Overview

Suggested Development

Construction and Conservation

Siege of 1570 and Later Kitchens

Entrance Tower→

The Guard Room

Destruction and Picturesque Ruin

The Entrance Tower to Dunure Castle

The entrance tower (the principle entrance to the castle) was originally a free-standing fortified tower that was open to the sky. It formed a barbican or protective fore-work in front of an entrance into the upper parts of the castle. It was probably built in the later fourteenth century as part of the first major expansion of the early fortification and may have originally contained a wooden stair with a draw-bridge arrangement at the top.

The masonry stair is a later addition, put in when the tower was roofed over and a new range of buildings built to the west. The stair rises in two flights and stops in mid-air, where a draw-bridge formerly spanned a narrow gap over a 17 foot drop. Sockets for the draw-bridge are visible on the threshold stone of the entrance into the keep. The new rooms to the west were entered by a doorway on each of the levels.

A square stone-lined shaft below floor level was a feature of the original tower, later sealed beneath the floor of an entrance broken through into the new kitchen range. It may have functioned as a well, supplied by an underground water channel. A large iron key and skull of a calf were found within the shaft when excavated in 1996.

Part of the original wall enclosure and the oldest surviving part of the castle can be seen built upon the living rock of the whinstone crag.

Excavation in this area involved the removal of over 20ft. of fallen masonry and rubble collapse by hand and crane. The stones from the two doorways at the head of the stair - one into the keep and one into the rooms to the west - were found where they had been flattened by falling stone from the collapsing keep.

The conservation work included the metal staircase which protects the delicate remains of the original stair as can be seen in the photo above left.