Old Lochore Castle (site of)

This page describes the old castle of Lochore. I have named it Old Lochore Castle to distinguish it from the later Lochore Castle (also known as Inchgall Castle)

Adam de Vallance or Adam de Valloniis, married a Lochore heiress some time before 1296, and is said to have possibly lived for a short time at the old Lochore Castle which was "becoming obsolete". He built a new castle, originally named Inchgall Castle (but now also known as Lochore after being renamed by the Malcolm family in the 17th century).

The site was thought for a long time to be the remains of a Roman camp, and Alexander Gordon described it in his Itinerarium Septentrionale of 1726 as consisting of an enclosure measuring 616 metres in circumference, and "on the West side of it, three rows of ditches and as many ramparts of earth and stone, and on the side towards the Loch, is a round turret".

This is backed up by William Maitland's description in 1757 in his History and Antiquities of Scotland, who measured it as around 230 metres long by around 70 metres wide.

According to a Lieutenant Colonel Miller, writing in 1857, the ditches were levelled in 1817, and "the burnt ends of the pallisades were found" which may suggest old Lochore Castle was built from wood, or at least surrounded by a timber stockade. This was during the building of Chapel Farm. In 1925 traces of the ditches were still visible as cropmarks and slight depressions in the ground.

It is now generally thought (through excavation) that the site wasn't Roman but medieval, which would fit with it possibly being a castle from the Norman (early medieval) period.

Nothing now remains of the old castle, and the site is located in the middle of a field.