In the summer of 2006 we took a long vacation to the United Kingdom. Our time in Edinburgh Scotland was great. Edinburgh is the perfect size city. I have included here the text and graphics from the visitor signs inside Edinburgh Castle, which provide a concise history of the site from pre-history to today. I think that it is an amazing story. Visit Edinburgh if you can. The historical text below are all from the visitor signs inside the castle.
Edinburgh Castle is built on a very high rock overlooking the city.
(Source: www.historic-scotland.gov.uk)
Key to Castle Map
First I'd like to share a little Scottish humor with you. While we were in Edinburgh an anciant tribe of Scottish Coos were visiting:
HISTORY OF EDINBURGH CASTLE
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100 BC
Prehistoric Man on the Rock
The Rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands was form 70 million years ago, during a period of violent volcanic activity. In the series of Ice Ages that followed, mighty glaciers ground away the softer stone, leaving behind the hard basalt core of the Rock. The debris was left as a sloping tail, down which the Royal Mile runs today.
The first people to see the Rock were probable the hunters who appeared in the region nine thousand years ago. Recent archaeological excavations here in the castle have uncovered evidence that Bronze-Age man was living on the Rock as long ago as 850 BC.
Two thousand years ago, during the Iron Age, the Rock was a busy hill-fort settlement of the Votadini tribe. In the first century AD, the tribesmen and women watched from these heights as the Roman Legions marched by, on their way to do battle in the Highlands.
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AD 600
King Mynyddog and His War-Band: Feast in Din Eidyn
In about AD 600, three hundred men gathered around their King, Mynyddog, in his stronghold of Din Eidyn. This is the first mention of the place which we call Edinburgh.
The war-band were mainly from the local tribe, the Gododdin, part of the ancient Celtic population of Britain, the descendant of the Votadini. They were preparing to attack the Angles, recent heathen invaders from Europe.
In the taper-lit hall the war-band pledged themselves in strong drink to die for their King. And almost all did die, on a rain into the territories of the Angles, at Catterick in Yorkshire.
Shortly after, in AD638, Din Eidyn was besieged and taken by the Angles and the place seem then to have received the English name which it has kept ever since – Edinburgh.
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AD 1093
Saint Margaret Dies in The Castle
In about 1070, following William of Normandy’s conquest of England, members of the old Anglo-Saxon royal house fled to the Scottish court of Malcolm III. Immediately the warlike King fell in love with the saintly Princess Margaret and they were married in Dunfermline shortly after.
Margaret carried out many acts of piety in her adoptive country, including providing a new priory at Dunfermline and the Queen’s Ferry over the Forth for pilgrims to the shrine at St. Andrews.
Meanwhile Malcolm kept up hostilities against the new line of English Kings. But on 16 November 1093, Queen Margaret, seriously ill here in Edinburgh Castle, was brought the news that her husband had been killed at Alnwick in Northumberland. Broken-hearted, she too died. Husband and wife were buried side by side in the church at Dunfermline.
Queen Margaret was made a saint by Pope Innocent IV in 1250.
A tiny chapel, built on the summit of the castle rock in the early twelfth century, is dedicated to her memory. It is the oldest building in the castle.
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AD 1314
The Scots recapture the Castle from the English
In 1296 Edward I of England invaded Scotland, besieged and captured the castle.
On the night of 14 March 1314, Sir Thomas Randolph, King Robert the Bruce’s nephew, and his men climbed the precipitous north face of the Rock, took the English garrison by surprise and won the castle back.
Robert the Bruce immediately ordered that the castle be dismantled “lest the English ever afterwards might lord it over the land by holding the castles”.
Three months later, on 24 June, the Scottish army crushed the English at the Battle of Bannockburn.
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AD 1457
Mons Meg Arrives in Scotland
In 1449, James II married Mary of Gueldres in Holyrood Abbey. That same year a great siege gun, made for the Queen’s uncle, the Duke of Burgundy, was tested at Mons (now in Belgium).
