Dunnottar Castle

Summary

A ruined medieval castle set on a 160-foot sea cliff headland two miles south of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, used as a filming location for Hamlet (1990) and chosen by Disney Pixar as the visual reference for Merida’s castle in Brave (2012).

About this location

Dunnottar Castle occupies a rocky headland projecting into the North Sea on the Kincardineshire coast, two miles south of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire. The headland rises approximately 160 feet above the sea and is separated from the mainland by a deep gully, so that the castle is effectively surrounded on all sides by cliffs or the sea. The site has been fortified since at least the early medieval period; the existing structures date from the 14th to 17th centuries, the period when Dunnottar was the principal stronghold of the Earl Marischal of Scotland, one of the great offices of the Scottish crown.

The dominant building on the headland is a late 14th-century tower house, rising from a stone-vaulted basement to four upper storeys. Around it are ranged a substantial 16th to 17th-century palace quadrangle, a chapel consecrated in 1276 and largely rebuilt in the 16th century, stables, a forge, and various lodgings. The palace complex, built largely by the 5th Earl Marischal from the 1580s, provided comfortable accommodation on a scale unusual for Scottish castles of the period, with seven identical lodgings along the west range and a 120-foot gallery above them. Charles II stayed at Dunnottar in 1651 during a campaign to recover his kingdom, and Scottish crown jewels were hidden in the castle to prevent their capture by Cromwellian forces in 1651–52.

The castle was dismantled after the attainder of the 10th Earl Marischal following the 1715 Jacobite rising and has been in a ruined state since the 18th century. It passed to Dunecht Estates in the 20th century and was partially consolidated. Access is via a steep 2,600-foot footpath from the coastal road or a 3-kilometre cliff path from Stonehaven.

Hamlet (1990, director Franco Zeffirelli, starring Mel Gibson, Glenn Close, and Helena Bonham Carter) filmed exterior scenes at Dunnottar, using the castle’s cliff-top setting and ruined battlements for sequences in the Danish court. The castle’s distinctive silhouette — a cluster of ruined towers and walls on an isolated sea cliff — was the principal visual reference used by Pixar animators when designing the castle of Merida’s father in Brave (2012, Disney Pixar).