DAN JONES: For me, a great British castle is a fortress, a palace, a home.
And a symbol of power, majesty and fear.
For nearly a thousand years,
castles have shaped Britain's famous landscape.
These magnificent buildings have been home
to some of the greatest heroes and villains in our national history.
And many of them still stand proudly today,
bursting with incredible stories
of warfare, treachery, intrigue, passion and murder.
Join me, Dan Jones,
as I uncover the secrets behind six great British castles.
This time, I'm in Edinburgh,
these days, home to the famous yearly spectacle
that is the military tattoo.
But over its 1,000-year history, it's earned the accolade
of being the most besieged castle in the land.
Edinburgh Castle is a truly iconic British landmark,
with a truly deadly history.
It's been the scene of legendary betrayals,
backstabbing and conspiracies,
as well as some of the most epic battles ever witnessed
between England and Scotland's kings and queens.
Edinburgh Castle is most the fought-over castle in Britain.
It's been attacked 23 times,
by everyone from warring Scottish clans to English kings and even German airships.
It has survived them all,
and today it still stands, dominant over the surrounding landscape,
bristling with cannon, unbroken and magnificent.
One of the greatest fortresses ever built.
And one that still packs a punch today.
This is the One o'clock Gun.
And a gun like this has been fired from the walls of Edinburgh Castle
every day except for Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Fridays since 1861.
Now, the boom it makes echoes over the city of Edinburgh below
and out to the Firth of Forth, where it helped shipping keep time.
-Phew. -(CROWD CHATTERING)
Now, that explosion is a daily reminder
that Edinburgh Castle still has a working military garrison.
This is a living fortress, and a very impressive one, too.
Wherever you walk, for miles around,
you see this mighty castle looming over the countryside.
The very granite it stands on is a natural wonder.
Edinburgh Castle sits on top of Castle Rock,
a vast outcrop of volcanic rock
that first erupted from the earth 350 million years ago.
Now, the volcano that produced it, well, that's long extinct,
but the rock remains the focal point of the city.
It's also the perfect defensive spot to put a military settlement
declaring to everyone for miles around,
"We are here to dominate you."
People have lived on Castle Rock since the Bronze Age.
That's nearly 3,000 years ago.
(BAGPIPE PLAYING)
And for at least half of that time,
it's been the base for warriors to get together
before going off to battle.
To eat, to fight and of course, to get drunk.
We know that there was a castle full of warriors at Edinburgh
from as far back as 1,400 years ago, because it's mentioned
in one of the earliest known poems in British history, the Gododdin.
The Gododdin celebrates the deeds of one of these warriors and it says,
"There was no one who more completely, from the fortress of Eidyn,
"scattered the enemy."
The fortress of Eidyn, well, that's Edinburgh Castle.
And the poem also says that these warriors spent a full year
feasting and drinking mead before they went out to fight.
By the Middle Ages, Scotland was becoming a unified kingdom.
Edinburgh was its leading city,
and the castle was controlled by the Scottish kings and their families.
And that's when the castle we see today started taking shape.
One tiny building within the sprawling castle complex
lets us peer inside that long-forgotten world.
It's this chapel, dedicated to Scotland's only royal saint.
This is St. Margaret's Chapel,
and it was put up nearly 900 years ago, in 1130, by King David I of Scotland
in memory of his mother, Queen Margaret.
Queen Margaret was an English princess
who came to Scotland to marry King David's father,
the powerful, long-ruling Scottish king, Malcolm III.
Tragically, she died three days
after learning that her husband, King Malcolm,
(SOLDIERS SHOUTING)
and her eldest son had been killed in battle by the English.
Three of Margaret's surviving sons went on to become kings of Scotland,
each of them consolidating Edinburgh's place
as the seat of Scottish royal power.
But hostilities with the kings of England would continue for centuries.
And none was deadlier
than the war with the English warrior king, Edward I,
who would earn the nickname the Hammer of the Scots.
