Нортумберлендтегі бұзылған Дунстанбург қамалы

Ruined medieval castle in Northumberland, England

Dunstanburgh Castle is a 14th century fortification on the coast of Northumberland in northern England, between the villages of Craster and Embleton. The castle was built by Earl Thomas of Lancaster between 1313 and 1322, taking advantage of the site's natural defences and the existing earthworks of an Iron Age fort. Thomas was a leader of a baronial faction opposed to King Edward II, and probably intended Dunstanburgh to act as a secure refuge, should the political situation in southern England deteriorate. The castle also served as a statement of the earl's wealth and influence and would have invited comparisons with the neighbouring royal castle of Bamburgh. Thomas probably only visited his new castle once, before being captured at the Battle of Boroughbridge as he attempted to flee royal forces for the safety of Dunstanburgh. Thomas was executed, and the castle became the property of the Crown before passing into the Duchy of Lancaster. Dunstanburgh's defences were expanded in the 1380s by John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, in the light of the threat from Scotland and the peasant uprisings of 1381. The castle was maintained in the 15th century by the Crown, and formed a strategic northern stronghold in the region during the Wars of the Roses, changing hands between the rival Lancastrian and Yorkist factions several times. The fortress never recovered from the sieges of these campaigns, and by the 16th century the Warden of the Scottish Marches described it as having fallen into "wonderfull great decaye". Multiple rectangular towers protect the walls, including the Lilburn Tower, which looks out towards Bamburgh Castle, and the Egyncleugh Tower, positioned above Queen Margaret's Cove. Three internal complexes of buildings, now ruined, supported the earl's household, the castle constable's household, and the running of the surrounding estates. A harbour was built to the southeast of the castle, of which only a stone quay survives.

The site of Dunstanburgh Castle in north east Northumberland was probably first occupied in prehistoric times. A promontory fort with earthwork defences was built on the same location at the end of the Iron Age, possibly being occupied from the 3rd century BC into the Roman period. Dunstanburgh formed part of the barony of Embleton, a village that lies inland to the west, traditionally owned by the earls of Lancaster. The origins and the earliest appearance of the name "Dunstanburgh" are uncertain.

Dunstanburgh Castle was constructed by Thomas, the Earl of Lancaster, between 1313 and 1322. Thomas was an immensely powerful English baron, the second richest man in England after the King, with major land holdings across the kingdom. It is uncertain exactly why Thomas decided to build Dunstanburgh. Although it was located on a strong defensive site, it was some distance from the local settlements and other strategic sites of value. In the years following Gaveston's death, however, civil conflict in England rarely seemed far away, and it is currently believed that Thomas probably intended to create a secure retreat, a safe distance away from Edward's forces in the south. He also probably hoped to erect a prominent status symbol, illustrating his wealth and authority, and challenging that of the King. He may perhaps also have hoped to create a planned town alongside the castle, possibly intending to relocate the population of Embleton there. Building work on the castle had commenced by May 1313, with labourers beginning to excavate the moat and starting to construct the castle buildings. Some of the outer walls may have been built by workers from Embleton as part of their feudal dues to Thomas. The operations were overseen by a mason, Master Elias, possibly Elias de Burton, who had been previously involved in the construction of Conwy Castle in North Wales. Iron, Newcastle coal and Scandinavian wood was brought in for use in the project. By the end of the year £184 had been spent, and work continued for several years.|group="nb" A licence to crenellate – a form of royal authorisation for a new castle – was issued by Edward II in 1316, and a castle constable was appointed in 1319, charged with defending both the castle and the surrounding manors of Embleton and Stamford. By 1322 the castle was probably complete.

