I see Alloa Tower almost everyday. Like many things that we see every day, this meant that I never did much exploration until very recently. It can always wait for another day. It’s not going anywhere. That, for the most part, is true. As far as I know, there is no movement to relocate Alloa Tower. Having said that, it has previously suffered extensive fire damage and had to be rescued in the 90s. Since there’s no guarantee that something like that won’t happen again, you can’t always work on the assumption that what’s here today, will be here tomorrow.
A few years back, I wandered about the outside and got some shots of the morning shadows from the nearby trees casting across the tower. It has limited opening hours so I’m guessing the reason that I didn’t go inside was that it was shut at the time. In fact, via the magic of the internet, I’ve been able to check that I visited on a Wednesday (the “few years back” was 6 and a half) which is outside of the window of visitation.
I was quite happy with those shots and I’m happy to share them now. I had good light on a winter’s morning. The shadows cast by the bare trees really added interest to the tower face.
There was a bit more greenery around this time. Winter hasn’t quite started yet. There were no bare trees to cast creepy shadows. So I didn’t try to recreate the shots I had taken on my previous visit. But I did get a chance to look around to see if I could find an interesting composition elsewhere.
As I mentioned earlier, this would be my first time inside. I was aware that the tower featured a restored interior. The fire that I mentioned earlier had gutted the inside. The original timber roof managed to survive, somehow.
The restoration brings up an interesting dilemma and how it plays out when it comes to historical buildings in Scotland. There are hundreds of historic buildings in Scotland. Many are owned by independent trusts and some are even still owned by the same family who have owned the property for hundreds of years. But the big two, with regards to number of properties looked after, are Historic Environment Scotland (HES) and National Trust Scotland (NTS).
These two are the Pepsi and Coca Cola of historical properties. I have no idea if there’s any animosity between the two. I highly doubt it and even if there is, they both hide it well. But I find it fun to imagine the two of them constantly fighting behind the scenes about which castle/tower/museum is best. Maybe even going round to rival castles and moving stuff to annoy the custodians. Maybe turning a bust around to face the wall, or fiddling with a painting to make it squint.
Where I get the impression that the two appear to have a difference of opinion is over restoration. Broadly speaking, NTS seems a bit happier to restore things to how they were in the past, whereas Historic Scotland tend not to. HES are of the view that deterioration or destruction of the property is also part of the history of the property. So if Oliver Cromwell smashed a castle to bits, restoring it to a point in time before that would be a bit like covering up the fact that Oliver Cromwell smashed it to bits. Same for fire, vandalism, neglect due to eviction and so on. Visiting an NTS property usually sees an attempt to recreate an accurate scene.
Personally I’m in two minds. I get that old things being destroyed is just how things are but at the same time I like
Where this issue is relevant to Alloa Tower, is that the Tower existed since the 1300s. In those 700 years, there have been countless renovations and alterations to the building. Which point do you pick to be the ‘correct’ one?
The well that supplied water to the house. This was a medieval addition that was filled in sometime later. The current decor of the house is that of sometime during the 1600s. The well was long gone by then. So there was debate about whether it should be on display because it was interesting, or kept hidden because it would not have been part of the house with everything else you can see. The ‘Display’ team obviously won out but I think it’s an interesting debate with no clear answer. Those debates are often the most interesting, of course.
The rooms are a bit hodge podge and aren’t immediately clear what they do. Several centuries of renovations will do that. By the end of its working life, the tower was the entrance to a much larger building. That building burned down, with only the tower surviving. So bedrooms/kitchens and other rooms that you’d normally find in a house are absent here as they were in the bigger building.
The ground floor is the entrance. This might seem obvious but it wasn’t always the case as most medieval buildings were entered through a raised entrance. These days it’s a reception and gift shop.
The first floor is a living room. I was told by one of the guides that the family would eat there from a table that would be removed when not in use to create a bit more space.
The second floor is the charter room. One of the Earls of Mar was a lawyer and used it as an office.
The third would have been the bedrooms and soldier’s barracks but was now essentially empty. It had a few artifacts and displays. This was actually the most interesting room to photograph. The large open spaces and widows brought in some nice light and created some lovely scenes.
The wooden roof is apparently original. Whether it’s a “Ship of Theseus” (or Trigger’s Broom, depending on your generation) situation, I don’t know. ‘Original’ might be open to interpretation. It is suitably wonky, though.
I was using my widest lens here at 18mm on a full frame camera. I tried to do a panorama but screwed it up! I stood in the middle of the room and as I was tracking my camera across the ceiling, I started to lose my balance and nearly fell backwards. Clearly I need to hire an assistant to keep me upright when I’m doing dangerous work, such as….looking upwards.
I wouldn’t normally include failed shots but I find the way I failed amused me enough that I think it’s worth sharing. And you get to see the whole ceiling in one image.
It’s not the biggest or most interesting property you can find in Scotland but you can certainly spend an hour (or more if you get chatting to the people that inhabit NTS properties). You can get up onto the external roof which allows you to get a look at the surrounding area. Alloa isn’t particularly photogenic so I didn’t take any photos but it’s interesting to see how far across the area you can see. There would have been relatively good communications from Tower to Tower across the Forth Valley.
And now I can stop saying, “I really should go in there” every time I see it, which is the main thing.