Cessford Castle

Around 1450 Andrew Ker, an ancestor of Robert Ker, 1st Earl of Roxburghe, built Cessford Castle on an L-plan, pairing a main keep with a wing of almost equal size. The fortalice (a small fortified tower house) rose to as many as six storeys, two of them barrel-vaulted, behind walls up to 13 feet thick, and it is possible the new building incorporated parts of an earlier structure already standing on the site.

A single-storey defensive gatehouse enclosed the angle where the keep met its wing, and the whole stronghold was ringed by a barmekin — an outer defensive wall — and further earthworks. That these outer defences were formidable is confirmed by the record of English troops having to mount an escalade, scaling the walls with ladders, to force their way into the courtyard rather than simply breaching a gate.

In July 1482 Richard, Duke of Gloucester, captured Berwick-upon-Tweed, and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, followed with a campaign that burned a number of places across the surrounding area. At the end of it, on 22 August 1482, Percy knighted twenty of his soldiers at what was recorded as the mains of Sessford, placing Cessford at the centre of a notable Border ceremony even before its later sieges.

Cessford was besieged in 1523 by the Earl of Surrey, whose own assessment of its defences survives in his remark that it might never have been taken had the defenders been able to keep on defending. The siege stands as clear evidence of the strength the Kerr family had built into their principal stronghold, and of their standing as some of the most formidable Border Reivers of the sixteenth century.

The castle was abandoned in 1650, after roughly two centuries as the principal stronghold of the Kerr family and the caput, or chief seat, of the Barony of Cessford. Its name lived on regardless: the Dukes of Roxburghe still carry the subsidiary titles Baron Ker of Cessford and Marquess of Bowmont and Cessford, a direct inheritance from this ruined tower house.