Dunstanburgh Castle was acquired by John of Gaunt through his marriage to Henry of Lancaster's granddaughter, Blanche, in 1362. Gaunt was the 3rd son of King Edward III and, as the Duke of Lancaster, was one of the wealthiest men of his generation. He became the Lieutenant of the Scottish Marches and visited his castle in 1380. The surrounding manor of Embleton had nonetheless suffered from Scottish raids and Gaunt had concerns over the condition of the castle's defences, ordering the building of additional fortifications around the gatehouse. Part of the surrounding lands around the castle may have been brought into agricultural production at this time, either to feed a growing garrison or to protect the crops against Scottish attacks. In 1381 the Peasants' Revolt broke out in England, during which Gaunt was targeted by the rebels as an especially hated member of the administration. He found himself stranded in the north of England in the early part of the revolt but considered Dunstanburgh insufficiently secure to function as a safe haven, and was forced to turn to Alnwick Castle instead, which refused to let him in, fearing that his presence would invite a rebel attack. A wide range of work was carried out under the direction of the constable, Thomas of Ilderton, and the mason Henry of Holme, including blocking up the entrance in the gatehouse to turn it into a keep. In 1384 a Scottish army attacked the castle but they lacked siege equipment and were unable to take the defences. Dunstanburgh Castle remained part of the Duchy of Lancaster, but the Duchy was annexed to the Crown when Gaunt's son, Henry IV, took the throne of England in 1399.

The Scottish threat persisted, and in 1402 Dunstanburgh Castle's constable, probably accompanied by its garrison, took part in the Battle of Homildon Hill in north Northumberland. Henry VI inherited the throne in 1422 and during the next few decades, numerous repairs were undertaken to the property's buildings and outer defences, which had fallen into disrepair. The Wars of the Roses, a dynastic conflict between the rival houses of Lancaster and York, broke out in the middle of the 15th century. The castle formed part of a sequence of fortifications protecting the eastern route into Scotland, and in 1461 King Edward IV attempted to break the Lancastrian stranglehold on the region. Another Yorkist army was dispatched north in November under the joint command of the earls of Warwick and Worcester, and Sir Ralph Grey. They besieged the castle, which surrendered that Christmas. Percy died at the Battle of Hedgeley Moor in 1464, and the Earl of Warwick reoccupied the castle that June following a short siege. It was used as a base for piracy in 1470, and by the 1520s its roof was robbed for the lead for use at the castle at Wark upon Tweed, and further lead and timber were taken for the moot hall in Embleton. In 1550 the Warden of the Middle and Eastern Marches, Sir Robert Bowes, described Dunstanburgh as being "in wonderfull great decaye". Alice Craster, a wealthy widow, occupied the castle from 1594 to 1597, probably living in the gatehouse, where she carried out restoration work, and farming the surrounding estate. For much of the 16th century, local farmers bought the right to use the outer bailey of the castle to store their cattle in the event of Scottish raids, at the price of six pence a year.

In 1603, the unification of the Scottish and English crowns eliminated any residual need for Dunstanburgh Castle as a royal fortress. The following year, King James I sold the castle to Sir Thomas Windebank, Thomas Billott and William Blake, who in turn sold it onto Sir Ralph Grey, a nearby landowner, the following year. Ralph's son, William Lord Grey, was affirmed as the owner of the castle in 1625. The Grey dynasty maintained their ownership of the castle, which passed into Lady Mary Grey's side of the family following a law case in 1704. The lands around the castle and the outer bailey were used for growing wheat, barley and oats, and the walls were robbed of their stone for other building work. A small settlement, called Nova Scotia or Novia Scotia, was built on the site of the castle's harbour, possibly by Scottish immigrants. Several engravings were published of the castle in the 18th century, including a somewhat inaccurate depiction by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck in 1720, and by Francis Grose and William Hutchinson in 1773 and 1776 respectively. Mary's descendants, the Earls of Tankerville, owned the property until the heavily indebted Charles Bennet, the 6th earl, sold it for £155,000 in 1869 to the trustees of the estate of the late Samuel Eyres. There had been some attempts at restoration in the early 19th century, and the passageway through the gatehouse was modified and reopened in 1885. The historian Cadwallader Bates undertook fieldwork at the castle in the 1880s, publishing a comprehensive work in 1891, and a professional architectural plan of the ruins was produced in 1893. Nonetheless, a representative of the estate expressed his concern to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne about the condition of the castle in 1898, noting the poor repair of much of the stonework and the importance of the ongoing preservation work that the estate was undertaking. Dunstanburgh's ruins became a popular subject for artists from the end of the 18th century onwards. J. M. W. Turner was influenced by Girtin, and when he first painted the castle in 1797 he similarly focused on the wind and the waves around the ancient ruins, taking some artistic licence with the view of the castle to reinforce its sense of isolated and former grandeur. Turner drew on his visit to produce further works in oils, watercolours, etchings, and sketches, through until the 1830s, making the castle one of the most common subjects in his corpus of work. A similarly wild view was painted by Thomas Allom showing a ship in a heavy sea offshore, the wreck of which is taken up by Letitia Elizabeth Landon in her poetical illustration to an engraving of that work published in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1839.

