Tibbers Castle

Tibbers Castle stands ruined on a ridge in Dumfries and Galloway, its name drawn from the Gaelic word for a well. A timber stronghold may have risen here in the twelfth or thirteenth century, but the site enters the written record in 1298, when the earlier defences were rebuilt in stone — most likely the work of Sir Richard Siward. Edward I of England visited that same year, and the castle was soon held for the English Crown, garrisoned by twenty-three men in 1302 and later by more than fifty. Its four-sided motte (the earthen mound of a castle) measures some forty-four by twenty-seven metres across the summit, and the roughly rectangular stone enclosure that crowned it carried round towers at its corners, a well to the east, and ranges of buildings along the west and north. Robert the Bruce seized Tibbers in 1306, and the Scots held it permanently from 1313. For a time it was the administrative heart of the barony of Tibbers, a role that later passed to nearby Morton. The castle changed hands among noble families through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries before falling out of use; by the eighteenth century its ridge was being ploughed for crops. It was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1937.