ABSTRACT
There are no roads to the castle. You start to walk from the little fishing harbour of Craster, along a grassy track hard by the rocky foreshore. The view ahead is bare of trees or bushes, a cow fence the only obstruction; the great gatehouse keep and south curtain wall at the end of the summer flow of visitors. From the north, wartime pill boxes watch the wide sand beach by the track over Embleton links. A fold in the layered rock juts out into the sea from a beach turned to round boulders under the black basalt crescent cliff, Gull Crag. The castle promontory falls steeply to the fields of Dunstan which rise again to make Scrog Hill, opposite. The Lilburn Tower sits just inland of the cliff atop the hill above the track. Basalt columns stand on the slope in front of the square turreted tower, drawn up like so many warders, sentinels in stone, as they have been described.
