Blackness Castle

Where it sits. Blackness Castle occupies a rocky spit that pushes north into the Firth of Forth from the shore of the old county of West Lothian, now in the Falkirk council area, beside the small village of Blackness. Water surrounds it on three sides. The castle is long and narrow because the spit is long and narrow, and its silhouette — a low bow, a tall central mass, a blunt stern — earned it the nickname the ship that never sailed, with the north and south towers still known as the stem and the stern and the central tower as the main mast.

Why it was built here. Blackness was the seaport for Linlithgow, one of the principal royal residences of the Scottish monarchy, four kilometres inland. Sir George Crichton, Lord High Admiral of Scotland and Sheriff of Linlithgow, raised the castle in the mid-1440s during his family's feud with the Black Douglases. It is first recorded in 1449 and was already serving as a state prison. Crichton handed his lands to James II in 1453, and the castle has been Crown property ever since. Between 1534 and 1540 James V's Master of Works, Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, rebuilt it as one of the most advanced artillery fortifications in Scotland: the curtain wall was thickened from about 1.5 metres to over 5 in places, gun ports were opened, the south wall was raised, and the entrance was given a caponier — a firing passage inside the wall that let defenders shoot into the backs of attackers who had forced the gate. Only three survive in Scotland, the others at Craignethan and Stirling.

Prison, depot, monument. Blackness held prisoners of real weight: Cardinal Beaton, and Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, who was regent in the 1520s. The pit prison in the stem tower has a drain to the sea that floods at high tide. Cromwell's New Model Army bombarded the castle into surrender in 1650, after which Finnart's defences were obsolete. Repairs came in 1667, when Covenanters were imprisoned here; in 1693 the spur was heightened and the north tower cut down to carry three heavy guns. French prisoners of war were held between 1759 and 1815. In 1870 the castle became the central ammunition depot for Scotland: the courtyard was roofed over, the ditch filled, barracks built, and a cast-iron pier — one of the last built in Britain, dating from 1868 — thrown out into the Forth. The depot closed in 1912, and a restoration between 1926 and 1935 stripped most of the Victorian work back out again.

On screen. Blackness has been busy for decades. Franco Zeffirelli shot Hamlet here in 1990 with Mel Gibson, using the seaward walls as Elsinore; the castle also appears in The Bruce (1996), the 1997 Ivanhoe mini-series, and the science-fiction film Doomsday (2008). For most current visitors, though, it is Fort William in Outlander — the garrison headquarters of Captain Jonathan Randall. The courtyard, with its high enclosing walls and hard stone floor, is where Jamie Fraser is flogged, and the range of buildings around it supplies Randall's offices and the cells. The production's choice makes sense: unlike most Scottish castles, Blackness offers a large, enclosed, entirely blank courtyard with no domestic clutter, so it can be dressed as an eighteenth-century English fort without a single anachronism in shot.

What you actually see today. The central tower is five storeys, roughly 11 by 9.8 metres, with walls 2.3 metres thick at the base and one large chamber per floor. The stern tower holds the main hall and sits above thick-walled gun positions whose muzzle openings reach 1.5 metres across. The wall-walks give a straight view down the Forth to the three bridges in one direction and towards Grangemouth in the other. There is a small exhibition in the former barracks outside the walls. Floors and stairs are steep and uneven, so upper levels are not workable for everyone, though the courtyard is reachable.

Getting there and timing. Blackness village is signposted from the A904 between Linlithgow and Queensferry, with a car park a short walk from the gate; there is a bus from Linlithgow, and the castle sits on the John Muir Way, which makes it a natural stop on a coastal walk between Bo'ness and South Queensferry. Historic Environment Scotland runs it on shorter winter hours. The spit is exposed, and an east wind here is genuinely cold in any month, so a windproof layer is worth carrying even in July.