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Publication Account

Date 1982

Event ID 1018289

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1018289

It seems likely that David I would have constructed a castle, probably of wood, on the convenient hill at the western boundary of his burgh of Elgin: but the first documentary reference to it occurs in 1160 in the reign of Malcolm IV. At the end of the thirteenth century, in the early stages of the Wars of Independence, it suffered the fate of many Scottish royal castles, being 'slighted' by the Scottish forces themselves. It appears to have been maintained in some degree of order by the earls of Moray down to the fifteenth century (Mackintosh, 1914, 170-2). But eventually only a chapel, that of the Blessed Virgin Mary, survived and by the mid-sixteenth century, and probably earlier, the hill was known as the Chapel Hill or Lady Hill (Cramond, 1903, i, 85).

Information from ‘Historic Elgin: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1982)

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