The sketch is part of the Turner Bequest and the cataloguers and commentators on the painting are uncertain what it it represents. They are right to be uncertain. Some, like Eric Shanes believe that it is likely a view of Dunstanburgh: others such as David Hill are reported as believing that Shanes is wrong. I tend to Hill's viewpoint.
The sun is either rising or setting. You can see its reflection in the water.If the central mass represents the bluff on which Dunstanburgh is sited- and it does look a little like the view from the Heugh to the South, then the sun is rising quite far to the North. Would that really be possible even at midsummer?. It is most unlikely to be sunset but I suppose someone might claim that the light is reflecting in the meres inland of the castle.Nothing really fits.
When I first looked at the photo it seemed to me that Turner is showing a windmill on the left of what may or may not be a rocky outcrop. There seems to be a windmill and some trees to the right of it.There seem also to be a couple of hesitant mark above but I now see that these are being interpreted as hints of a castle. The marks are crude and do not correspond to any possible viewpoint for Dunstanburgh.
I have walked over this area since childhood and still do so regularly. I have never heard or seen any traces of a windmill at Dunstanburgh. It can be a windy place but who would want to take their corn to such an isolated spot?I have also seen many illustrations of Dunstanburgh by artists such as by John Varley and the A W Hunt drawings of Dunstanburgh at the Ashmolean. In none of them, if I remember rightly does a windmill appear.
Turner's views of Dunstanburgh are usually from the South and he at least understood the uneven nature of the site which falls from left to right in his views, something which is not always observed by artists. The fall in reality can be so extreme that it can appear that the base of the Lilburn Tower is higher than the top of the Eggynclough Tower.
Addition Nov 21,2020
I cannot find anything to suggest that this is really a watercolour of Dunstanburgh, or even the start of one.
You can see a photo of the drawing in Gerald Wilkinson's Turner's Colour Sketches 1820-1834,this is clearer than my illustration.He calls it Promontory and Setting Sun (page 191). It seems to me quite significant that Wilkinson makes no identification whatsoever for the subject.This work just cannot be Dunstanburgh, it has more of the block like nature of Warkworth-but I'm not suggesting that it is Warkworth.
