Affleck Castle

Affleck Castle stands near Monikie in Angus, a compact L-plan tower house raised in the fifteenth century on lands the Auchinleck family had held since 1471. Built of thick rubble walls and rising some sixty feet through four storeys to a parapeted garret, it is among the better-preserved lairds’ towers of its kind in the region, though it has stood unoccupied for well over two centuries. Inside, the plan survives remarkably intact. The main hall on the first floor is covered by a stone vault, and a small withdrawing room is fitted with a spy-hole that looks down into it, giving a private vantage over the household below. Most striking is the little circular oratory on an upper floor, still equipped with its aumbry, piscina, holy-water stoup and stone candle-holders, a rare survival of a domestic chapel from the late Middle Ages. A square turret guards the south-west angle, and gun loops at ground level speak to the tower’s defensive purpose. The castle passed to the Reid family in the mid-seventeenth century, who forfeited it after the Jacobite rising of 1746. It was abandoned in 1760 when a new mansion replaced it, and it survives today as a scheduled monument, though it is not open to the public.