dumfries-1920/04-065

Transcription

INVENTORY OF MONUMENTS IN DUMFRIESSHIRE.

time made the original entrance more formidable. Morton is probably the latest of
these enceinte castles; its defences are concentrated on the one way of approach,
where, too, the lower part of the curtain wall shows a pronounced batter, which
forced into fuller exposure assailants attempting to undermine the foundations. Here,
as also at Lochmaben, three sides of the building are flanked by the water of the loch.
In the case of Lochmaben the entrance between half-round towers and over the canal-
like ditch - the last of three ditches - comes immediately upon the mass of the main
building, behind which extend successive rectangular wards.
Several circumstances, however, brought the square tower back to favour in
England, and it was at this stage that the tower residence properly took root in Scot-
land. On the borders of both countries it figures in isolation as an independent
structure (fig.4). Where it is incorporated in more extensive wards, as at Lochwood
(No. 315) and Sanquhar (No. 551), it will be found that these added wards are of much
later date, are mainly domestic in character - so far as the distinction can be made -
and bear witness to the growing fortunes of the families concerned. These two are
probably 15th-century towers. Certain examples, such as Closeburn (No. 59), Tor-
thorwald (No. 590), and Spedlin's (No. 446) are of earlier type, and accordingly more
massive. Comlongon (No. 537) alone supplies examples of chambers in the mass of
its 11-feet-thick walls. The latest examples of free-standing towers, which are also
the most numerous, display an increasing fondness for ornament. Repentance Tower
(No. 89) was purely a watch-tower.
The fact is that in these towers we do not see a fortress in the strict sense of the term,
in which everything is subordinated to military purposes, but the residence of a local
magnate or laird which was also fortified. "The houses of the Grames that were,"
writes a traveller of 1629, "are but one little stone tower garretted and slated or
thatched, some of the form of a little tower not garretted; such be all the leards'
houses in Scotland." ¹ They were not expected to withstand a regular siege, but
with a small garrison offered quite effective protection against a raid. In their
external features the towers thus display a progressive insistence upon residential
conveniences, of which Caerlaverock, in a different class, affords an impressive illustra-
tion in the extension and adornment of the domestic buildings within the curtain
walls. In the case of the towers such additions and reconstructions from century to
century make it difficult to give them a strict chronological sequence.
As a type, however, this form of residence may be described as a square-angled
tower varying in dimensions and rising to a height of 40 to 50 feet at the wall head.
The walls are generally about 5 feet thick, but, while some are rather less, the lower
parts of Lochwood Tower are 9 feet thick, of Hoddom 9 1/2 feet and nowhere less than
8 feet, of Closeburn 10 feet, and of Stapleton 12 feet, thinning above to less than 6 feet.
The lower stages were, of course, the more vulnerable, but fire seems to have been the
enemy most feared. Still, in the 16th century, the "viii foote" walls of Lochmaben
were accounted of "small thyknes" - probably with respect to artillery. ² The walls
of Castlemilk Tower were 11 feet thick, and of Cockpool 14. ³ We might expect a tower
to be surrounded by a boundary wall, within which, or in the line of which, minor
enclosures would be found. A late 18th-century illustration of Hoddom Tower (No. 90)
shows it standing with such a close. When the enclosing wall was of stone it was
known as a barmkin or barnekin (cf. p. lxv.); in certain cases it might be a palisade

1 Hist. MSS. Comm. xiii., App., part vii.
2 Armstrong's Liddesdale, App. lxx. p. cxiii.
3 Ibid.

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