You
have to go a bit out of your way to reach Rosyth Castle, unless you work at the
Port of Rosyth, as the castle is right at the entrance to the docks there. It is also a bit unclear if you are actually
permitted to walk around the grounds, as there is a great big sign warning you that
you are entering private property and trespassing is not allowed. However, I asked the security guy at the
entrance to the docks, and he said that it was fine to walk around the castle
grounds but to beware of the seagulls. A
warning I pretty quickly heeded as almost as soon as I walked through the entrance,
they started to screech at me, and divebomb me.
I stuck close to the walls and
kept away from the several young seagulls who were strolling around the far
side of the castle towards the docks.
Rosyth
Castle dates from around 1450 and was built for Sir David Stewart. It originally stood on a small island in the
Forth that was connected to the mainland by an artificial causeway. At high tide it was surrounded by the sea and
cut off from the mainland. During the building of Rosyth Dockyard, the land
around the castle was reclaimed and the castle now sits some distance from the sea.
Like
most castles in Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots is believed to have spent some
time here, though rather than being here as a prisoner, it is thought she
holidayed at the castle on several occasions.
It was also rumoured that Oliver Cromwell’s grandmother had been born at
the castle and had lived there for several years. If there is any truth to this rumour, then things
came full circle in 1651 when the castle was occupied briefly by Cromwell’s
troops and maybe even by Cromwell himself.
The
castle remained in Stewart hands until it was sold in the late Seventeenth
Century and eventually ended up being owned by the Earl of Hopetoun prior to
being sold to the Admiralty in 1903. The
Admiralty had plans to upgrade the castle, put a roof on it and turn part of
the keep into a reading room for naval officers and the rest of it into a naval
museum. However, these plans were never
carried out and only some basic work was done to stop the walls from
deteriorating any further.
At
one time there was a stone quarry near to the castle. This quarry extended out into the sandstone under
the Forth and as there was also a sandstone bed on the opposite shore, it was
suspected that this stretched out across the whole of the Forth. So, in 1806 a proposal was put forward that a
tunnel be dug from an area near to Rosyth Castle over to Springfield, now part
of South Queensferry, thus linking the Lothians and Fife. As this idea was proposed before commercial train
travel, the tunnel would have been created only for the use of pedestrians and
horses & carts. It was eventually
decided that the costs of building the tunnel were too prohibitive and the idea
was abandoned. There was then a gap of nearly
a hundred years before the Forth Bridge was built and trains could travel
directly from one side of the Forth to the other.
After avoiding the angry seagulls and managing to snatch a few photographs I left the Skulferatu that accompanied me on today’s walk in a gap in the wall of the castle. I then made a hasty retreat away from my feathery foes.
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –
Latitude 56.023686
Longitude
-3.431434
I used the following sources for information on Rosyth Castle –
The Peoples Journal
Saturday October 5, 1889
Fife Free Press and Kirkcaldy
Guardian
Saturday, 20 January 1906
Rosyth
by John Rupert-Jones
1917
Photograph of Rosyth Castle &
Forth Bridge by Valentine & Sons
from Rosyth
by John Rupert-Jones
Photograph of Rosyth Castle as
it was before construction of the dockyard
from Dundee Evening
Telegraph
Thursday 28 February 1929
Article
and photographs are copyright of © Kevin Nosferatu, unless otherwise specified.
