Castle Balfour

The surviving castle presents a long rectangular main block aligned north to south, with the primary range measuring about 26 metres by 8 metres. Built in a Scottish manner and attributed to Lowland Scots masons, the main block originally rose three storeys and was later extended by a rectangular addition at the northern end. Square wings project to the east and west so that the remaining footprint reads as a T-shaped plan.

Captain Pynnar reported an enclosing courtyard of lime and stone measuring roughly seventy feet on a side, with two ranges of that wall raised to about fifteen feet high. The site preserves defensive features such as a principal entrance fitted with gun-loops, and corbelled tourelles that include narrow gun slits, indicating provision for small firearms. Internally there are recorded vaulted chambers, and at ground level a kitchen area with a fireplace and an oven, while principal living rooms lay on the first floor. The castle fabric shows evidence of modification in the mid seventeenth century and damage from fighting in 1689, and it retains conserved masonry following restoration work in the 1960s and further conservation in the late 1990s.

Excavation on the demesne revealed remains of an earlier enclosure beneath and around the later castle site. Archaeologists exposed a shallow bank-and-ditch system with a ditch about two metres deep between two raised banks, consistent with a ringfort, and radiocarbon sampling from deposits associated with this feature returned dates in the range 359–428 AD. These traces demonstrate occupation of the place long before the seventeenth-century castle was erected, and the earthworks survive as archaeological features within the protected site.