Before meeting S’s cousin and her husband for lunch we visited Blackness Castle. From a distance the castle looks like a ship on its little rocky promontory in  the Forth and is often referred to as “the ship that never sailed” with its towers looking like  the stern and mast.  Blackness Castle was built nearly 600 years ago to help defend the harbour serving the royal palace at Linlithgow about five miles away. Originally it consisted of a tower house inside a curtain wall with other buildings later added and also the walls were strengthened.  It was used as one of four royal garrisons in Scotland and also as a state prison for high status prisoners like Cardinal Beaton until the Act of Union between Scotland and England in 1707. The British Army then took over, storing ammunition there and later guarding French POWs. The iron pier was built in the 1870s for loading munitions onto boats serving the gun emplacements on the Forth.  Eventually during WW1 the cramped confined conditions were considered to be unsuitable for storing the vast shells required and the castle was abandoned.
It is now in the care of Historic Scotland and worth visiting not only for castle but also the views down the Forth to the three bridges and towards the hills across the water.  A warning is that the ground inside the defensive walls is very rocky and uneven and the spiral stairs within the two towers are steep.  Blackness Castle has been used in various films including “Outlander.”