Cramond Tower is a fifteenth-century

tower house A tower house is a particular type of stone structure, built for defensive purposes as well as habitation. Tower houses began to appear in the Middle Ages, especially in mountainous or limited access areas, to command and defend strategic points ...

in the village of

Cramond Cramond Village (; ) is a village and suburb in the north-west of Edinburgh, Scotland, at the mouth of the River Almond where it enters the Firth of Forth. The Cramond area has evidence of Mesolithic, Bronze Age and Roman activity. In modern ...

to the north-west of

Edinburgh Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. The city is located in southeast Scotland and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh ...

, Scotland.

History

The area around the Tower has had a human settlement since the time of

Ancient Rome In modern historiography, ancient Rome is the Roman people, Roman civilisation from the founding of Rome, founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, collapse of the Western Roman Em ...

, and there are relics from that time in the area. The Tower was probably built in the late 15th or early 16th century, primarily as a defensive feature, although it could have been built earlier, and may have been mentioned in 1409. It was at one stage part of the

bishop of Dunkeld The Bishop of Dunkeld is the ecclesiastical head of the Diocese of Dunkeld, one of the largest and more important of Scotland's 13 medieval bishoprics, whose first recorded bishop is an early 12th-century cleric named Cormac. However, the firs ...

's summer residence. It became the property of James Inglis, an Edinburgh merchant, in 1622. He repurposed the tower to make it more comfortable for occupation, adding and enlarging windows and creating internal recesses to increase the available living space. His grandson moved to the nearby Cramond House in 1680, and the tower was abandoned for the next 300 years. It was portrayed as a romantic ruin by

James Skene James Skene of Rubislaw (1775–1864) was a Scottish lawyer and amateur artist, best known as a friend of Sir Walter Scott. Life The second son of George Skene (1736–1776) of Rubislaw, Aberdeen and his wife Jane (Jean) Moir of Stoneywood ...

in 1837, and was in a poor state of preservation by the middle of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the

City of Edinburgh Council The City of Edinburgh Council (Scottish Gaelic: ''Comhairle Baile Dhùn Èideann'') is the local government authority covering the City of Edinburgh council area. Almost half of the council area is the built-up area of Edinburgh, capital of Sco ...

put a concrete cap on the roof and cleared the vegetation. In 1978, it was acquired by Eric Jamieson, an amateur antiquarian. Between 1979 and 1981, it was restored by architects Robert Hurd & Partners into a private residence. It was damaged by a fire in 2011.

Description

The castle is a nearly square four-storey

, around on each side and with walls up to thick. In the south-east corner is a round staircase that protrudes from the building. Currently, the tower has a store at ground level, a living room on the first floor, kitchen on the second, and bedrooms and bathrooms on the third and fourth floors. A pitched roof has been re-erected as part of the restoration. In the 1990s, a stone extension was added on the east side. It is a category B

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

Archaeology

Excavations between 1976 & 1981 and 1987 & 1988 found medieval and post-medieval material. They also identified building foundations to the west of the tower which are believed to be the outbuildings identified in the 19th century. Because of its proximity to

Cramond Roman Fort Cramond Roman Fort is a Roman-Era archaeological site at Cramond, Edinburgh, Scotland. The settlement may be the "Rumabo" listed in the 7th-century ''Ravenna Cosmography''. The fort was established around 140 AD and occupied until around 170 ...

some Roman

amphorae An amphora (; ; English ) is a type of container with a pointed bottom and characteristic shape and size which fit tightly (and therefore safely) against each other in storage rooms and packages, tied together with rope and delivered by land ...

and

mortaria A mortarium (pl. "mortaria") was one of a class of Ancient Roman pottery kitchen vessels. They are bowls with thick sides that were likely used for crushing and grinding foodstuffs. They sometimes had grit embedded in the inner surface and a spou ...

, as well as a defensive ditch for the fort, were also found.

References

External links

{{coord , 55.9773, N, 3.2995, W, display=title Castles in Edinburgh Category B listed buildings in Edinburgh Listed castles in Scotland