Dunoon Castle

Dunoon Castle first appears in written record in the thirteenth century, and its origins may lie in the growing authority the Stewart family was building across Cowal at the time. A hill fort or earlier stronghold may have stood on the same cone-shaped mound before the stone castle rose, but the documentary trail begins only with the Stewarts' rise to power in the region.

In 1333 the castle was besieged and captured by Edward Balliol, the rival claimant to the Scottish throne, who promptly surrendered it to Edward III of England. The occupation provoked an insurrection that drove Balliol out of Scotland, and Robert the Steward, later crowned King Robert II, arrived in Cowal and, with the help of Colin Campbell of Lochow, retook the castle for the Scottish crown.

By 1468 the castle was in Campbell hands in all but name: James III agreed to repay his Master of Household, Colin Campbell, 1st Earl of Argyll, for repairs he had carried out, and in 1472 made him keeper of the castle outright. From this point Dunoon functioned as a royal castle with the Earls of Argyll and their Campbell heirs holding the keepership as a hereditary right through the fifteenth century.

In 1544 Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, besieged the castle with eighteen ships and 800 soldiers supplied by Henry VIII of England, part of the wider English campaigns against Scotland known as the Rough Wooing. Lennox succeeded in taking both Dunoon and Rothesay Castles, driving out Archibald Campbell, 4th Earl of Argyll, who sustained heavy losses in the defeat.

Mary, Queen of Scots, stayed at Dunoon Castle from 27 to 29 July 1563 while visiting her half-sister, Jean Stewart, Countess of Argyll, granting several charters during her short residence; the food served to her household during the visit was recorded in her household accounts. Two years later, in August 1565, her rebel lords gathered at Dunoon during the Chaseabout Raid, among them the Duke of Châtelherault and the Earls of Argyll and Rothes, before the faction left for Ayrshire on 18 August 1565.

In 1646 the Dunoon massacre took place nearby, in which Campbell forces killed men, women, children and infants of Clan Lamont, one of the bloodiest episodes of the long feuding between the two clans in Cowal. After the Restoration and the return of episcopacy under Charles II, the castle briefly served as a residence for the bishops of Argyll before slipping into permanent ruin during the seventeenth century.

During both the First and Second World Wars, military fortifications were built on and around the castle hill to help defend the River Clyde and its shipbuilding industry, giving the site a final, twentieth-century military role long after its medieval defences had crumbled.