A historic castle which once sheltered Mary, Queen of Scots before she fled to France is due to finally reopen after being closed for essential conservation work.
Dumbarton Castle will reopen on Saturday, Historic Environment Scotland (HES) has announced.
Access restrictions were put in place at the start of last year as a safety precaution while HES, who manages the site, introduced new measures to deal with the risk associated with potentially unstable high-level masonry.
READ MORE: 19th-century Scottish wedding venue castle embarks on major makeover
Craig Mearns, Director of Operations at HES, said: “I am very pleased to announce that Dumbarton Castle is reopening this weekend, ahead of schedule. Our staff have been working very hard to get the castle ready for reopening and we very much look forward to once again welcoming visitors through the gates of this iconic fortress.”
The castle’s history spans hundreds of years – as well as being an important royal castle in the Middle Ages, Dumbarton was also a mighty garrison fortress with defences being packed with guns and saw military action as recently as the Second World War.
In 1548, Mary, Queen of Scots was brought to Dumbarton Castle for safety before she sailed to France.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here