Kinnaird Head

Scotland's first lighthouse did not replace the castle on Kinnaird Head — it was built straight through it. Sir Alexander Fraser founded the tower in 1570; in 1787 the Commissioners of Northern Lights set their first light on its roof, and in 1824 Robert Stevenson drove a light tower through its heart. Fifty metres away, over a sea cave the tide still fills, stands the older Wine Tower, a stack of three vaulted rooms with no staircase and no recorded purpose, its upper chamber hung with carved bosses of the Fraser arms and the Instruments of the Passion. The legend attached to it keeps changing shape: in the oldest printed version, an 1870 poem, a laird's daughter leaps into the sea clasping the corpse of a lover starved in the cave; today the site tells of Isobel Fraser's piper, chained below and drowned by the tide, still heard playing in storms, while red paint on the rocks marks where she fell. The old lighthouse is now the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses, and the cave mouth can be seen from the headland path.

The headland of Kinnaird Head shoulders the town of Fraserburgh out into the North Sea, and everything built on it belongs to one family's ambition. On 6 March 1570 Sir Alexander Fraser, 8th laird of Philorth, laid the foundation of “the Tower of Kynnaird’s head”, as the old account quoted by John B. Pratt puts it. Over the following decades the same laird raised a new church, turned the fishing village of Faithlie into the burgh of Fraserburgh, and in 1592 obtained a Crown charter to found a university there — a scheme that stalled by 1597, most probably for want of funds. The building spree ruined him: he was forced to sell Philorth, the family seat. Some fifty metres from the castle, on a rock the storms wash over, stands an older and stranger building: the Wine Tower. Nobody knows what it was for. It is three vaulted chambers stacked without a staircase; the habitable upper room was reached through an outside door at third-storey level, by a ladder that could be pulled up at will. Historic Environment Scotland dates the work to after 1559 on the evidence of its carvings: seven freestone pendant bosses hang in the upper chamber, among them an eagle grasping a key in its beak over the quartered arms of Fraser and Abernethy, ringed by the motto “The glory of the honourable is to feir God”; the royal arms of Scotland; and the crown of thorns, pierced hands and feet and scourge of the Passion. That last, defiantly Roman Catholic device, carved decades after the Reformation, underpins the theory published by Bryce and Roberts in 1993 that the chamber served as a covert chapel for Magdalen Ogilvie, Sir Alexander's Catholic wife — though the scheduling record itself notes the room has a fireplace and no ecclesiastical arrangement. Even the name is disputed: the parish minister writing in the New Statistical Account in 1845 took the tower for the castle's wine cellar, while Lord Saltoun derived it from “The Wynd”, the winding path that once linked castle and tower. In 1787 the newly created Commissioners of Northern Lights acquired the castle tower as their first lighthouse property. Thomas Smith of Edinburgh mounted a whale-oil lamp with seventeen reflectors on the roof, first lit on 1 December 1787 — the first lighthouse in Scotland lit by the Commissioners. In 1824 Robert Stevenson drove a proper light tower, with its own foundations and spiral stair, straight through the heart of the castle. The Wine Tower was meanwhile demoted to powder magazine during the Napoleonic invasion scare, when most of its windows were bricked up, and again for the Volunteers in 1860, ending as a lighthouse store. Keepers watched from Kinnaird Head until 1991, when the Northern Lighthouse Board raised a new automatic tower alongside and retired the old light; since 1995 the castle-lighthouse has housed the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses. The legend belongs to the Wine Tower and to the sea cave beneath it, which Fraserburgh people called the Selch's — the seal's — Hole. In the oldest version this research could date in print, the anonymous verse “Legend of the Wine Tower” published in the third edition of Pratt's Buchan in 1870, a laird's daughter loves beneath her station; her father's hired men fetter the lover in the cave, where he dies slowly, “a hapless prey to hunger gaunt”; the father shows the girl the corpse to bend her toward a rich old suitor, and she leaps into the sea clasping the body. John Cranna, Fraserburgh's harbour treasurer, retold the story in prose in 1914: his lover is “a handsome, well-made menial” who dies in a dungeon about the castle, while the daughter is held prisoner in the Wine Tower itself. The version told at the site today — by the museum, the Northern Lighthouse Board and the scheduling record alike — has recast the lover as a piper: Sir Alexander Fraser chained his daughter Isobel's sweetheart in the cave, the rising tide drowned him, and Isobel threw herself from the tower onto the rocks, where a splash of red paint is still kept up to mark the fall. In the Piper's Cave, the modern telling goes, he can be heard playing for his lost love when storms drive the sea in.

The former lighthouse and castle are run as the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses, at Kinnaird Head, Stevenson Road, Fraserburgh AB43 9DU (tel. +44 1346 511022). At the time of writing it opens daily from 10am to 4pm, with 45-minute guided tours of the castle and lighthouse tower on the hour from 10am to 3pm; admission is £12.50 for adults, £10.50 concessions and students, £6 for under-16s, free under 5, £26 for a family ticket. The museum holds a major collection of lighthouse lenses and keepers' effects, and there is a tea room overlooking the sea. The Wine Tower is not part of the standard tour: it is a scheduled monument in the care of the state, and its interior is normally closed. It stands in plain view a short walk from the lighthouse, however, and the shore below — including the mouth of the Piper's Cave and the red-painted mark on the rocks — can be seen from the headland path. Take care near the cliff edge in wind and swell; the cave itself floods with the tide, which is the whole point of the story. The working 1991 lighthouse beside the museum is a plain white automatic tower and is not open to visitors. Fraserburgh is about 40 miles north of Aberdeen by the A90/A98, with regular buses from the city.