Windsor Castle and Edinburgh Castle history: two royal fortresses in timelines, from William the Conqueror and Malcolm III to the fire of 1992 and the Stone of Destiny

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Windsor Castle, on a chalk hill above the Thames 35 km west of London, was begun by William the Conqueror about 1070 as a timber motte-and-bailey, rebuilt in stone by Henry II from 1165, made a Gothic palace by Edward III in 1350–77, given St George's Chapel by Edward IV from 1475, remodelled in baroque by Charles II and in romantic Gothic by George IV's architect Jeffry Wyatville in 1824–40, burned in 1992 and restored by 1997, and is the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world and the home of the British monarch; Edinburgh Castle, on the volcanic rock above the Scottish capital, was a fortress in the Iron Age and a royal castle from the 11th century, keeps St Margaret's Chapel of about 1130 as Edinburgh's oldest building, was captured and recaptured through the Wars of Independence, held out in the Lang Siege of 1571–73 until its David's Tower was blown down, became a garrison and prison, and holds the Honours of Scotland, the Stone of Destiny and Mons Meg, and fires a gun at one o'clock. Below: the two castles in timelines, what stands from each age, what to see, and the myths, with the castles' cousins in how the Tower of London was built and the oldest and biggest castles in the world.

Windsor: from the Conqueror to Edward III

• About 1070. William the Conqueror builds a motte of chalk and a timber tower on the hill above the river, a day's march from the Tower of London, one of a ring of nine castles round the capital, on land of Windsor manor where the Saxon kings had a hall.
• 1110. Henry I moves his court to the castle, the first king to live there, and holds his Whitsun court; Windsor has been a royal residence since, the longest of any in the world.
• 1165–79. Henry II replaces the timber with stone: the Round Tower on the motte, the walls of the Upper Ward and the first royal lodgings; John holds the castle during the Magna Carta crisis of 1215, sealed at Runnymede 5 km away, and withstands a siege in 1216.
• 1350–77. Edward III, born at Windsor, spends 51,000 pounds, the most on any medieval English building, turning the castle into the seat of his Order of the Garter, founded 1348: the St George's Hall, the royal apartments of the Upper Ward and the Norman Gate, by William of Wykeham, the clerk of works who became bishop of Winchester; the plan of the Upper Ward is his.
• 1475–1528. Edward IV begins St George's Chapel, the church of the Garter, finished by Henry VII and Henry VIII, in Perpendicular Gothic with a fan vault of 1528 and the Garter knights' stalls with 800 heraldic plates; ten monarchs are buried in it, Henry VIII and Charles I among them, and, since 2022, Elizabeth II.

Windsor Castle.

Windsor: from Charles II to the fire

• 1642–49. Parliament holds the castle through the Civil War; Charles I is imprisoned there and buried in the chapel after his execution.
• 1675–84. Charles II rebuilds the Upper Ward apartments in baroque, with ceilings by Verrio and carvings by Grinling Gibbons, the State Apartments' Queen's Presence and Audience chambers surviving.
• 1824–40. George IV, with Jeffry Wyatville, spends a million pounds to make the castle the Gothic silhouette everyone knows: the Round Tower raised by 10 m, the Waterloo Chamber, the Grand Corridor, the towers heightened and battlemented, and the Long Walk to the statue on Snow Hill.
• 1837–1901. Victoria makes it the seat of the court, and the "Widow of Windsor" after Albert's death there in 1861, with the Albert Memorial Chapel and Frogmore mausoleum; the royal family takes the name Windsor in 1917.
• 20 November 1992. A spotlight sets a curtain alight in the Private Chapel; the fire burns for 15 hours through the north-east of the Upper Ward, St George's Hall, the Grand Reception Room and the Crimson Drawing Room, 115 rooms; the staff and the Duke of York carry out the art, and almost nothing of value is lost. The restoration, 37 million pounds paid by opening Buckingham Palace to tourists, is finished in 1997, St George's Hall with a new hammerbeam roof of green oak, the largest since the Middle Ages.
• Today. The King's weekend home and the setting of state visits and the Garter ceremony in June; 1.5 million visitors a year to the State Apartments, St George's Chapel and Queen Mary's Dolls' House; the Changing of the Guard; 13 acres within the walls, about 1,000 rooms.

Edinburgh: from the rock to Bannockburn

• About 900 BC. The rock, a volcanic plug 130 m high with cliffs on three sides, is settled in the Bronze Age and fortified in the Iron Age as Din Eidyn, the fort of the Gododdin, whose poem of about 600 mourns the warriors who rode from it to die at Catterick.
• About 1093–1130. Malcolm III's queen Margaret dies in the castle in 1093; their son David I builds St Margaret's Chapel about 1130, a small Romanesque chapel that is the oldest building in Edinburgh and the only one on the rock older than the 15th century.
• 1296–1341. Edward I takes the castle in 1296 after three days and carries the Stone of Destiny to Westminster; Robert the Bruce's nephew Thomas Randolph retakes it on the night of 14 March 1314 with thirty men who climb the north cliff by a route a soldier's lover had used, three months before Bannockburn, and Bruce has the castle demolished so the English cannot hold it; the English rebuild it in 1335, and William Douglas retakes it in 1341 disguised as a merchant with a cart that blocks the gate.
• 1367–1437. David II builds David's Tower, a keep of 30 m, the royal lodging, on the site of the Half Moon Battery; James I is murdered elsewhere in 1437, and the castle becomes the seat of the Stewart kings and the royal treasury.