In March 1296, Edward's army invaded Scotland and marched on Edinburgh.
(SOLDIERS SHOUTING)
Now, people didn't call Edward I the Hammer of the Scots for nothing.
(SOLDIERS SHOUTING)
He was a warrior king
with a vast collection of siege catapults known as trebuchets.
And arriving in Edinburgh, he deployed the most fearsome of them all,
Warwolf.
Said to be the largest trebuchet ever made,
Warwolf needed 30 wagons to transport it
and could hurl missiles weighing around 300 pounds.
After a three-day battering, the Scottish defenders of Edinburgh Castle
quite sensibly gave up and the English moved in.
They installed their own garrison, and humiliatingly for the Scots,
they stayed here for the next 18 years.
It would take nearly two decades
for the Scots to dislodge the English from Edinburgh Castle.
Edward I's invasion marked the beginning of a conflict
known as the Wars of Scottish Independence,
which would rage between the two sides for over half a century.
When they weren't fighting the English,
competing claimants to the Scottish throne plotted against each other.
Give him fire!
This grinding period of unrest
meant Edinburgh Castle would be the scene of a litany of murders,
massacres and jaw-dropping treachery,
as conflicting sides fought over this mighty fortress.
In the Middle Ages,
England's warmonger king, Edward I, invaded Scotland.
He used the latest military machinery to smash Edinburgh Castle into submission
and he took the castle for himself.
The English then held it for nearly 20 years.
This fortress, built to house and protect Scottish royalty,
had become a humiliating sign of English triumph.
The Scots didn't have the firepower to retake Edinburgh Castle by force.
But what they did have was stealth,
cunning and a little bit of top-secret information.
In 1314, a wily Scottish nobleman called Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray,
hatched a simple and astonishingly brazen plot
to regain this monster of a castle.
He was going to climb over the wall.
You look at that cliff and it's pretty daunting, but that's the point.
The whole reason the castle is up there
is because that is supposed to be impossible to climb.
But that's not what Moray thought.
According to chronicles of the time, he'd learned about a secret route
up the rock face, over the wall and into the castle at the top.
Historian David Caldwell
thinks he's got to the bottom of this incredible story.
They knew it was possible because they met up with a guy
who was the son of a previous governor of the castle...
-Okay. -...William Francis.
And he used to escape over the wall, at that point, at night,
to go and visit his woman in town.
So, he knew it was possible with the use of a ladder over the wall at the top.
But how on earth did Moray get up this rock face?
With a great deal of difficulty, I think, and by the look of it, but I don't know.
I mean, you can just imagine that
they could have got up that sort of gully there.
And you can see there's a sort of platform and quite a substantial ledge.
JONES: Yeah.
Now, I think that's where 30 men could have had a rest,
as we know from the accounts of the escapade.
-Just a rope ladder to get over? -Just a rope ladder, yeah.
And there were just 30 of them
and the garrison of the castle was probably about 200.
So, even just getting into the castle was still a major risk
that they could actually overpower the garrison and take it.
JONES: Unbelievably, Moray's plan worked.
He and his men climbed the sheer rock, jumped the walls,
and slaughtered the English soldiers inside.
In the blink of an eye,
Edinburgh Castle was back in Scottish hands.
And Moray was a hero.
But there was plenty more trouble still to come.
Less than 100 years after Moray's climb,
a new Scottish royal family was on the throne.
They were called the Stuarts.
The Stuarts would become one of the most famous dynasties in British history.
But not always for the right reasons.
And Edinburgh Castle saw them at their very worst.
For centuries, this was a place of backstabbing,
skullduggery and intrigue
as kings of Scotland and their enemies played a real-life Game of Thrones.
And no episode better showcases this castle's deadly history
than something that took place
somewhere above our heads during the 15th century.
It's one of the most notorious events in all of British history,
The Black Dinner.
In 1437, the Stuart king, James I, was murdered.
