Coxton Tower

In 1572, Alexander Innes was granted a royal licence to build a tower house on the site, but his initial tower was completely destroyed by fire in 1584. A new tower was built, which appears on a map by Timothy Pont from around 1590, and much of the surviving fabric of the building dates from that construction, although repairs were necessary after attacks in 1635 and 1645. The tower has been uninhabited since around 1867 except to house Canadian soldiers during the Second World War. and was subsequently recognised as a Category A listed building in 1971. Coxton Tower was removed from the scheduled monuments register in 2018, as this largely duplicated its listed building status.

Each storey of the tower is a single room, with a stone-vaulted ceiling. The orientation of the vaulting alternates between north–south and east–west on each storey, in a rare arrangement that helps to counteract the lateral thrust of the vaulting in the levels above and below each storey. The ground floor, which is somewhat below ground level, served as a store room, and provided protection for cattle when necessary; a hatch in the vaulted roof communicates with the hall above, and would have provided a means of passing goods between the store room and the living accommodation. The first floor, which was protected from intruders by a surviving iron yett, served as a small hall. It features…

Coxton Tower is a relatively small, four-storey fortified tower house, about 1 km south of Lhanbryde in Moray, Scotland. Although it was built around 1590, its style is old-fashioned for that date; Charles McKean has described it as "grossly antiquated", and Walker and Woodworth describe it as "remarkably antiquated", comparing it to rudimentary tower designs of the early fifteenth century.