Good Morning Adventurers, and if you are reading this then you may realize that this is not Tuesday. Normally I’d have posted this yesterday, but alas I forgot to complete this and post it. So here is here is my final post about castles. I’ll still make a few more posts on social media(that I still need to post), but otherwise I’ll get back to talking about my projects. Alright, today I’ll be talking about Dumbarton Castle and Duffus Castle.
Dumbarton Castle
Ok, so they call this place a castle but in reality it is a fort. The castle itself sits on a small hill/peninsula/mountain, or whatever word that you’d like to describe when looking at this place. This was the very first castle that we visited on our drive to Isle of Skye when we couldn’t find a parking spot for Stirling castle. Now in that first picture you can clearly see how the place overlooks the entire city below. Now I have to say this, and told this to my wife, if I had grown up in this place then this castle is where I would have always been. The place is huge and there are so many little nooks and crannies to explore. Sure, you have to buy a ticket every time you get in, but I figured that after a while, the staff there would just see me as a regular part of the castle. Then every time I was there, I’d just be working on homework, reading, writing, or imagining what it was like living/ruling in this castle.
Now, when you wander around these castle ruins it’s pretty spread out. There’s even a manor that you enter first before even crossing under the portcullis to enter the place. Then it’s up to you on where you want to go, and I believe my wife and I easily spent over an hour and a half just wandering around the place. In the picture above is where they kept some french prisoners. This, however, was one of the flatter parts of the castle, the rest of it was a mire of steep steps and inclines.
This picture here was taken on the pathway that walked along the wall that looped around the majority of the castle. This was also probably the most narrow part of the entire path as well, with steps going up and down the entire way. Despite all of that, it was still pretty cool to get the chance to basically walk alongside this ancient fortification. Now, I want to say more but I am really starting to get distracted right now, so how would I use this in a story? Well, I’d keep the ruins as ruins and write about a boy that spends to much of his free time in them. Since this was the first castle that I really explore, that inner teenager wanted to get out and explore. So that’s what he’d get, and in that story, he would be there so often that he would eventually notice when something was different. Maybe it would be the weather or how the tourists were acting that day, but he would know that something is different. He’d to the ruins and while looking for the day’s place to just relax and hang out, he’d find a new hidden section of the castle. A place that was recently revealed due to whatever mystical force that wanted it revealed to him. The story I have in mind, essentially would have been one that a younger me would have loved to fall into.
Duffus Castle
Ok, Duffus Castle was another one of those castles that you drive out to, pull up to a small parking lot in basically a cornfield, talk to the small coffee cart owner, then go and explore. Still baffles me how these castles are essentially in peoples backyards…and they just live with them there. Like, that’s crazy of a concept to me. Anyways, Duffus Castle. So this castle sits on a hill with the remains of a moat around it. When reading some of the signs placed around the ruins, it talks about how there used to be a village(?) around it as well. What’s really cool about this place is how massive it feels when you looked out at it. Even now, when I look at that first picture, I can still feel how massive the place was. Now to enter the castle grounds, you had to walk along the fence and then cross an old bridge.
In the ruins, we can see the remains of several old buildings, mainly a kitchen, stables, and storage. However, the coolest part about this castle besides the keep is the wall that is still standing. The picture above only shows a portion of the still standing wall, which nearly wraps around half of the hill. So this would have been a difficult castle to take if it did ever come under attack. Now, when you look up at the keep, you can already see how difficult it would be to climb that hill just to get into the keep. So imagine what it must’ve been without the added steps that were put there for tourists sake. Now sadly, when you go into the keep, even though it looks like there is a second floor, there isn’t.
So when you go inside the keep, there is a small room/hallway that you can check out before going into the main hall. That main hall can be partially seen from the outside because a section of the keep fell(can be seen in the first pic). So, despite the hall being really cool, there wasn’t anything that was really interesting to share because of all the fencing and scaffolding to support the ruins. However in that first room, you can see the stonework and the holes where wood would have gone to create stairs up to the second floor. There were also several ledges and perches that you could climb up just to get a different perspective on the area, of which I totally took advantage of.
This is another one of those places that would make for a great rebel base or a hidden rendezvous between nobles/lovers/cults. With so many still standing walls, the place is quite defensible still, despite the keep not being completely whole. There is enough elevation to hide small lights, and would be a pretty cool place for the main characters of a story to, say, stumble upon a cult performing a sacrifice and summoning an ancient deity. Or maybe, the knight is leading away the princess from the battlefield, protecting her throughout the night in the ruins while keeping an eye out for the rest of her guard who had stayed back fighting off the bandits. There are plenty of possibilities with this one, it’s just a matter of which one I’d want to write.
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