People have lived beside the Tay for thousands of years. The Law, the volcanic hill at the centre of the city, was an Iron Age fort, and graves from around 1500 BC have been found on its slopes. Souterrains like the one at Tealing tell of farming people on the land to the north. Dundee grew up as a trading port on the river, and it was made a burgh in the late 1100s, in the reign of William the Lion. Broughty Castle was built in 1490 to guard the estuary. The town suffered badly in the wars of the 1600s, and in September 1651 English troops under General Monck stormed it and plundered it. The city knew sorrow too. On the stormy night of 28 December 1879 the first Tay Rail Bridge fell while a train was crossing, and nobody on board survived. Its replacement opened in 1887 and still carries the trains, and the road bridge followed in 1966. In 1901 the city's shipyards launched RRS Discovery for Scott's Antarctic expedition. The jute trade faded through the twentieth century, but the university, independent since 1967, and later the games industry brought new work. DMA Design made Lemmings here in 1991. In 2014 Dundee became the UK's first UNESCO City of Design, and in 2018 the V&A opened on the rebuilt waterfront.
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The Library