A golf course was constructed alongside the castle in 1900, and the estate was later sold to Sir Arthur Sutherland, a wealthy shipowner, in 1919. Sutherland opened an additional course at the castle in 1922, designed by the Scottish golfer, James Braid. The costs of maintaining the property became too much for him and, after undertaking eight years of clearance work in the 1920s, he placed the castle into the guardianship of the state in 1930, with the Commissioners of Works taking control of the property. Archaeological investigations were carried out as part of the clearance work by H. Honeyman in 1929, exposing more of the main gatehouse, and further work was carried out under Robert Bosanquet in the 1930s. Aerial photography was carried out by Walter de Aitchison for the Ordnance Survey. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, concerns grew in the British government about the threat of German invasion along the east coast of England. The bays just to the north of Dunstanburgh Castle were vulnerable targets for an enemy amphibious landing, and efforts were made to fortify the castle and the surrounding area in 1940, as part of a wider line of defences erected by Sir Edmund Ironside. The castle itself was occupied by a unit of the Royal Armoured Corps, who served as observers; the soldiers appear to have relied on the stone walls for protection rather than trenches, and, unusually, no additional firing points were cut out of the stonework, as typically happened elsewhere. The surrounding beaches were defended with lines of barbed wire, slit trenches and square weapons pits, reinforced by concrete pillboxes to the north and south of the castle, at least partially laid down by the 1st Battalion Essex Regiment. A 20 feet (6 m) wide ditch was dug at the north end of the moat to prevent tanks from breaking through and following the track south past the castle, and a wide anti personnel minefield was laid to the south west to prevent infantry soldiers from circumventing the castle's defences and advancing down into Craster. After the end of the war, the barbed wire was cleared away from the beaches by local Italian prisoners of war, although the two pillboxes, the remnants of the anti tank ditch and some of the trenches and weapons pits remain. In 1961, Arthur's son, Sir Ivan Sutherland, passed the estate to the National Trust. Archaeological surveys were carried out in 1985, 1986 and 1989 by Durham University, and between 2003 and 2006 researchers from English Heritage carried a major archaeological investigation of of land around the castle. In the 21st century, the castle remains owned by the National Trust and is managed by English Heritage. The site is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and the ruins are protected under UK law as a Grade I listed building. It lies within the Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and is part of a Site of Special Scientific Interest, with parts of the site comprising a Special Protection Area for the conservation of wild birds. The National Trust has encouraged the land around the outside of the castle to remain waterlogged to enable the conservation of amphibians and bird species, and the inside of the castle is protected from grazing animals to encourage nesting birds.

