Ballone Castle, Highland
Photo © Anne Burgess, August 1989
Ballone Castle, Highland
Photo © Sylvia Duckworth, 14 November 2008
Ballone Castle, Highland Photo © Anne Burgess, August 1989 |
Ballone Castle, Highland Photo © Sylvia Duckworth, 14 November 2008 |
Ballone Castle is a Z plan castle and is thought to have built by the Dunbars of Tarbat in the late 1500. It came under MacKenzie control in 1623 and had fallen into ruin around the time of the second Jacobite revolt. It has now been beautifully restored as private build and looks fantastic.
-- BALLONE CASTLE, ROSS-SHIRE.
This picturesque ruin stands on the edge of the precipitous coast of the German Ocean, at the extreme eastern point of land jutting out between the Dornoch and Moray Firths, and culminating in Tarbetriess. Its history is little known, but it is supposed to have been built by the Earls of Ross. It was more recently occupied by the Earls of Cromarty, and the Mackenzies of Ardloch-Assynt, but has been uninhabited for two hundred years.
It is here given as one of the most successful and effective examples of the plan with two diagonally opposite towers. The mode in which the corbelled stair turrets are carried up, together with the fine corbelling of the angle turrets of the main building, give a very pleasing and varied effect to the design. The angle turrets of the main building are remarkable. The corbelling is of a very unusual character, while the mode in which some of them are finished on top, without any turret rising above the eaves of the main roof, is an admirable example of the mode in which the turrets were pushed out by the increasing gable, as above commented on.
The plan is similar to Kilcoy (another Ross-shire castle of the Mackenzies) and many other buildings of the same form, but in this example one of the angle towers is square and the other round. The south-east or square tower contains the entrance doorway in the re-entering angle. From this a wide staircase ascends as far as the first floor, the remainder of the tower being occupied with a guard-room entering under the stair, off which was a small prison.
The ground floor, which is all vaulted, has the usual kitchen passage leading to the kitchen and cellars, one of which is the wine-cellar, with the accustomed private stair from the hall. The north-west angle tower is round externally and square internally, and both towers are provided with shot-holes flanking all the walls. The shot-holes have the deep outer splay usual about the middle of the sixteenth century.
The first floor contains the hall in the main building (30 feet by 19 feet) and a private room in the circular tower.
Two turret stairs lead from the hall to the upper floors. That at the north-west angle has also a door from the private room, and no doubt led to the family rooms, while the other probably led to strangers' rooms at the other end of the building.
The erections at the north end of the castle are of about the same date. They were no doubt built against the wall, which enclosed a small courtyard between the castle and the perpendicular rocks above the sea. These buildings are vaulted and seem to have contained bake-houses and other offices, with servants' rooms in an attic floor -- The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland by David Macgibbon and Thomas Ross 1889
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