Bass of Inverurie

The Bass of Inverurie is the surviving earthwork of a motte-and-bailey (an earthen castle mound with a walled courtyard) castle, now standing within Inverurie Cemetery in Aberdeenshire. Raised in the twelfth century, it served as the administrative centre of the Garioch through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the hereditary constables were drawn from the De Lesselyn — later Leslie — family. Two grassy mounds remain. The larger, the motte, rises around twelve metres, with a summit some eighteen metres across, its sides scarped steeply and ringed by a ditch. Beside it lies the Little Bass, an oval bailey mound roughly thirty metres east to west by twenty-three across, standing about five metres high. As a motte-and-bailey stronghold, the site would have carried timber buildings and defences rather than stone, and its earthworks are all that now survive. Nineteenth-century excavations uncovered the remains of an oaken gangway on the motte, while medieval pottery recovered from the surrounding ditch included fragments of a fourteenth-century face-mask jug — small clues to the people who once held the place. Today the earthworks are protected as a scheduled monument, their military purpose long given over to the quieter business of a burial ground, where family lairs gather around the ancient mounds.