Visit Dumfries

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The bonny, bustling market town of Dumfries, or the Queen of the South as she’s nicknamed, is famous as the place where Robert the Bruce murdered his rival for the Scottish throne.
The Bruce stabbed Red John Comyn in Greyfriars Kirk in 1306. He was excommunicated for the crime but a month later he was crowned King at Scone as the Wars of Independence, which raged in two long stretches from 1296 to 1328 and from 1332 to 1357 which so shaped the resolute fighting character and independent spirit of the Borderers, continued.
The Bruce’s father, Robert of Annandale, was actually Governor of Carlisle Castle at one point and had fought alongside the English King Edward at the battle of Dunbar – while it was an attack on Carlisle by the Scots that led to the beginning of the bloodshed and Robert himself besieged the castle in 1315. He also attacked Dumfries castle after the killing of Comyn and the English garrison based there surrendered. No ruins of the castle remain.
The river Nith runs through the heart of Dumfries, where Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns was employed as an excise man, and his house is now a popular museum.
There was hell on in the town in 1584 as the King appointed Laird Johnstone Provost of Dumfries – a position that had always been enjoyed by the Maxwell Earl of Morton.
Both sides began gathering their family and supporters and the hostility boiled on and in a shrewd move, Maxwell set free one of Kinmont Willie’s sons from the ‘pledge chamber’ in the town, after he’d been locked up by Johnstone – thus getting the Armstrongs on his side. Maxwell had to hand over the keys to his houses, on pain of treason, which he did, and the seeds of the great feud between the two families were being sown.

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