Edinburgh Castle.

Edinburgh: from Mons Meg to the Tattoo

• 1457. Mons Meg, a bombard of 6 tons firing stone balls of 150 kg two miles, given by Philip of Burgundy to James II, who died in 1460 when another gun exploded; she burst in 1681 saluting the Duke of York, went to the Tower in 1754 and came back in 1829 at Walter Scott's urging.
• 1511. James IV builds the Great Hall, with its hammerbeam roof, for state occasions; it is a barracks in the 17th century and restored in 1887.
• 1566. Mary Queen of Scots gives birth to James VI in a small room in the palace block, the future James I of England; the room is shown.
• 1571–73, the Lang Siege. Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange holds the castle for Mary against the regents for two years until English cannon brought from Berwick bring down David's Tower in ten days in May 1573; the tower's ruin is buried in the Half Moon Battery of 1574, built over it, and Kirkcaldy is hanged. Almost everything that stands on the rock dates from after this siege.
• 1650–1745. Cromwell's army takes the castle in 1650, the Covenanters are imprisoned in it, the Jacobites fail to take it in 1689, 1715 and 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie holding Edinburgh but not its castle; the Honours of Scotland, the crown of 1540, the sceptre and the sword, are locked in a chest in 1707 at the Union and forgotten until Walter Scott has the chest opened in 1818.
• 1737–1923. A garrison: the New Barracks of 1796, the prisons in the vaults holding American sailors of the Revolution and French of the Napoleonic wars, whose graffiti survive; the One O'Clock Gun fired since 1861 as a time signal for the ships in Leith; the Scottish National War Memorial of 1927 in the old barracks; the army leaves in 1923 and the castle becomes a monument, with the Royal Regiment of Scotland's headquarters in it still.
• 1950–96. The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo on the esplanade each August since 1950, 220,000 spectators a year; the Stone of Destiny, taken by Edward I in 1296, stolen from Westminster by students in 1950 and returned, comes to the castle for good on St Andrew's Day 1996 and lies beside the Honours, to go to Westminster for coronations, as it did in 2023.
• Today. Scotland's most visited paid attraction, 2 million visitors a year, on the rock at the top of the Royal Mile, with St Margaret's Chapel, the Great Hall, the Honours, the Stone, Mons Meg, the war memorial, the prisons and the gun; 26 sieges in its history, more than any castle in Britain.

The numbers

• Windsor. Begun about 1070; stone from 1165; 13 acres (5.3 ha) within the walls; about 1,000 rooms; the Round Tower 65 m above the river; St George's Hall 55 m long; the Long Walk 4.3 km; the estate 6,400 ha; 1.5 million visitors a year; 950 years of royal residence.
• Edinburgh. The rock 130 m above sea level, 80 m above the town; St Margaret's Chapel about 1130; 26 sieges; the Great Hall 29 by 12 m; Mons Meg 6 tons, 510 mm calibre; the One O'Clock Gun since 1861; 2 million visitors a year; the Tattoo 220,000.
• Oldest inhabited. Windsor, since 1110; Edinburgh has not been a royal home since 1633, when Charles I slept there before his Scottish coronation.

Versions and theories

• Windsor is medieval. The plan, the Round Tower's base, the walls and St George's Chapel are; the silhouette and most of the interiors are George IV's of the 1820s and the restoration of 1997.
• The 1992 fire destroyed the castle. 115 rooms, a fifth of the floor area, and one painting; the rest was carried out, and the rebuilding was done in five years to the day.
• Edinburgh Castle is the oldest in Scotland. The rock is the oldest fortified site; the buildings, except St Margaret's Chapel, are of the 15th century and later, and Castle Sween in Argyll is the oldest stone castle.
• The Stone of Destiny at Edinburgh is a fake. The story that the monks of Scone gave Edward I a substitute in 1296, or that the students of 1950 returned a copy, is old and unproven; the stone in the castle is the one from Westminster, geologically from Scone, and was used at the coronation of 2023.
• Mons Meg was made in Mons. At Mons in Hainaut, in 1449, for Philip the Good, who gave her to James II in 1457; the "Meg" is a Scottish nickname.
• Thirty men climbed the cliff in 1314. The chronicler Barbour tells it, with the ladder of rope and the soldier William Francis who knew the way from his nights visiting a girl in the town; the north face is 40 m and the story is accepted.

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