Dunstanburgh Castle

Listen first. Wind comes off the North Sea and moves through the long grass. Somewhere below the cliffs, waves break against black rock. Under your boots the path is soft turf, cropped short by sheep and grazed in places to bare earth. Ahead of you, two broken towers rise against an open sky. They look less like a building and more like a silhouette someone left on the horizon. This is Dunstanburgh Castle, and it stands on one of the wildest stretches of the Northumberland coast.

Most visitors arrive the way you probably did, on foot from the fishing village of Craster. The walk is a little over two kilometres along the shore. There is no road to the castle gate, and that matters. You approach slowly, and the ruin grows larger with every field you cross. Notice how the castle sits on a raised shelf of land. On one side the ground falls away to the sea. On the other, it slopes gently down toward farmland. The builders chose this spot with great care.

The rock beneath the castle is part of the Whin Sill. This is a hard, dark volcanic stone, formed when molten rock pushed up between older layers and cooled underground. Over millions of years the softer stone around it wore away, and the Whin Sill was left standing as ridges and cliffs. The same rock carries Hadrian's Wall across the north of England, and it holds up Bamburgh Castle further along this coast. Here at Dunstanburgh it gives the castle a natural wall of cliffs on its northern side.

The story of the castle begins in 1313. The man behind it was Thomas, Earl of Lancaster. He was one of the richest and most powerful nobles in England, and he was a cousin of King Edward the Second. The two men did not get along. Thomas led opposition to the king and to the royal favourites around him. Many historians believe the castle was partly a statement. It was a show of wealth and strength, built on a scale that a king could not ignore.

And the scale really is enormous. The curtain wall encloses a huge area, around eleven acres of open ground. That makes Dunstanburgh one of the largest castle sites in the north of England. Inside, there was room for people, livestock, and supplies. Today the enclosure is mostly grass, and that empty space surprises many visitors. You expect rooms and corridors. Instead you find a wide green field, with the sea on one edge and broken walls on the others.

Thomas did not enjoy his great fortress for long. His quarrel with the king turned into open rebellion. In 1322 his forces were defeated at the Battle of Boroughbridge in Yorkshire. Thomas was captured, tried, and beheaded near his own castle at Pontefract. There is no strong evidence that he ever spent much time here at Dunstanburgh. The grandest building of his life may have been one he hardly saw finished. That thought adds a strange sadness to the towers in front of you.

Now look at the great gatehouse, the tallest part of the ruin. Two round towers stand side by side, with a gate passage once running between them. In Thomas's time, this was the main entrance and also the finest living space in the castle. Later in the fourteenth century, the castle passed to John of Gaunt, a powerful son of King Edward the Third. He changed the design. He blocked the old entrance and turned the gatehouse into a strong keep, with a new gateway built beside it.

Walk along the wall toward the north-west corner, and you reach the Lilburn Tower. It stands on high ground and looks inland across the countryside. It is named after a constable of the castle, a man who held it for its owner. From up here, on a clear day, you can see a long way along the coast. Watchmen on this tower would have seen ships at sea and riders on the land. The tower still feels like a lookout.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Look at the low ground to the west and south of the castle. Archaeologists believe this area once held shallow artificial lakes, called meres. They would have surrounded the castle with water, and visitors may have seen the towers reflected in them. This suggests the castle was not only a fortress. It was also designed to impress, a piece of landscape theatre on the edge of the sea. Look carefully for the soft hollows in the fields.

The castle's most violent years came during the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. These were civil wars between two royal families, the House of Lancaster and the House of York. Dunstanburgh was a Lancastrian stronghold, and it was besieged more than once and changed hands several times. The fighting badly damaged the walls. After these wars, the castle was never properly repaired. Slowly it fell into ruin, and local people took stone from it for other buildings.

Now walk to the edge and look down at the cliffs on the north side. This is Gull Crag. In spring and early summer, the ledges fill with nesting seabirds. You may see kittiwakes, small gulls with clean grey wings, and fulmars gliding stiffly along the cliff face. Listen for their calls over the waves. Below the castle on the shore, there is also a narrow gully called the Rumbling Churn. In rough weather the sea forces its way into it with a deep, hollow boom.

The ruin has inspired artists for centuries. The painter J. M. W. Turner came to this coast and made several images of the castle, often with dark skies and heavy seas. There is also a local legend. According to an old tale, a knight called Sir Guy sheltered here from a storm. A strange figure led him to a hidden hall where a lady lay asleep under a spell. He failed the test to wake her, and legend says he searched for her ever after.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment inside the great curtain wall. Feel the wind and look at the light on the dark stone. The castle is now owned by the National Trust and cared for by English Heritage. As you walk back toward Craster, turn around once or twice. Watch the towers get smaller against the sky. Then follow the smell of woodsmoke into the village, where fish are still smoked in the old way.