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01 / THE STORY
Corsbie Tower: history and highlights
Corsbie Tower stands on a prominent mound near Gordon in the Scottish Borders. Only parts of the tower survive, but its earthworks and marshy setting reveal a much wider defensive landscape.
The Cranstouns and the tower
Corsbie Tower stands on a prominent mound west of Gordon in the Scottish Borders. Historic Environment Scotland describes a sixteenth-century tower house and records that the property is believed to have belonged to the Cranstouns of Oxenford until the middle of the seventeenth century. The surviving remains are protected as scheduled monument SM8876.
Only the south and east walls remain. Their height, the open side of the building and the surrounding ground make the tower an evocative fragment, not a complete castle. The records offer no well-supported local ghost story, so the landscape and its surviving archaeology tell the story here.
A castle in the marsh
The mound is surrounded by boggy ground, and HES records a causeway approaching it from the north. Banks and ditches survive around the mound and tower. Their scale suggests that an earlier earth-and-timber castle may have stood here, perhaps a ringwork, but this is an archaeological interpretation rather than a confirmed reconstruction.
The tower measured roughly 12 by 8.3 metres across walls averaging 1.8 metres thick. Its surviving walls rise to about 15 metres. Look for the unusual rounded dressed-stone corners in the photographs and the contrast with the rougher masonry between them.
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