Alloa Tower

Alloa Tower was built as part of fortifications defending the north shore of the Firth of Forth. Archaeological investigations in the early 1990s dated its original fortified house to the early fourteenth century, with a cellar sometimes used as a pit prison. By the mid-fourteenth century it had gained a great hall and reached three storeys, with entry at first-floor level. A fifteenth-century enlargement created four or five levels. Ground-floor access was likely added late in the sixteenth century. John Erskine, sixth Earl of Mar, incorporated the tower into Alloa House in 1710. That house burned in 1800, was rebuilt in the 1830s and later demolished. The tower became a scheduled monument in 1960.

The listing is category A, made on 9 June 1960, and dates the tower to the fifteenth century with alterations in the sixteenth, seventeenth and late eighteenth. It records four storeys and an attic in coursed rubble, measuring 62 feet 6 inches by 39 feet 6, and rising 68 feet to the parapet walk.

The parapet is stepped and crenellated, with corbelled rounds at the angles and another at the centre of the north wall — a detail that breaks the usual pattern of corner turrets alone. The doorpiece is arched in the Ionic order of Philibert de l’Orme, nineteenth-century work that may reproduce an earlier doorway, and its bases are possibly seventeenth century. It existed in its present form by at least 1861, when it appears in a print of Alloa and Environs.

The mansion that superseded the tower has itself gone. Alloa House, built by George Angus between 1834 and 1838 and extended by John Melvin in 1868, has been demolished. Its stables survive as a quadrangle with a tower at the centre of the north front over a pend, mid nineteenth century and severely plain — so what remains of the estate is the medieval tower at one end and the Victorian service buildings at the other, with the house that stood between them erased.

The listing also records that the tower has been de-scheduled, meaning it is protected as a listed building rather than as a scheduled monument. Among the sources cited are the Old and New Statistical Accounts, the latter noting that the attached mansion burned in August 1800.