This left his young son, James II, as king.
James II came to the throne when he was just six years old
and on his mother's orders,
he was kept in Edinburgh Castle for his own safety.
By the time he was 10,
the real power lay in the hands of the governor of the castle, William Crichton,
and his treacherous ally, Alexander Livingstone.
These two would stop at nothing to protect their hold over the young king.
Their scheming and plotting came to a head one fateful night in November 1440.
Crichton and Livingstone's main rivals for influence with James II
were the infamous Douglas clan,
a family who'd been powerful members of the Scottish aristocracy for 300 years.
Like the king, the heads of the Douglas clan were very young.
William, Earl of Douglas, was 16,
his brother was even younger.
Nevertheless, Crichton and Livingstone still saw them as a dangerous threat
and they hatched a dastardly plot to silence them forever.
In November 1440,
the Douglas boys were invited to Edinburgh Castle for dinner.
It would be the last meal they ever ate.
While the young men were enjoying their dinner,
a servant brought out a very unusual dish,
the severed head of a black bull.
It was a signal.
The Douglas boys were dragged from their seats.
Outside, they were subjected to a sham trial.
Then both of them were beheaded.
-(THUD) -(HEAD ROLLING)
This grotesque double murder is now known as the Black Dinner.
You might have thought the horrific events of the Black Dinner
would have put James II off bloodshed forever,
but instead he grew up to be a king who relished war.
He particularly loved one lethal weapon
that took Europe by storm during his lifetime,
the cannon.
Thanks to James, Edinburgh Castle is full of cannons,
and one in particular really stands out.
This massive cannon is called Mons Meg,
and she came to Edinburgh Castle in the middle of the 15th century
as a gift to the King James II
from his wife's uncle, the Duke of Burgundy.
Now, Mons Meg was actually a wedding present
and if she's not very romantic, she certainly was deadly.
This monster could fire a stone nearly two miles,
and not any old cannonball.
The balls that came out of here would have weighed 150 kilograms,
that's nearly twice my body weight,
and had a diameter of around 500 millimeters,
which isn't too far from a modern Tomahawk missile.
So, this wasn't just any old cannon,
she was a medieval weapon of mass destruction.
I met up with medieval firearms expert Professor Ronald Hutton
to check out the sort of cannon
that James II would have loved to play with.
It's owned and operated by Colin Herriett.
Colin, this looks like a pretty serious piece of military hardware.
Hefty ol' piece of iron.
It's a copy of a 16th-century port piece, same as was on the Mary Rose.
This is a shortened version and she's a breech loader.
She's not a muzzle loader.
Everything don't get stoked in from that end,
it gets stoked in from this end.
And this is a gun stone.
Wow, that's heavy! How much do you think that weighs?
-HERRIETT: About 20 pounds. -And how do you aim her?
-Well, we squint along the barrel. -All right.
And aiming is probably the wrong word,
-but pointing is more like it. -(LAUGHS)
It's quite worrying when you're firing it and that's what we're going to do now.
So, we're going to fire
-this piece of marble... -Yeah.
-... into that van? -Hopefully.
So, you chaps had better clear off into a safety place, I think.
-HUTTON: With pleasure. -Because hopefully it's going to go bang.
What would a 14th- or 15th-century cannon be made from?
It's a disgusting tub of metal
in which you put stone or sometimes metal balls,
and as often as not in the early days, it blows up.
So, this was something very dangerous to fire?
It's extremely dangerous and they smell horrible,
but everyone senses, rightly, that they have a future, and they have.
Until now, it would take a couple of months to reduce a castle.
Now you can take one out in less than a week.
JONES: That's extraordinary.
Preparing to give fire. Giving fire!
Whoa!
Wow!
Ah!
My ears are ringing, but I'm glad I wasn't in that van.
-Ronald, can you see what it's done to it? -Yes, I can see.
Whoa! Wow!
That... That was a loud one.
