09/02/2026
In July 1300 the King of England brought three thousand men to a small castle in Dumfriesshire, and the sixty men inside shut the gate on him.
Caerlaverock sits on the Solway flats, and it is unlike any other castle in Britain. It is a triangle. Two round towers at the gate, a wall running back to a single point, and a broad water-filled moat all the way round. Edward I came north that summer with his son and eighty seven barons, partly to take Nithsdale and partly to make a point after Wallace. The garrison was commanded by Sir Eustace Maxwell.
What makes it remarkable is that we know almost exactly what it looked like. A herald in Edward's own army wrote the whole thing down in Old French verse, listing the banners, the arms of every lord present, the camp, the engines and the assault. The Roll of Caerlaverock is one of the finest eyewitness accounts of a medieval siege that survives anywhere in Europe. He describes the place as shield-shaped, corner-towered, moated and strongly walled.
Sixty men against three thousand, and a poet on the other side taking notes. The castle held for two days before terms were taken. Edward, by all accounts, was genuinely astonished at how few men had been in there.
If you had been one of the sixty, standing on that wall watching eighty seven banners come up the road, what do you think you would have done?
