Castlecary

Castlecary is where the Bonny Water valley narrows between drumlins and a sandstone ridge, forcing every army, trader and rider onto one crossing that the Romans fortified in the second century. They built a six acre fort beside the road, and later people kept returning to that same throat of land: a motte rose near the Roman route, a barony formed, and a fifteenth century tower house still stands on the escarpment above the Red Burn. The name may preserve the old fort rather than the later castle, as if the place had been warning people for centuries that this was the gate.