Craigie Castle

The castle occupies a small knoll rising from a flat area between two marshy ponds, and the surviving work is mainly Gothic in character from the 1400s with some much earlier masonry. Defensive earthworks surround the rising ground, with excavated ditches cut between the lochans to enclose roughly four acres. One of these earthworks cuts a ridge to the northeast and formed an outer bailey, while other trenches linked the small lakes and lay close to the castle’s south and west sides.

The main range contained a high-quality vaulted hall built in the 1400s, consisting of three bays of rib vaulting over a basement that was not vaulted. Traces remain of an earlier hall-house dated to the late 1100s or early 1200s, including the lower courses of walling that once supported a crenellated parapet. In one wall a round-headed doorway survives, and opposite this there is a late medieval fireplace added in the 1400s that sits above an earlier round-arched opening.

Access to the castle was from the southwest where a drawbridge once spanned the defensive cut, and the stone abutment for that bridge is still visible. The entrance passage was defended by a circular watch tower or bastion. Inside the enclosing wall a courtyard contained ranges of service and domestic buildings, and an entrance from that courtyard led into the great hall, an approach that had been blocked in later years.

By the 1800s structural remains included two gable ends in poor repair, fragments of curtain walls, bits of battlement and several underground vaulted chambers. Those cellar spaces had become partly filled with debris and were used by animals. The drawbridge abutment and other masonry features remain in place in their original positions. An armorial plaque bearing the combined arms of the Lyndesay and Wallace families was removed from the ruin and set into a nearby farm wall.