I mean, it's ripped the metal clean off the top.
HUTTON: That is horrific.
I mean, you need only a little imagination to imagine what that does to personnel.
It changes the world.
Nothing is ever the same once they learn how to use gunpowder.
I think that's the point, isn't it?
As soon as... You know,
castles have been these great edifices that would take you months to get through,
but as soon as a weapon like that comes along,
the whole game is changed.
Mons Meg would only get one outing against the English
and it wasn't at Edinburgh Castle, but instead in Northumberland.
Although she made a big bang,
her great weight made her impractical to carry around.
But James II continued to line the walls of his castles
with the very latest in gun technology.
And cannons were to be his undoing.
James II's love of guns quite literally backfired on him.
In 1460, he was besieging Roxburgh Castle
and trying to fire a new type of cannon from Flanders
called the Lion, but it exploded and it blew the king to pieces.
He was just 29 years old.
But his successors were just as keen on collecting artillery as James was,
and under the Stuart kings, Edinburgh Castle
became one of the most heavily armed fortresses in Britain.
Which was just as well,
because Edinburgh Castle had plenty of enemies
who would stop at nothing to try and breach its mighty walls.
And one of the bloodiest assaults of all
came from Britain's most infamous king, Henry VIII.
Edinburgh Castle has been besieged
more times than any other fortress in Britain.
But no attackers ever caused as much trouble for this grand old lady
as Britain's most notorious royal dynasty, the Tudors.
The Tudors' poisonous relationship with the Stuart kings of Scotland
led to wars, invasions, attempted kidnappings,
and even a plot to kill a queen.
But it all started with a marriage,
which, amazingly, is still commemorated on the walls of the royal palace,
this incredible and lavish suite of rooms built in the heart of Edinburgh Castle.
These are the royal apartments and there's an image here
that crops up all over the castle.
It's the image of a rose and a thistle entwined,
and that's more than just a pretty piece of decoration.
The rose is a symbol of the Tudors,
that great English dynasty of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
And the thistle represents the Stuart kings of Scotland.
And the fact that they are entwined is a reference to the marriage in 1503
of James IV of Scotland and Henry VIII's sister, Margaret.
Now, that marriage was supposed to bring about peace
between the two families,
but as with many families, there were as many fights
as there were hugs and smiles.
In fact, when the Tudors and the Stuarts clashed,
the whole of Britain had to take cover.
And once of the bloodiest fallings out happened right here at Edinburgh Castle.
Henry VIII and James IV of Scotland may have been brothers-in-law,
but they were also deadly rivals.
So, just 10 years after the Tudors and Stuarts
had joined their families in marriage,
their armies were at war.
King James IV was killed in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden.
His death was Henry VIII's most significant military achievement.
In 1542, James' son, James V, also died,
following another military humiliation,
this time at the Battle of Solway Moss.
That left James V's 6-day-old daughter as the new monarch.
She would come to be known as Mary Queen of Scots.
And her reign plunged Scotland and Edinburgh Castle into crisis.
That crisis began straightaway
as Henry VIII ordered the Scots to marry little Mary to his own son, Edward,
so that England and Scotland would one day be united.
The Scots were having none of it.
They refused to be bossed around by the arrogant Tudor king of England.
Henry was furious.
He decided to teach the Scots a lesson.
In 1544,
he sent an army to Edinburgh to settle things the way he knew best,
with the sword.
This is the Firth of Forth,
where the North Sea meets land just outside the city of Edinburgh.
And in May 1544, all this water was teeming with ships
packed with English soldiers on a very simple mission.
They had instructions from Henry VIII. And he said,
"Put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh,
"as there may remain forever a perpetual memory
"of the vengeance of God lightened upon them
"for their falsehood and disloyalty."
Henry VIII wanted control of Mary Queen of Scots,
and if he couldn't have her,
then Edinburgh and her castle would be the first to suffer.
