Bothwell Castle

High above a bend of the Clyde between Bothwell and Uddingston, about ten miles south-east of Glasgow, stands one of the largest medieval castles in Scotland. The bank falls away steeply on the river side, which is the whole point of the position: the castle was raised to watch a crossing of the Clyde that mattered strategically, and the ground does half the defensive work.

The barony of Bothwell was granted by King David I to David Olifard, Justiciar of Lothian, in the middle of the twelfth century. It descended through his family — his daughter had married William de Moravia, son of William son of Freskin — and by 1252 had come to their son Walter de Moravia. Walter began the castle. His ancestors are the forerunners of Clan Murray.

What Walter finished was less than he intended. By the outbreak of the Wars of Scottish Independence in 1296 only the great cylindrical donjon (the principal tower of a castle, its strongest and most defensible building), the prison tower and the short curtain wall joining them stood complete. Foundations for the rest were probably laid, and the gaps would have been closed with a wooden palisade — a common expedient on a half-built site, and a reminder that the castle went to war unfinished.

It then changed hands repeatedly. Edward I of England invaded at the opening of the war and seized Bothwell from Walter’s son, William Moray of Bothwell. The Scots besieged the English garrison for fourteen months across 1298 and 1299 before it capitulated. Edward returned in 1301 with six thousand eight hundred men and purpose-built siege engines and took it again. It became the headquarters of Aymer de Valence, second Earl of Pembroke, Edward’s Warden of Scotland, and stayed in English hands for several years afterwards.

The sieges did the damage that the builders never repaired. The donjon was severely broken about before the rest of the castle could be completed, and the fabric visible today reflects a rebuilding in the early fifteenth century that enlarged the castle rather than restoring the thirteenth-century design.

The ruin is rectangular. The remains of the donjon stand at the west end and the later Great Hall at the east, with long curtain walls enclosing the courtyard between them and round towers at the south-east and south-west corners. The castle was abandoned by the eighteenth century, which is why so little was altered after the medieval work stopped.

The Scottish archaeologist William Douglas Simpson placed Bothwell among the foremost secular structures of the Middle Ages in Scotland — a judgement about the ambition of the design rather than about what was actually completed.