Blackness

The Ship and the Bay

The castle sits on a rocky spit at the eastern edge of the village, long and narrow and running north to south, which is why people have spent centuries insisting it looks like a ship. The north tower is the stem, the south tower the stern, the central tower the main mast, and Blackness Castle has been known as the ship that never sailed for as long as anyone has been comparing the two. It dominates the view east from the village and has done since the 1440s.

The village itself is small — around 135 people at the last count that bothered — gathered on Blackness Bay, an inlet on the south shore of the Firth of Forth. You arrive past the war memorial, unveiled two days before Christmas in 1922, and St Ninian's mission church, put up in 1914 to mark the entrance. A public hand-pump dated 1875 still stands. The boat club's pier runs out into the firth, and the water is more or less always in view.

Village Tables and Shore Paths

The Lobster Pot is the pub, on the upper side of the square, and it is the last one standing. The smithy, the post office and the dairy have all closed. The name tells you what the kitchen leans on, given the harbour, and Undiscovered Scotland calls the village "a busy little place that is popular with visitors." Alongside it there is a small community shop, which together with the pub is more or less the whole of village retail. Blackness also keeps the last public toilets open in the Falkirk council area, which is the sort of distinction a village earns without meaning to.

The walking is the main reason to lace up here. The John Muir Way, the coast-to-coast route from Helensburgh to Dunbar, passes straight through along the south shore, taking you past the castle and harbour with the whole width of the Forth in front of you. Shorter circuits loop the village, the castle and the headland. On foot along the shore it is about three miles west to Bo'ness and roughly five miles east to South Queensferry and the Forth bridges.

A Fortress with Many Lives

Blackness was the port for Linlithgow, a royal residence since the twelfth century, and by around 1200 it was working — "the best natural harbour on the south side of the Firth of Forth west of Queensferry." The castle came later, built by Sir George Crichton, passed to the Crown in 1453, and never given back. It held prisoners for most of its life: Cardinal Beaton, the Earl of Angus, Covenanters, French prisoners of war. Cromwell's army bombarded it into surrender in 1650. From 1870 it stored Scotland's ammunition until 1912. If parts of it look familiar, that is because Outlander used it as Fort William, and Zeffirelli filmed Hamlet here.

Three Nearby Detours

Two miles south is the House of the Binns, home of the Dalyells. Bo'ness has its steam railway; Linlithgow has the palace where Mary, Queen of Scots was born.

Low Tide at Blackness Bay

At low tide the foreshore empties out below the boat club, and the castle keeps its watch on a bay that stopped needing a harbour three hundred years ago.