Roxburgh Castle

Tradition credits King David I with founding Roxburgh Castle, and it first appears in record around 1128 during his reign, guarding the meeting point of the Tweed and Teviot. The stronghold anchored a royal burgh that grew up around it, but its position on the border made it a prize fought over for more than three centuries. In 1174, following the capture of King William I at Alnwick, the castle was surrendered to England, beginning a long pattern of it changing hands between the two kingdoms.

Between 1306 and 1310, King Edward I of England had Robert the Bruce's sister Mary imprisoned in a cage suspended from the castle walls, a deliberate act of humiliation aimed at the Bruce cause. The castle was finally retaken for the Scots on 19 February 1314, when Sir James Douglas, known as the Black Douglas, led a night attack; his men, wrapped in black cloaks, were reportedly mistaken for grazing cattle as they scaled the walls using rope and board ladders.

Robert the Bruce then ordered his brother Edward Bruce, Earl of Carrick, to demolish the newly won castle entirely, so that, in the words of the Lanercost Chronicle, the English could never again hold the land by garrisoning it. The order reflected a deliberate Scottish strategy of the period: rather than hold and defend border castles against superior English resources, raze them so they could offer the enemy no future foothold.

The castle did not stay demolished for long. English forces under Edward III captured the site again in 1334 and restored its defences, only for the Scottish knight Alexander Ramsay to recapture it on 30 March 1342 in a daring night escalade over the walls. England regained control shortly after its victory at the Battle of Neville's Cross in October 1346, and the castle changed hands yet again in 1417, when a Scottish siege forced substantial repairs to the damaged defences.

In August 1436, King James I of Scotland assembled a huge army to besiege Roxburgh, bringing large cannons and mortars served by German gun crews under Johannes Paule, described as "Master of the King's engines", alongside thousands of Highlanders and men-at-arms from the Lowlands. The siege collapsed before it truly began: the queen warned the king that rival nobles were plotting against him, and James abandoned the campaign, leaving his costly German artillery behind as his army dispersed.

The Scots besieged Roxburgh again in 1460, and during the fighting King James II was killed when one of his own bombards exploded, scattering metal fragments. Despite the king's death the Scots pressed on and stormed the castle successfully, and his widow, Mary of Guelders, had it demolished so it could never again be turned against Scotland, ending its life as a functioning medieval fortress.

During the War of the Rough Wooing, an English garrison under Ralph Bulmer built a new rectangular fort on the ruined site in 1545 at the instigation of the Earl of Hertford. In 1547 Hertford had the surveyor William Ridgeway and the master carpenter John Revell erect a brewhouse there, reusing a timber frame originally made for Wark Castle. This last fortification was itself destroyed in 1550 under the terms of the Treaty of Boulogne, ending centuries of building on the site.