Dunstanburgh Castle occupies a site within a larger body of National Trust land along the coast. The castle is situated on a prominent headland, part of the Great Whin Sill geological formation. On the south side of the castle there is a gentle slope across low lying, boggy ground, but along the northern side, the Gull Crag cliffs form a natural barrier up to high. The cliffs are punctuated by various defiles, formed from weaknesses in the black basalt rock, including the famous Rumble Churn. The area around the castle was dominated by three shallow artificial lakes, called meres, and accessed by three gates on the north, west and south sides. The meres were fed from a freshwater spring 2,000 feet (610 m) inland, linked to the meres by an underground stone channel. The meres were originally bounded by a sod cast boundary bank and ditch; today this is heavily eroded, and up to 3 feet (1 m) high. The North Mere is in area, and is blocked off on its northern end by a sod cast bank, adjacent to the site of the North Gate. The southern half takes the form of a 331 feet (101 m) long moat, which was recorded as being 18 feet (5 m) deep in the medieval period, terminating in the West Gate. The northern part of this mere occasionally floods in the 21st century, creating a temporary lake, and the moated section usually still contains some standing water. The West Mere, covering , stretches away from the location of West Gate and is blocked at the far end by a small, stone dam. Three rectangular fishponds were built alongside the West Mere, the smallest, probably a stew pond for raising young fish, being fed with water from the lake. A protective earthen bank, probably originally reinforced by a timber palisade, ran for approximately 490 feet (149 m) along either side of the West Gate, where a gatehouse was probably built. At the far end of the lake complex was the South Mere, in size, with the South Gate positioned in its eastern corner. All that remains of the harbour is its 246 feet (75 m) quay, built from basalt boulders, and it may not have been in frequent use during the medieval period, since it could only have been safely used during periods of good weather. West of the castle is a later shieling, the earthwork remains of a longhouse. South of this is a rectangular earthwork, with walls over 3 feet (1 m) high, which may have been a siege fortification from 1462. If this is such siege work, it would be a unique survival in England from this period. Possibly from the very start of the castle, and certainly by the 1380s, the castle buildings formed three distinct complexes supporting the Earl's household, the castle's constable and the administration of the Embleton barony respectively. The inside of the bailey still shows the marks of former strip farming, which can be seen in winter. The sandstone has since been stripped from the western parts of the wall, and the sandstone along the eastern end of the walls gives way to small limestone blocks, originally only laid 11 feet (3 m) high with a 4 feet (1 m) parapet, but later raised in height with additional basalt boulders, probably during the Wars of the Roses. It is uncertain if the curtain wall originally extended above the cliffs along the northern edge of the castle. Moving anticlockwise around the curtain wall from the north west, the rectangular Lilburn Tower looks out across Embleton beach. The tower was named after an early castle constable, John de Lilburn, but may have been built under Thomas of Lancaster; it was intended as a high status residence, 59 feet (18 m) high, 30 feet (9 m) square with 6 feet (2 m) thick walls, with a guardroom for soldiers on the ground floor. The rectangular towers at Dunstanburgh reflects the local tradition in Northumberland, and are similar to those at nearby Alnwick. Further along the wall there are the remains of a small tower, called Huggam's House by local tradition. Earthworks around the inside of the curtain wall suggest that there may once have been a complex of buildings stretching between Lilburn Tower and Huggam's House. This was heavily influenced by the Edwardian gatehouses in North Wales, such as that at Harlech, but contains unique features, such as the frontal towers, and is considered by historians Alastair Oswald and Jeremy Ashbee to be "one of the most imposing structures in any English castle". In the 1380s this gatehouse was further strengthened with a 31 feet (9 m) long barbican, of which only the rubble foundations now survive, around 2 feet (1 m) high. The passageway through the gatehouse was protected by a portcullis and possibly a set of wooden gates. The ground floor contained two guardrooms, each 21 feet (6 m) wide, and latrines, with spiral staircases in the corner of the gatehouse running up to the first floor, where relatively well lit chambers with fireplaces probably accommodated the garrison's officers. The staircases continued up to the second floor, containing the castle's great hall, an antechamber, and bedchamber, originally intended for the use of Thomas of Lancaster and his family. Four towers extended above the gatehouse's lead