If you go looking for Dingwall Castle today you will find a folly - a small ornamental ruin in the back of someone's garden, built in part from the castle's own stones. That is essentially all that survives above ground. Underneath the modern town, a collapsed tunnel still runs from the castle site to the basement of Tulloch Castle on the hill above, and you can supposedly peer down into the passage through an air vent on Tulloch's front lawn. Once this was the biggest castle north of Stirling. The Norse settlers who built it in the eleventh century, the English garrison Edward I installed in it, the Lords of the Isles who occupied it in 1411 - all of them treated this fortress as the key to controlling Ross. Almost nothing of it now remains. Even by Scottish standards the disappearance is unusually complete.
Before there was a castle there was a thing - a þingvöllr, a Norse assembly place, and that is the meaning baked into the name Dingwall itself. The Scandinavian settlers who moved into this corner of the eastern Highlands in the early Middle Ages established their assembly site here, on the flat ground at the head of the Cromarty Firth. By the eleventh century they had built a castle nearby, on what local historians believe was the site of the older Moothill - the meeting mound where the assembly had once gathered. For a stronghold meant to dominate the country between Ross and the Moray Firth it was nearly perfectly placed: it commanded the trade routes through the valleys of the Peffery and the Conon, and the firth itself was a sheltered approach for ships.
During the Wars of Scottish Independence the castle was held by Edward I of England, who garrisoned it as part of his northern grip. Scottish forces under Uilleam II, Earl of Ross, took it back for Robert the Bruce. That much was conventional medieval warfare. What followed was not. Iye Mackay and his son Donald were murdered in the castle while they slept, the killings carried out by Nicholas Sutherland, 1st of Duffus, brother of the Earl of Sutherland - a private vendetta executed on royal castle ground. The Scottish Castles Association preserves another tradition: that the next governor of the castle was assassinated by a Munro and replaced by a Mackay. The pattern would repeat. Dingwall Castle was never just a fortress. It was a place where the clans came to kill each other under cover of office.
In 1411, having defeated Angus Dow Mackay at the nearby Battle of Dingwall, Donald of Islay, Lord of the Isles, took possession of the castle as part of his pursuit of the earldom of Ross, which he claimed through his wife Mariota Leslie. It was a brief tenancy. The Lord marched on, fought the indecisive Battle of Harlaw later that summer, and the earldom dispute kept boiling for another generation. In 1436 the next Clan Donald chief, Alexander of Islay, was officially recognised as Earl of Ross and made Dingwall Castle his residence. His son, John of Islay, was less politically nimble - the earldom was confiscated in 1475 and the castle reverted to crown possession. After that came a parade of governors: John Stewart, 2nd Earl of Atholl. James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray. David Sinclair. George Munro of Milntown. Sir Andrew Keith, who was elevated as Lord Dingwall. Sir John Preston, later Earl of Desmond, in 1605.
After 1605 the records thin. By the eighteenth century the castle had ceased to be defensible, and the local nobility - in the Scottish habit of the day - began to quarry it for building stone. What was once the biggest castle north of Stirling was dismantled stone by stone to build houses, walls and finally a small ornamental ruin that local tradition says was constructed on the castle's actual site and partly from its actual stones. The folly survives. The tunnel, which connects the castle site to the basement of Tulloch Castle on the hill above Dingwall, has collapsed - but is supposedly still visible through an air vent on Tulloch's front lawn. Anyone who goes to Dingwall expecting a Highland fortress will find instead a few stones and a sealed-off passage. The Lords of the Isles ruled here. The Earls of Ross died here. Now it is mostly just under the grass.
The castle site lies at 57.5979°N, 4.4223°W, in the centre of modern Dingwall at the head of the Cromarty Firth. Inverness Airport (EGPE) is about 18 miles south-southeast at Dalcross. From the air Dingwall reads as a small grid of streets at the western end of the firth, with the Peffery flowing through it and Tulloch Castle on the wooded hill immediately south. Recommended viewing altitude 2,500-4,000 ft AGL. The Cromarty Firth opens broad to the east; Ben Wyvis (1,046 m) dominates the western skyline. The castle site itself is hard to pick out - look for the small green space south of the High Street.