Publication Account

Date 1977

Event ID 1017866

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1017866

The Townhead Motte was located near the Academy and is now so mutilated that the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments stated that 'save for the suggestive name of Moat Brae by the waterside it would have been difficult to infer a motte on this site' (RCAHM, 1920, 51). Regardless, it has been inferred that the Townhead motte was the headquarters for Radulf, sub-king of Strathnith, and that it was occupied as a castle site until at least the seventeenth century. By the fifteenth century the possession of the Townhead Motte had passed to the Maxwells of Caerlaverock, whose ‘castle' (perhaps, in reality, a fortified townhouse) was described in an English report of 1563-66 as ‘battled within . . . but not tenable nor strong against any battery of guns' (Barbour, 1903-4, 362). The words of that rang true, for Lord Scrope, writing of his raid in 1570, noted that he 'took and cast doun the Castles of Caerlaverock, Hoddam, Dumfries, Tinwald ... and sundry gentlemen's houses ... and having burnt the town of Dumfries returned with great spoil to England' (McDowall, 1867, 291). The 'castle' was apparently rebuilt by the Maxwells but was again ruinous in the early eighteenth century when the existing remains of the 'castle' were employed in the construction of the New Church (McDowall, 1867, 616).

Information from ‘Historic Dumfries: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1977).