The Castle That Remembered the Moon
Cradled in the wind-kissed highlands of Aberdeenshire, amid the moors and gorse-thickened valleys of eastern Scotland, lies a fortress older than many of its neighboring stones dare remember: Dunnottar Castle. Perched upon a dramatic promontory overlooking the North Sea, its weather-battered ruins speak not merely of time, but of resistance, war, refuge, and secrets that seabirds refuse to caw.
The first written mention of Dunnottar (“Dùn Fhoithear,” meaning “fort on the shelving slope” in Gaelic) appears in the annals of the 5th century, when Saint Ninian allegedly established a place of Christian worship upon this spit of stone. However, archaeological evidence suggests its strategic location was used long before by Picts, who found spiritual resonance in high crags overlooking relentless waters. In the ensuing centuries, the promontory became a fortress in the truest sense—militaristic, monastic, and monarchical in turns.
The current fortifications trace significant development to the late 14th century, when Sir William Keith, the Great Marischal of Scotland, received a license from King David II in 1392 to build what would become the castle’s central tower house and curtain walls. The structure grew in defiance of siege and time; with each royal feud or foreign threat, it blossomed—an architectural barnacle built deeper into the rock.
Crimson history poured through its gateway. In 1297, William Wallace assaulted an English-occupied Dunnottar, allegedly burning its garrison alive in the chapel. Lest one think that Scotland’s heroism was a genteel affair, the castle reminds us: freedom was forged with flint, fire, and livers charred in sanctified places.
But it was in the mid-17th century that Dunnottar truly earned its place in the vault of national memory. During the reign of Charles II, as Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army swept across Britain like a cold wind from the grave, the Honours of Scotland—the Scottish crown jewels—were spirited into the castle for safekeeping. The English forces laid siege, battering stone and hope, but the treasures disappeared mid-siege, smuggled out by a serving maid named Christian Fletcher. She supposedly hid them in sacks of wool, passing through enemy lines under the pretense of laundering her husband’s tunics. This act of subterfuge elevated Dunnottar to an almost mythic icon of Scottish defiance.
The castle’s architecture reflects its turbulent past. The sea-bound promontory is accessible only by a narrow, zigzagging path, a deliberately cruel choke-point for invaders. Its inner courtyard houses the grim Whigs’ Vault, where 122 Presbyterian covenanters were imprisoned in 1685 for refusing to recognize the king as head of the church. Many perished in that salt-damp cell, their faith calcified into legend on the very stones where tourists now pose for cheerful selfies.
The architectural complexity is labyrinthine: dungeon, bakehouse, smithy, barracks, and even a brewery—all hemmed into dry-laid stone and rust-licked mortar. The sea perpetually claws at its flanks, but the castle remains—ineluctable and embittered.
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It was on a droopy Tuesday in August—sky like porridge, gulls silent with suspicion—that a woman named Tabitha Maples traipsed up the path to Dunnottar Castle carrying a collapsible ladder, a Bluetooth speaker, and three bottles of Smartwater.
Clad in a poncho made entirely from laminated “VisitScotland” brochures, she told the entrance guide she was an “electromystic, fourth degree,” and insisted, with polite intensity, that she had obtained “psychic consent” from the castle in a dream. “It gargled to me,” she whispered, “in architectural glossolalia.”
What began as a curious act of eccentric devotion—pouring Smartwater down the ancient well “to revive its aqua-memory circuits”—soon turned into a performance. Tabitha began draping crystals over wall niches, naming each one after a member of the cast of Downton Abbey. “This is Lord Grantham. He guards the drawbridge chakra.”
When a child in a plastic sword costume pointed at her Bluetooth speaker and asked what she was playing, Tabitha replied, “The resonance frequency of emotionally trapped sandstone. Listen closely—you’ll hear the portcullis weep.”
Then came the ceremony.
With the help of her collapsible ladder, Tabitha ascended the parapet, affixed a fake granite mustache to the battlements, and declared that the castle was “too often gendered by tourists as male, but now she identifies as a crone-rock goddess named Svelta, Guardian of Lichen Dreams.” She then scattered confetti mixed with sea salt and glitter into the wind, chanting lines from what may have been either Yeats or a detergent bottle in Old Norse.
The crescendo arrived when she attempted holy matrimony with the portcullis. “Witness me!” she shouted to a terrified Canadian tour group. She produced a ring (foil, from a sandwich she had moments earlier purchased in Stonehaven), cut her palm on a rusty hinge, and began reading aloud from an old copy of Scottish Castles: A Pictorial History, replacing all the personal pronouns with “Svelta.” “Svelta’s arrow slits were surveyed post-Reformation! Svelta endured Cromwell’s breaches of intimacy!”
Security arrived late—flummoxed, over-moussed teenagers from Edinburgh—and Tabitha retreated to the dungeon, hissing like a kettle. Left behind: sage bundles, empty water bottles arranged in the zodiac of Aquarius, and a paper banner slung across two trebuchet stumps that proclaimed in red calligraphy: “Stone Rights Are Human Rights.”
What remains of her presence is unclear—except one small mystery: since that day, visitors have whispered that the castle occasionally trembles—not from wind or tide, but… laughter.
These days, Dunnottar’s only real protection lies not with guards or heritage trusts, but with a simple T-shirt sold online—a garish citadel sigil believed to soothe even the most emotionally conflicted turret. Whether the castle now worships this garment or merely tolerates it remains unclear. But by all accounts, it hasn’t wept since.