They called this period, with typical Scots gallows humor,
the Rough Wooing.
For eight years, Scotland was battered by English military force.
But they refused to be beaten.
The accounts of the invasion are pretty chilling.
Twelve thousand men piled off the English ships in just four hours.
There are records of the English commandeering local fishing boats
just to speed up the landing process.
And once the men hit the shore,
they started burning buildings between the Firth of Forth
and the city of Edinburgh.
The noise, the violence,
the sheer size of the invasion must have been absolutely terrifying.
On the 3rd of May, 1544, the English stormed the city,
blowing open the medieval gates and killing hundreds of defenders.
Those who survived the assault
retreated behind the safety of the castle walls.
The English set fire to the town,
withdrawing to their base at Leith for the night
to watch Edinburgh burn.
Over the next three days, the burning and looting continued
not just in Edinburgh, but also in the surrounding towns.
Reports of the time say that,
"Neither within the walls nor in the suburbs
"was left any one house unburnt."
-So, you had boats coming from the Forth. -Yeah.
And you had troops coming across the border from England.
-Yeah. -This is an incredible time in the city.
What the English had been ordered by King Henry VIII to do
was to burn Edinburgh, take the castle,
do a lot of destruction, get lots of loots,
in order to encourage them to have Mary Queen of Scots marry his son.
How much damage did they do to Edinburgh?
Some of the main gun positions
fired right down the High Street of Edinburgh,
and at various times,
that's exactly what the holders of the castle did,
and what they evidently did in 1544.
They fired the guns right down the High Street to hit the English.
So, actually, you could come into Edinburgh
and do as much damage in the surrounding area as you want,
but taking the castle was a totally different matter.
And they failed in their one key objective,
which was to capture Mary Queen of Scots.
Exactly.
Mary Queen of Scots was barely a year old at the time of the Rough Wooing.
The nobles governing Scotland in her name sent her to France,
where she was betrothed to the heir to the French throne.
In 1558, when she was 15,
she and her husband were crowned king and queen of France.
But two years later, her husband died of a mysterious illness.
Now a widow in a foreign land,
and with her mother-in-law, the feared and powerful Catherine de Medici,
making it clear she was no longer welcome,
Mary decided her future lay back in Scotland.
Despite her years in France, she was still queen of Scotland,
and eager to reclaim her throne
from the nobles who'd ruled in her absence.
But when she arrived in Edinburgh, she received a mixed reception.
This flame-haired, intelligent woman had French clothes and manners
and was also a Catholic.
Much of Scotland was now Protestant, and in 1560, while she was away,
the Scottish Parliament had adopted Protestantism as the state religion.
Many Scots were now suspicious of Mary.
How was Mary received?
Joy, that at last a queen, an absent queen,
had returned to Scotland and that she was no longer a minor,
and would be ruling,
but at the same time, a recognition that her religion
was going to be unpopular in some quarters.
In 1565, five years after her return from France,
the headstrong young Queen of Scots married for a second time.
She chose a Scottish nobleman
who was also her cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.
JONES: Why did she marry him?
DR. DORAN: She was attracted to him,
and politically there were reasons why she thought
it would be advantageous to her.
It would help her claim to be Elizabeth I of England's successor.
Henry Darnley was born in England, so there was a political advantage.
JONES: But Darnley was bad news.
Described as spoilt, vain and vindictive,
he had no interest in helping Mary run the country.
Instead, he spent his time drinking and chasing women.
His disrespectful behavior quickly made him unpopular with the Scots
and dragged down Mary's reputation, too.
Despite their troubled marriage, by 1566, Mary was pregnant with her first child.
But there were rumors the child was not Darnley's.
What Darnley did next doomed their marriage.
It resulted in Darnley conspiring against her,
and conspiring, ultimately, to possibly seize the queen,
but certainly murder one of her favorites, whose name was David Riccio.
