Doune Castle

The site at the confluence of the Ardoch Burn and the River Teith had been fortified by the Romans in the first century AD, though no remains are visible above ground. Ramparts and ditches south of the present castle may mark an earlier fortification, and the name Doune derives from the Gaelic dùn, meaning fort. Recent research has shown that Doune Castle was originally built in the thirteenth century and was probably damaged during the Scottish Wars of Independence. The whole castle was traditionally thought to be the product of a single building campaign, and that view has now been revised.

It was rebuilt in its present form in the late fourteenth century by Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany, son of Robert II of Scotland and Regent of Scotland from 1388 until his death in 1420. His stronghold has survived relatively unchanged and complete. The castle assumed that form during one of the most creative and productive periods of Scottish medieval architecture, between 1375 and 1425, when numerous castles were being built and remodelled — Dirleton and Tantallon in Lothian and Bothwell in Lanarkshire among them.

Because of the status of its builder, Doune reflected the current ideas of what a royal castle should be. It was planned as a courtyard with ranges of buildings on each side, but only the northern and north-western buildings were ever completed. Those comprise a large tower house over the entrance containing the rooms of the lord and his family, and a separate tower holding the kitchen and guest rooms, the two linked by the great hall. It is an unfinished design that has been read for centuries as a finished one.

The castle passed to the crown in 1425, when Albany's son was executed, and was afterwards used as a royal hunting lodge and dower house. In the later sixteenth century it became the property of the Earls of Moray. Doune saw military action during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and Glencairn's rising in the mid-seventeenth century, and again during the Jacobite risings of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1800 the castle was ruined.

Restoration was carried out in the 1880s, replacing the timber roofs and internal floors along with interior fittings. The stonework is almost all of the late fourteenth century, with only minor repairs made in the 1580s, so the fabric a visitor sees is very largely Albany's. The castle passed into state care during the twentieth century and is now maintained by Historic Environment Scotland, so a building that was a ruin by 1800 is today among the most complete fourteenth-century castles in Scotland.