God and confirmed in Christ.

St. Patrick

The shores of the River Leven under Dumbarton Rock

The Vikings at Dumbarton

In 756 a band of Picts and Northumbrians raided the castle but were ousted some days later. This was the beginning of the paranoid occupation of the longest embattled fort on British soil. The Dark Age occupation by the Britons was a few hundred years of high feudal culture with the Rock as its hub (from around 500 CE until the turn of the first millennium).

The Vikings did not miss their opportunity either. Sailing from occupied Ireland in 870 the Norse King Olaf ‘the white’ and his brother Ivarr ‘the boneless’ swished up the Clyde in 200 longboats. They aimed their bold fleet at Dumbarton Rock, beaching the longboats and laying siege to the Britons on the rock four four months, until their well dried up and they were taken in captivity to Ireland. However, the King of the Scots Constantine I and Artgal King of Strathclyde, soon resumed occupation of the castle and maintained its Britonnic stamp for a few more centuries.

‘In this year the kings of the Scandinavians besieged Strathclyde, in Britain. They were for four months besieging it; and at last, after reducing the people who were inside by hunger and thirst (after a well in their midst had dried up miraculously), they broke in upon them afterwards. And firstly, all the riches that were in it were taken; and also a great host was taken out of it into captivity.’ Duald Mac-Firbis’s account of the storming of the Briton’s fortress of Dumbarton in 870 AD

Modern Dumbarton from the battlements

The Vikings arrive at Alt Cluth

Dumbarton from the North West

Dun Breatainn

In the early second millennium the castle had become known as Dun Breatainn (hence Dumbarton), or the ‘Fort of the Britons’, but its Britonnic era symbolically came to an end when Owen the Bald was defeated at the Battle of Carham in 1018. The castle may have hung on for a while as a Britonnic centre but in a widening political landscape the new Scottish Kings saw Dumbarton as a vital staging post on the west coast. Kenneth McAlpin, the first King of Alba, was merging or conquering the Picts and unifying Scotland and he saw Dumbarton as a vital stone marker at the corner of his kingdom. Its imposing high walls were built and reinforced in 1220 by Alexander II and its transformation into a Scottish Medieval castle was complete. It was of central strategic importance in the Battle of Largs in 1263, which finally saw off the Norse influence in southern Scotland.

The narrow PortCullis to the Upper Castle

Dumbarton and William Wallace

In the new era of the Wars of Independence in Scotland from 1290 on, the castle was to become an important hub of power to the emerging Scottish kings and invading English forces.

Edward Longshanks – the despised Edward I – was wily enough to understand the strategic importance of Dumbarton Rock and in 1296 he gave specific instructions to John Stewart of Menteith to take the castle and hold it on behalf of the English Crown. This is the same Menteith who betrayed William Wallace and captured him in 1305, possibly in revenge for an earlier massacre by Wallace of English troops in Dumbarton.

They imprisoned him in the ‘Wallace Tower’ for some days before his martyrdom in London with an extended gory death at the hands of a bloodthirsty and vengeful English crown. It is ironic that Wallace would have overlooked the very peaks of his homeland – such as Ben Lomond – before his heavily guarded martyr’s journey south.