Because she was, I think, fairly fearful for her life
and possibly concerned that if she died in childbirth,
her son would become a prisoner of Darnley,
and Darnley would seize the throne,
that she decided to give birth
in this very well-fortified castle of Edinburgh.
In this period, women,
about 20% between the ages of 20 and 35,
died from childbirth.
(GROANING)
And so, Mary wrote out her will. In fact, she wrote out three wills.
(GROANING)
Which would make provision if she died and her son survived
or if both died in childbirth.
So, she was very, very well aware of the risks.
JONES: Mary gave birth to a son, whom she named James,
and she survived the birth.
But the turmoil that marked her ill-fated reign
was about to get worse.
Within months of the birth of Mary's child,
Darnley himself would be murdered.
His naked body was found not far from Edinburgh Castle,
strangled in the garden of a house that had been blown up with gunpowder.
Mary was suspected of having a hand in his death.
She became increasingly unpopular and the country descended into civil war.
A group of rebellious Scottish lords
forced her to abdicate in favor of her 1-year-old son, James,
and she fled to England in 1568,
hoping for support from her English cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
But she was out of luck.
A suspicious Elizabeth had her arrested and the crisis in Edinburgh escalated.
The Scottish lords were now deeply divided.
One side supported Mary's Catholic claim to the throne,
while the rebels backed her young son, James VI,
who'd been placed on the throne in her absence
and had spent his childhood up the road in Stirling Castle.
The standoff between the two sides would take two long years to resolve,
and it would nearly destroy Edinburgh Castle,
whose defenders were still loyal to the queen's cause.
In May 1571, Elizabeth's English troops marched on Edinburgh
and joined forces with the supporters of James VI.
Using the latest guns and mortars,
they literally blasted the castle into submission.
After a month-long bombardment, the walls were breached.
David's Tower, the centerpiece of the medieval castle,
and the tallest tower, was demolished.
Mary's demoralized Catholic supporters within the castle surrendered.
James VI was now secure as king of Scotland.
But his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, remained an English prisoner.
She would be shunted around various English castles for 19 years
before finally being beheaded for plotting against Elizabeth, in 1587.
Yet, the Scots had the last laugh.
When Elizabeth I died without any children,
her Scottish cousin, James VI,
was named her heir and crowned James I of England in 1603.
The thistle and the rose were finally reunited.
But for Edinburgh Castle, there was plenty more drama still to come.
For hundreds of years,
Edinburgh Castle was besieged, battered and bombarded
as war raged between Scotland and England.
The conflict left its mark
on the very stone of this incredible fortress.
And nowhere more than here at the Half Moon Battery,
built after the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I's army
knocked down the old medieval building called David's Tower.
After David's Tower was demolished during Elizabeth's siege of 1571,
the rebuilding program
included one of the most distinctive features
of Edinburgh Castle today.
The Half Moon Battery wraps right around the southern face of the castle
and is designed to give the men firing these cannon
the maximum range of fire over the area below.
It's not the prettiest area of the castle, but I think it's utterly magnificent.
You can't look at all this
without understanding why they call Edinburgh Castle
the most besieged castle in Britain.
It looks as though it's still ready to go.
Despite the fortified majesty of Edinburgh Castle,
its days as a royal home ended more than 400 years ago.
For all its formidable defenses and palatial apartments,
by the start of the 17th century,
Edinburgh Castle had long ceased to be a place for kings and queens to live.
Instead, royalty preferred to stay in the sumptuously decorated rooms
of Holyrood Palace,
at the other end of the Royal Mile.
Occasionally, visiting kings would hold court in Edinburgh Castle,
but for the most part, that grand old fortress
was now a military barracks.
During the middle of the 17th century,
Charles II turned Edinburgh Castle into a military headquarters
fit to house a large standing army.
In the 18th century,
new buildings and barracks were added to the castle complex
to prepare against the threat of foreign enemies
like the infamous French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte.
But as well as a barracks, Edinburgh Castle also became a jail.
