Broughty Castle

We cannot be sure when the mouth of the Tay was first fortified, but the present castle was built at the end of the 1400s. Five English ships had been captured near the site in 1489, prompting King James IV to order the construction of the castle in 1490. It's changed hands several times since then.

After the English devastated the Scots army at the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, Sir Andrew Dudley was sent to capture Broughty Castle. The castle’s owner Lord Gray supported the English cause: he wanted Mary Queen of Scots to marry a Protestant Englishman, not a Catholic Frenchman. As such, the castle was captured without a shot being fired.

Sir Andrew wasn't overly impressed by the troops under his command. He said "never had a man had so weak a company of soldiers given to drinking, eating and slothfulness." But the English stayed stayed for two and a half years, before being driven out by a Franco-Scottish force in 1550.

On the night of 31 August 1651, royalist forces abandoned Broughty Castle after seeing the strength of the parliamentary army, led by General George Monck, which was heading their way. According to English sources, they left behind four cannons, a single barrel of gunpowder and nineteen barrels of salmon.

At the time, Dundee was a royalist stronghold and an enormous prize for Monck’s men, who had been advancing north all summer, aiming to crush support for Charles II.

Records show that Monck called upon the Governor of Dundee, Robert Lumsden, to surrender the city on 26 August, but Lumsden refused. Those inside Broughty Castle weren’t quite so resolute. As Monck’s experienced army amassed, they “quitted and fled away” without putting up a fight.

The next morning, Monck’s troops began an assault on Dundee. Much of what we know about what followed comes from local tradition, but it seems that after the city walls were breached there was at least three days of slaughter and plunder. Some say as many as a fifth of the occupants of Dundee were killed. Following the attack, the spoils of war, along with prisoners, were carried south by English ships, passing Broughty Castle as they went.

The War Department bought Broughty Castle in 1854, converting it so it could provide artillery defence across the Tay in the event of a French invasion. The castle was gutted and extended to house a sergeant and 14 men. A huge angled battery was built, but no invasion came.

In 1888, Captain J.G. Grant of the Forfarshire Artillery Volunteers complained: “A fort such as this could never defend our river, for its demolition would only afford an enemy an hour's pleasant and agreeable recreation.”

Following Grant’s assessment, Broughty Castle was modernised again. The latest round of changes transformed the ruined castle into a modern artillery fort. The result was a well-equipped coastal fort that continued to defend the Tay and its commercial ports until the end of the Second World War.