The Bass Rock.
Professor Richard Oram.
This bleak island fortress – now best known as home to the biggest colony of gannets in the world – stands at the outer limits of the Firth of Forth off the East Lothian coast. A place where early Christian hermits had once found isolation from the temptations of the world and later where state prisoners were held in unescapable solitude, it became the young Prince James’s unintended refuge in February 1406.
James had been on an expedition through Lothian, led by Sir David Fleming of Biggar, in an attempt to re-assert Stewart authority in an area of Black Douglas control. Pursued by Archibald, 4th earl of Douglas, Fleming and his following were overtaken on 14 February and slaughtered on Long Hermiston Moor in East Lothian. James, however, had been sent ahead to North Berwick in the company of Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney and from there, according to the chronicler, Andrew Wyntoun, was ‘rowyt to the Bass’ to prevent him from being captured by the Douglases.
Although later tradition claims it was always the plan, it is clear that an idea to send James for his own safety to France was hatched while he was trapped on the Rock. It cannot have been a comfortable stay for, although the lords of the Bass – the Lauder family – had a residence there from which they oversaw the ‘harvest’ of the sought-after gannets, the surviving ruins show that the buildings on the island were cramped and hardly designed to accommodate even a fugitive prince and his noble companions.
After a month in the windswept stronghold, Sinclair made contact with a merchant-ship from Gdansk, the Maryenknecht, and secured passage for James and himself to France. James must have been heartily relieved to escape from his near-imprisonment on the Bass but his relief was short-lived. On 22 March off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast, English pirates captured the Maryenknecht and, realising immediately the importance of the boy passenger, sent him to King Henry IV. A month on the Bass Rock was just the prelude to eighteen years of English captivity.
Today, the island is a sea-bird sanctuary and public access is strictly limited. Boat trips from North Berwick to view the gannets sail around the rock, giving excellent views of the mainly sixteenth-century fortifications that cling to its sloping south-west face. For those unwilling to face the roll and swell of the North Sea around the rock, the high-powered telescopes at North Berwick’s sea-bird centre and Tantallon Castle on the East Lothian coast offer a comfortable alternative.