The structure began as a stins - a fortified Frisian stone house, a kind of family bunker against the politics of the medieval Wadden coast - built around 1424 by Ritske Jelmera. Jelmera was a nobleman from the mainland village of Ternaard who had settled on Ameland in 1405 and over the next two decades made himself the de facto ruler of the island. His stins, called Jelmera Stins and later Jelmera State, anchored his claim to the place. After his death, his descendants took the name Cammingha and turned the modest fortified house into something grander. By the 16th century the building was a Renaissance castle, with stepped gables, ornamental masonry, and a name to match: Camminghaslot, the Cammingha castle.

The castle had a clear plan. Two wings met at a right angle to form an L, both topped with gable roofs - stepped on the main wing, plain on the shorter one. At the inner corner of the L stood a five-story octagonal tower, balustraded and crowned with a slender onion-domed spire that must have been visible for miles across the flat island. The facade carried cross-windows and a grand entrance framed by columns, niches, and a carved coat-of-arms panel. A separate gatehouse, built more for ceremony than defense, opened through a round-arched gateway between pilasters, with arched windows on the upper level and a pediment that almost certainly bore the Cammingha arms. The grounds held Ameland's only ornamental garden, and the adjacent woodland was the only proper grove on the otherwise treeless island.

The castle was the legal heart of a quiet rebellion. From its rooms, generation after generation of Cammingha lords held off claims from Holland, Friesland, and the Holy Roman Empire that Ameland should be part of one or the other. In 1527, the Count of Egmond filed suit against Wytze van Cammingha to try to bring the island under his control. The court found for Cammingha. In 1697 another Count of Egmond tried again, and again the claim failed. The family ruled Ameland as Vrij- en Erfheren - free and hereditary lords - until the male line died out in 1681, after which the lordship passed to the Thoe Schwartzenberg and Hohenlansberg family, who sold the island in 1704 to the House of Orange. The castle changed hands but kept standing.

Stone became the building's enemy. Ameland is sand, dune, and grass; every block of the Camminghaslot had been hauled across the Wadden Sea at considerable expense. By the late 18th century, the castle was decaying, the roof was failing, and the repairs needed more stone than the new owners could justify importing. In 1795 the French confiscated the island, and the castle was downgraded to the residence of the grietman, the local magistrate - a much smaller role than its silhouette implied. By 1828 the building was condemned. Demolition was completed the following year, in 1829. The municipal hall of Ameland was built on the site, replaced again in 1961 by a more functional structure that still stands there today.

What survives the castle is mostly absence and memory. Behind the modern town hall, on the cemetery ground that once belonged to the chapel attached to the Camminghaslot, the seashell path now marks where the walls used to stand. The bier house at one corner is still recognizable. Inside it, the tombstone of Wytze van Cammingha - the same Wytze who beat the Count of Egmond in court in 1527 - is preserved as a quiet witness to the family that built and lost this place. There are floor plans, drawings, paintings of the castle in archives. A foundation has discussed rebuilding it. For now, the seashells are the architecture.