covered roof for an additional two storeys of height, giving extensive views of the surrounding area. This design may have influenced the construction of Henry IV's gatehouse at Lancaster Castle. Immediately to the west of the Great Gatehouse is John of Gaunt's Gatehouse, originally either two or three storeys tall, but now only surviving at the foundation level. This gatehouse replaced the Great Gatehouse as the main entrance, and would have contained a porter's lodge, defended by a combination of a portcullis and an 82 feet (25 m) long barbican. A inner bailey was approximately , defended by a 20 feet (6 m) high mantlet wall, was constructed in the 1380s behind John of Gaunt's Gatehouse and the Great Gatehouse. This complex comprised a vaulted inner gatehouse, 30 feet (9 m) square, and six buildings, including an antechamber, kitchen and bakehouse. Further along, the south side of the walls is the Constable's Tower, a square tower containing comfortable accommodation for the castle's constable, including stone window seats. On the inside of the walls are the foundations of a hall and chamber, built before 1351, part of a larger complex of buildings used by the constable and his household, approximately 60 feet (18 m) square. To the west of the Constable's Tower is a small turret that projects from the upper wall – an unusual feature, similar to that at Pickering Castle – and a mural garderobe; and to the east a small oblong turret with a single chamber,
In the south east corner of the walls, the Egyncleugh Tower – whose name means "eagle's ravine" in the Northumbrian dialect – overlooks Queen Margaret's Cove below. A three storey, square building, 25 feet (8 m) across, Egyncleugh Tower was designed to house a castle official, and included a small gateway and drawbridge into the castle, either for the use of the castle constable, or possibly for the local people. There is a postern gate in the eastern wall, added in the 1450s, and a further gateway in the north eastern corner, which gave access to Castle Point and Gull Crag below. Along the inside of the curtain walls are the foundations of a yard, , and a large rectangular building, usually identified as a grange or a barn. This would have probably supported the administration of the Embleton estates, and have included the auditor's chamber and other facilities. Although the castle was intended as a secure bolt hole for Thomas of Lancaster should events go awry in the south of England, it was, however "clearly not an inconspicuous hiding place", as the English Heritage research team have pointed out: it was a spectacular construction, located in the centre of a huge, carefully designed medieval landscape. The meres surrounding the castle would have reflected the castle walls and towers, turning the outcrop into a virtual island and producing what the historians Oswald and Ashbee have called "an awe inspiring and beautiful sight". The different elements of the castle were also positioned for a particular effect. Unusually, the huge Great Gatehouse faced southeast, away from the main road, hiding its extraordinary architectural features. This may have been because Thomas intended to establish a new settlement in front of it, but the gatehouse was also probably intended to be viewed from the harbour, where the most senior visitors were expected to arrive. The Lilburn Tower was positioned to be clearly – and provocatively – visible to Edward II's castle at Bamburgh, 9 mile (14 km) away along the coast, and would have been elegantly framed by the entranceway to the Great Gatehouse for any visitors. It was also positioned on a set of natural basalt pillars, which – although inconvenient to build upon – would have enhanced its dramatic appearance and reflection in the meres. The design of the castle may also have alluded to Arthurian mythology, which was a popular set of ideals and beliefs among the English ruling classes at the time. Thomas appears to have had an interest in the Arthurian legends and used the pseudonym "King Arthur" in his correspondence with the Scots. Dunstanburgh, with an ancient fort at its centre encircled by water, may have been an allusion to Camelot, and in turn to Thomas's claim to political authority over the failing Edward II, and was also strikingly similar to contemporary depictions of Sir Lancelot's castle of "Joyous Garde".

Dunstanburgh Castle has been closely associated with the legend of Sir Guy the Seeker since at least the early 19th century. Different versions of the story vary slightly in their details, but typically involve a knight, Sir Guy, arriving at Dunstanburgh Castle, where he was met by a wizard and led inside. Matthew Lewis wrote a poem, Sir Guy the Seeker, popularising the story in 1808, with subsequent versions produced by W. G. Thompson in 1821 and James Service in 1822. The tale continues to be told as part of the local oral tradition. One of these involves a child prisoner within the castle, who escaped, throwing the key to her dungeon into a nearby field, sometimes argued to be an outcrop of land north west of the castle, which from then onwards was infertile.