Publication Account
Date 1995
Event ID 1016684
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016684
A ruined tower, known to seamen as the Old Man of Wick, stands on a rocky promontory jutting out into the sea, cut off on the landward side by a ditch. What survives is the ruined shell of a simple tower keep, so simple that it has no diagnostic features by which it can be accurately dated. Most probably it was built in the 12th or early 13th century AD, the time when the Norse Earls of Orkney held Caithness from the King of Scotland, and thus it has some claim to be called a Norse castle.
The ditch was originally spanned by a drawbridge, and has the remains of a rampart and gatehouse outside it. The tower had four floors and an attic under a pitched roof, with one room on each floor, and the floor beams carried on scarcement ledges built into the walls. The only entrance was a door to the first-floor hall on the seaward side, but this part of the wall has collapsed, and entry is now through a breach in the wall into the storeroom below. As there are no stairs in the thickness of the wall , all access up and down from the hall must have been by internal wooden ladders. There are no fireplaces or chimneys either, so the rooms may have been heated by braziers set on stone flags let into the wooden floors. Each room had two tiny windows. The only feature built into the walls of this tower was a small chamber on the first floor in the southwest wall, possibly a latrine, of which the last traces can still be made out.
Beyond the tower a passage led down the middle of the narrow promontory past two rows of buildings, now grassed over, to a small courtyard at the end. These buildings will have housed the kitchen,bakehouse, stables, servant's quarters and so on. Down the coast at Forse (ND 224338) is another promontory castle with a small tower of rather similar design, whose date is also uncertain. Both castles belonged to the Cheyne family in the 14th century.
Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: The Highlands’, (1995).
