Balfour is in Scottish Islands, in the United Kingdom — coordinates 59.0300°, -2.9070°.

Castles · Scottish Islands

Balfour

Balfour in Orkney + Shetland, United Kingdom.

Yacht in Elwick - geograph.org.uk - 7583675 — Anne Burgess — CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons licence

Plan your visit

Typical visit: 1.5 h–3 h

Balfour is a place of interest in Orkney + Shetland, United Kingdom — drawn from open-data sources for visitor reference. See the linked Wikipedia article for the full description.

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From the Wikipedia article

Balfour is a village on the island of Shapinsay, Orkney. The village is situated on Elwick Bay, which was used as an anchorage by Haakon IV of Norway before sailing south to eventual defeat at the Battle of Largs in 1263. Today, the village still possesses a harbour, with mock defensive walls constructed at the same time as the castle. David Balfour even added a stone marked with the date 1725, taken from Noltland Castle on the island of Westray, to his defences. A car ferry to Kirkwall, operated by Orkney Ferries, sails from a pier at the harbour. This became a roll-on/roll-off service in 1990.

Excerpt from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0. See the source article linked in Sources below.

Background

History

Originally known as Shoreside, Balfour was built in the 1780s by Thomas Balfour, a former tenant farmer who acquired a private income by marrying the sister of an Earl. With his new-found wealth, Balfour purchased the estate of Sound, whose estate house had been burned down in revenge for the then owner's support of the Jacobite rising of 1745. In 1782, to make way for a new residence, Balfour cleared cottars from the south-west of the island, and appropriated part of the common, building the village of Shoreside to house those evicted. At the same time, many changes were made to the village, which was renamed Balfour. While some of the village was demolished in order to improve the view…

Sourced from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0.