Ballinshoe Tower

Ballinshoe Tower is a small square tower in between Kirriemuir and Forfar. It lies on a low ridge, and is fenced off for safety reasons, but can be seen on three sides from the public road.

The tower is unroofed, has two storeys and an attic, and a single turret at the wall head in one corner. Some of the windows have shotholes beneath, and overall there is little decoration beyond the turret corbels. Each of the floors contains a single room and a fireplace, showing that it was residential, but the building extended further than this as there are doors in the angle of the north-east corner at every level. The conventional wisdom (driven by the History of Forfar) is that at this location was a round stair tower, however there are no wall scars at all. The Pont map showing Easter Ballinsho (sic) shows a substantial Z-plan tower house with all parts taller than this tower – but it also shows the courtyard with small corner towers, and I suspect this is what has survived.

Ballinshoe was a property held by the Lindsays of Crawford in the early 16th century, and was sold in 1539 to another branch of the family. In 1640 the earl of Crawford issued a charter in favour of his sister and her husband Robert Fletcher. The Fletcher family retained Ballinshoe until 1799, when the entire estate was sold, and in the middle of the 19th century it was acquired by the Earl of Strathmore. The fate of the tower house of Easter Ballinshoe is unknown, but it was ruined by the mid 19th century, and may have been demolished to build the house to the north of the road shown on the Ordnance Survey map.