In 1457 Mons Meg (as she is now called) was shipped to Scotland as a present to the King and Queen. Three years later the King was dead, killed at the siege of Roxburgh Castle by one of his guns (NOT Mons Meg!).
Mons Meg was kept with the rest of the royal guns here in the castle. She was used against the English and against rebellious Scottish noblemen.
Her enormous bulk (she weighs over 6 tons) soon made her obsolete as a siege gun and she was put to good use firing ceremonial salutes. In 1681, during a birthday salute for the Duke of Albany (later James VII, and II, the last Stewart King) her barrel burst open and she was unceremoniously dumped beside Foog’s Gate.
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AD 1566
King James VI is Born in the Castle
On 8 December 1542, Princess Mary was born in Linlithgow Palace. Six days later her father, James V, lay dead at Falkland Palace. The tiny baby became Mary, Queen of Scots, with a claim also to the throne of England.
In July 1565 Mary married her first cousin and second husband, Henry, Lcrd Darnley. Almost a year later, on 19 June 1566, she gave birth to their child, Prince James, here in the castle. The national rejoicing did not last long.
Over the next two years, Mary lost her second husband, remarried, was captured and imprisoned, escaped and ultimately fled into exile in England. Her son succeeded to the throne of Scotland as James VI and on the death of Elizabeth in 1603 also became James I of England. After more than three centuries during which English Kings had attempted by force to take the Scottish throne, it was a Scottish King who took the Crown of England without a shot being fired in anger.
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AD 1573
The Castle and the “Lang Siege”
On 16 May 1568 Mary, Queen of Scots fled to England and her infant son James became King of Scots. She left behind a divided nation.
Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange was keeper of Edinburgh Castle in 1571 when he decided to come out openly in support of the exiled Queen. The King’s supporters immediately laid siege to the castle but since the best artillery was inside the castle, it proceeded inconclusively for two years- whence the name – the “Lang (long) Siege”.
Kirkcaldy’s stout defence of the castle came to an end only after England had sent a large force and heavy artillery at the request of the King’s party, led by the Regent Morton. In May 1573, after a devastating eleven-day bombardment, the east defences of the medieval castle came crashing to the ground. Kirkcaldy surrendered and was executed.
Almost immediately Regent Morton put in hand the work of rebuilding the shattered castle. Much of what you see today dates from this time, including the mighty Half-Moon Battery and the Protcullis Gate.
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AD 1689
The Jacobites and the Last Siege
Late in 1688 the Protestant William of Orange landed in England and the Catholic James VII of Scotland and II of England, the last Stewart King, fled into exile. William and his wife Mary (James VII’s elder daughter) were proclaimed joint sovereigns of England. The Scots were undecided.
The governor of Edinburgh Castle at the time was the Duke of Gordon, a firm supporter of King James, who prepared the place for defence. The siege began in March 1689 and lasted for three months, during which time William and Mary were offered, and accepted, the Scottish Crown. On 13 June Gordon surrendered the castle.
It proved to be the last real action the castle saw. In the subsequent Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745, the castle was picketed by supporters of the “Old Pretender” and “Bonnie Prince Charlie” but was never seriously threatened. Peace has reigned ever since.
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AD 1818
Sir Walter Scott Find the Honours of Scotland
On 19 March 1707 the Act uniting Scotland and England was passed in the Scottish Parliament. When it rose, the Crown, Sword, and Sceptre were brought back to the castle and locked away. In time people wondered whether the Honours of Scotland, as they were known, really survived at all.
In February 1818 Sir Walter Scott, with permission from the Prince Regent, broke into the room where the Honours had supposedly been locked away. He found them lying at the bottom of a chest covered in linen cloths “exactly as they had been left”.
They were immediately put on display in the room where they were discovered, so beginning the castle’s new role as a visitor attraction.
