St Andrews Castle
It’s hard to believe that the gentle town of St Andrews had a turbulent past but as the Episcopal centre for Scotland it saw many bloody battles particularly surrounding the reformation, as the ruins at St Andrews Castle show.
St Andrews had been the administrative centre for the church in Scotland since the tenth century and it’s archbishops and bishops had a principle residence here befitting their lofty status. There was a castle here since the 12th Century though much of the original castle was destroyed during the Wars of Independence with England and it was uninhabited until 1401 when it was rebuilt under Bishop Walter Trail.
Perched on the headway of the bay with steep cliffs protecting two sides and deep ditches surrounding the southern and western fronts the castle would have been an attractive fortress. Heightened tension between church and state in the early 1500s led to the castles to be further reinforced with two gun towers or blockhouses. These would be called to action in the famous 1546-7 siege.
After the then Cardinal David Beaton, a powerful figure with lots of enemies, had protestant preacher George Wishart burnt at the stake by the castle walls, a group of Fife lairds managed to gain access to the castle, overpower the garrison and murder the cardinal. They hung his bloody, naked body from the castle walls and held the castle against a siege that lasted a year, to be broken when a French fleet began a devastating artillery battery of its seaward walls.
Today you can see how these was powerful defences rising from vertical sea cliffs were decimated by the French ships. You can also explore one of the most fascinating remaining features of the siege, the mine and countermine. The attackers began digging a mine beneath the outer wall in the hope of collapsing it, the defenders then dug a countermine to intercept them. As you delve these depths you can see the evidence of the defenders frantic efforts to intercept in their narrow tunnel compared with the attackers wider tunnel, and imagine having to battle at close quarters in these cramped conditions. Another feature that still survives today is the castle’s notorious ‘bottle dungeon’, a dank, airless pit cut into the rock in the Sea Tower, with no light and no hope of escape.
This attraction is included in the Great British Heritage Pass.