The Cannons guard the battlements

Wallace and his men arrived at Dumbarton before break of day. He called upon a widow of his acquaintance who entertained them in a closed barn with the greatest secrecy. She presented her nine sons to Wallace to increase the number of his warriors, and made him a present of one hundred pounds. Meantime he caused her to mark all the doors where the Southerons lodged and then marched all his men in solemn silence unto the gate where they securely slept. An English captain and nine of his messmates were still drinking and vaunting about their strength, one said,” Had I Wallace, I would think nothing to engage with him”; another said, “I would tie Sir John Graham,” a third said “ I will fight Boyd” and so on, and Wallace walks in among the midst of them and saluted them handsomely all round, “ I am come from my travels, gentles,” said he, “I long to see your conquest of the Scots, some of your good cheer I would wish to have.” Then the Captain gave him a very saucy answer, saying, “Thou seemst to be a Scot, likely to be a spy, and mayest be one of Wallace’s company, which, if thou be, nothing shall protect thee from being hanged”. Wallace thought it then good time to draw his dreadful claymore, and he cut off his head at one stroke, killed another, and burned a third into the fire, and Kierly and Stephen came in and killed all the rest. And then by the guidance of a hostler, he set fire to the buildings where the rest of the English slept and burned them all to death and proceeded to reduce Roseneath Castle. The night following the fall of Dumbarton, Wallace proceeded from Dumbarton Cave, whither he retired for rest, after the burning the English there,to Roseneath where he surprised and killed eighty of them returning from a wedding...

From The Life of Sir William Wallace, the Governor General of Scotland and Hero, 1851 by Peter Donaldson

The battlement walls.

Scottish & English Wars

King David II (Robert the Bruce’s son) sheltered here in 1333 after the disastrous rout by the English at Berwick’s Halidon Hill, illustrating that the Rock had returned to being a Scottish stronghold on the western fringes of a troubled land. The Castle was never far from controversy or dispute - in 1489 the Clyde echoed to the resounding crack and boom of the great cannon Mons Meg (now smothered in black paint at Edinburgh Castle), as James IV laid siege to the Darnley-occupied castle. Dumbarton Castle was captured in 1514 by the Earl of Lennox (after the disastrous Scottish loss at the Battle of Flodden) who entered the now vanished North Gate under cover of darkness in a storm. In 1523 the Castle was briefly garrisoned with French troops by the Duke of Albany, but by 1530 it was retaken by James V.

In 1548 the young Mary Queen of Scots was harboured here to play on the grassy turf in the safety of the higher castle, before her exile to France. In 1568, seven years after her victorious return, she was defeated at the Battle of Langside in Glasgow on her way to Dumbarton, her old ‘safe’ stronghold. The Reformation was in full swing and the Protestant forces finally captured the castle from Mary’s catholic Stewart supporters in 1571. With a daring raid under cover of darkness, Captain Thomas Crawford led a party of Protestant forces up the precipitous north face of The Beak and stormed the castle to finally wrest the Rock from its Jacobite occupation. Many Jacobites were subsequently held here before deportation after the uprisings of 1715 and 1745, to witness the same galling but beautiful view of their Highland home as Wallace would have seen it.

In 1652 the Castle had fallen into such disrepair that it surrendered to Cromwell’s armies without a scrap. New artillery fortifications were added by George II in the 18th Century in fear of reprisals from Jacobite supporters of the ousted Stewart royal line. The modern castle buildings and impressive battlements reflect the fear of concerted invasion during the Jacobite uprisings of 1689, 1715 and 1745, though the castle was never threatened. The modern Governor’s House was added in 1735. The Duke of York’s Battery replaced the old North Gate in 1795 and today this dominates the view over the giant boulders under the north face. During the French Wars, the Castle was maintained as an un-used defensive battery against naval attack and a ‘French Prison’ was built to hold French POW’s. The military left in 1865, only briefly to return during the two World Wars of the 20th Century. In May 1941 four German bombs fell upon the castle, though most enemy aircraft had been distracted by decoy harbour lights laid out on the reservoirs of the Kilpatrick hills.

Dumbarton Rock old postcard John Stoddart. Scenery & Manners in Scotland 1800

John Slezer

John Abraham Slezer, whose early prints of Dumbarton Rock captured it in the 17th Century, was born around 1650 in German-speaking Europe.

Slezer first visited Scotland in 1669 and had surveying experience in the army which led to his military posting in Scotland in 1671. Slezer’s surveying work was to produce groundplans of the main fortifications at Edinburgh, Stirling, Dumbarton, Blackness, and the Bass Rock.