The castle vaults, rooms dug into the giant rock,
were made into detention blocks.
Chris, this room was once a prison vault.
How many prisoners would have been in here?
There would be over 1,000 people in these vaults in Edinburgh Castle.
Most of them were French, because in the 18th century,
um, Britain spent most of its time fighting the French.
But other countries were sucked into the conflicts,
Spanish, Italian, Dutch, American and even some British prisoners of war.
JONES: So, these are the prison rations, are they?
Well, these are the prison rations for Americans.
They got half rations
because Americans weren't really a nation then,
they were still considered British.
So, they were traitors.
I mean, it doesn't look too bad. I mean, what do you get?
A quart and a half of beer every day,
a pound of bread every day,
three-quarters a pound of beef every day,
well, apart from Fridays, when you have cheese, do you?
Yes, they would have their fish or their cheese they got on Friday.
And this was the basic diet,
but could you supplement this if you were a prisoner?
Oh, yes. They were able to make things and sell them
to people from the town of Edinburgh who come up to the castle.
They could buy their fags, then their tobacco, for their pipe.
The more you tell me about prison in Edinburgh Castle in the 18th century,
the more it doesn't sound like too bad a deal.
You got your beer, you got your fags, you got a bit of writing paper.
I don't think I'd need anything more in life.
-Unless you're an American. -Unless you're an American.
And you were denied all that!
JONES: When the 20th century dawned,
most castles had long been left behind as tools of war.
But when the First World War broke out in 1914,
Edinburgh Castle still managed to find itself in the firing line.
This time, the threat came from above.
During this war, Britain was bombed from the air for the first time,
and in the sky above Edinburgh,
there appeared monstrous new air balloons laden with explosives.
They were called zeppelins.
The zeppelin was named after its inventor, Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin.
Before the war, they were used for passenger flights,
but from 1915, the Germans adapted them for bombing raids to Britain,
and from 1916, they were targeting Edinburgh.
And you can imagine how terrifying that must have been.
For the first time, civilians were facing the threat of bombing raids from above.
The war could literally break into their homes at any moment.
On the evening of Sunday, the 2nd April, 1916,
two German zeppelins reached the Firth of Forth
and carried out the first-ever air raid on Scotland.
Reports of bombs exploding came shortly before midnight.
In less than an hour, 24 bombs landed on the city of Edinburgh.
Thirteen people were killed, 24 were injured,
and buildings across the city were destroyed.
The bombs rained around the castle.
One bounced from the road up to the main gate,
another landed here in the Grassmarket, shattering windows and damaging homes.
But that was as close as they got.
That old castle was built to withstand a battering from medieval trebuchets,
but it stood up pretty well to 20th-century aerial bombardment, too.
Thankfully, Edinburgh Castle's active military duty
is now a part of history.
But it's celebrated every summer
in one of the world's most popular military pageants, the Edinburgh Tattoo.
(BAGPIPES PLAYING)
ANNOUNCER: The Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
A sight to stir the Scottish heart and a feast of sound to go with it.
JONES: The tattoo's roots are in the 16th century,
when drummers would be sent out from the garrison
at the last post each night to inform the local innkeepers
that it was time to turn off the beer taps and send the soldiers back to barracks.
Today, over one and a half million tourists a year flock to Edinburgh Castle.
And while they're in the castle,
they can also look at the Scottish crown jewels
and the Stone of Scone,
an ancient rock on which the monarchs of England and Scotland
still sit for their coronations.
They call Edinburgh Castle the most besieged place in Britain,
and it's hard to disagree
when you think of the number of times it's been assaulted
by everyone from medieval soldiers with rope ladders
to German airships dropping bombs.
But I think its greatest claim to fame
isn't the number of times it's been attacked,
but the fact that it's always survived.
And it's still here today looming from its rocky perch,
towering over the city around it.
Booming its gun from the walls every day
to remind the world that it is, as it always has been, unbreakable.