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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)