Eventually he was to produce a book on Scotland’s main towns, castles and buildings known as the Theatrum Scotiae. In 1688, however, Slezer was Captain of the Scots Train of Artillery, and a supporter of the Roman Catholic monarch, James II, during Reformation times. Refusing to swear allegiance to the new Protestant King William he was sent to prison, only to be released in June 1689, when he accepted the new monarchy and was reinstated to his former position. Slezer eventually managed to get a royal licence for the printing of the Theatrum Scotiae in 1693.

The books did not sell well and money promised by Parliament never materialised, and the irregularity of his army pay deepened his debts. He spent the last years of his life in the debtor’s sanctuary at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh. John Slezer - ‘recorder of the State of Scotland’ – died in 1717.

Dunbritton

Dumbarton or Dunbritton, is a Town in the Sheriffdom of Lennox, which Beda calls Allclyth, other Allcluith. It has its Name from Dun, which in our ancient Language signifies a Hill or Rock, and Bar which in the same Language signifies the Top or Height of any Thing.

The Town is situate in a Plain on the Bank of the River Levin, near the Place where it enters into Clyde, a little below the Castle, which is excellently fortified by Nature, owing little to Art; and seems to have been built by the Ancient Brigantes. This Town had its Privileges procured to it by One of the Countesses of Lennox.

The Castle hath a strange kind of Situation; for where the Waters of Clyde and Levin meet, there’s a Plain exended to the length of a Mile at the Foot of the neighbouring Hills: And in the very Corner of this Meeting there rises a Rock with two Tops, the higher of which looks to the West, with a Watch-Tower on the Top of it, having a large Prospect on all Sides. The other being a little lower lies to the East. Betwixt these two Tops are Steps hewen out of the Rock with great Pains and Labour, which yield Passage only to one Person at a Time, to the upper Part of the Castle.

To the South where Clyde runs by the Rock which is naturally steep, it hath a little Descent, and as it were with out-stretcht Arms embraces the plain Ground; which partly by Nature and partly by Art is so enclosed, that it furnishes Room for several Houses and a Garden. It secures the Harbour by its Ordnance, and obliges the smaller Boats to come up almost to the very Gate of the Castle, the Chanal of the River running on that Side.

The middle of the Rock where the Entry to the Castle is, being built up with Houses, makes as it were another Castle distinct from the former. This Castle, as appears by its Prospects, does almost stand like a Sugar-loaf upon a plain Ground. The Circumference of it is but very small, and yet it hath at the Top a little kind of a Lake and several other Springs. Besides the natural Fortification, it is bounded on the West by the Water of Levin, and on the South by Clyde, which are to it instead of Ditches. To the East, the Sea at a full Tide beats against the Foot of the Rock; and when it ebbs it does not leave a Plain of Sand, but of a soft Clay, which is divided by a Rivulet that runs down from the neighbouring Hills.

Robert Sibbald’s text for the Theatrum Scotiae

William Daniell & Richard Ayton’s A Voyage Round Great Britain

A Voyage Round Great Britain is a collection of 308 aquatint engravings which William Daniell (artist) and Richard Ayton (writer) compiled during their epic journeys between 1814 and 1825. Daniell’s aquatint engravings, particularly those of the Scottish Highlands, are remarkable. He was one of the most famous landscape artists of the early Nineteenth Century. The ‘Voyage Round Great Britain’ was compiled “not merely to give plans and outlines of its well-known towns, ports, and havens, but to illustrate the grandeur of its natural scenery, the manners and employment of people, and modes of life, in its wildest parts”. Daniell took Richard Ayton around with him - a young playwright, freelance author and sailing enthusiast. While sailing on the Clyde, Daniell sketched the first ever illustration of a steam boat with Dumbarton Rock in the background:

“The stream of smoke from the tall cast-iron chimney generally takes a horizontal direction in consequence of the movement of the vessel, forming a pendant of extraordinary length and singular appearance”.

Alexander Nasmyth’s Dumbarton Castle1816

Historic Scotland’s ‘Dumbarton Castle’ - the Governor’s House