Ballone Castle

Ballone Castle is a medieval tower house perched on the Tarbat peninsula along the eastern Highland coast of Scotland, listed as a Category A protected monument. For roughly three hundred years the structure stood empty and deteriorating, its sandstone walls slowly yielding to the coastal climate, before a restoration project beginning in the mid-1990s returned it to habitable condition. Its isolated position on the peninsula frames views across the Moray Firth, and the long centuries of abandonment give the site an atmospheric melancholy quite distinct from Scotland's more polished castle attractions.