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The site of Abercorn Castle is located on the estate of Hopetoun House, just to the North-east of the small community of Abercorn with its important ecclesiastical history. According to the C18th & C19th Statistical Accounts, local lore stated that the castle site originally dated back to Roman times. However, excavation in 1963 by the Moray House Archaeological Society yielded no Roman artefacts. Today, the main visible feature is a low, roughly circular mound along one of the publically-accessible pathways to the Western end of the Hopetoun House gardens. Given the shape of this, it was long thought that the original castle must have been an early motte-and-bailey structure, but according to the 1963 excavation, this mound turns out to be an eighteenth century attempt to landscape over the (presumably less-than-Romantic) ruins of a castle which appeared to have two main phases of construction.
Our first knowledge of the castle is its ownership by William de Avenel in the twelfth century, who may (or may not) have been the commissioner of its construction. Subsequently, it was taken over by the Graeme family, but by the fifteenth century it was in the hands of the powerful Douglases, who also owned the nearby Strathbrock Castle. During the period of Douglas ownership, Abercorn Castle is thought to have been converted into a manor-house, as was fashionable in that period. However, along with many other Douglas castles (not least Strathbrock), Abercorn fell prey to the infamous civil war between that powerful family and James II, being wrecked by the monarch on 18th April 1455 following a siege.
In 1582, we find George Buchanan referring to "the half ruined castle of the Douglasses called Abercorn", which would seem to indicate that James II did not completely level the castle (Buchanan, Description of Scotland 1582). Certainly, Strathbrock still existed in a ruinous state as late as the nineteenth century, and so it would seem that James' reputation as a total demolisher of all Douglas castles is sometimes slightly overstated. James' primary target for demolition was, of course, the more abstract political influence of the family, and in this, the Douglas castles were only one of many symbols. As such, there was no point in wasting good military resources in going completely mad.
Close to the castle site is an early modern wall circumnavigating this area of the Hopetoun House gardens. Given the Georgian style of the stone benches and small buildings set into it, this wall is probably of late eighteenth-century construction, but it also contains numerous large stone blocks (with a higher occurrence in the sections of wall closest to the castle site) which could thus represent re-use of some ruined castle materials. When we visited the site, however, there was also evidence of debris from the castle being brought to the surface by rabbits burrowing beneath a large tree set on top of the eighteenth-century mound.
Three small fragments were indicative, including a small piece of mortar, a periwinkle shell which had clearly been mixed in with the mortar, and a rather scabby chunk of oyster shell. Such use of sea-shells in mortar was common practice in the medieval period, with the shells acting as a natural source of lime. In this location, the source was undoubtedly the nearby estuary beaches of the River Forth. Evidence of such use (including whole oyster-shells) can be seen within the surviving mortar at the abbey on Inchcolm Island in the middle of the Firth of Forth itself, although whether our Abercorn piece represents a mortar fragment or an oyster used for food is uncertain (but likely); while the periwinkle shell was actually filled with mortar, the oyster shell below seems not to carry any mortar traces, despite being found in a small masonry assemblage which included the fragments shown here.
But although no major remains of the castle are to be found, two small candidates some distance from the actual site are possible remnants. Again, comparison with Strathbrock is useful. In the case of this sister castle from further south in West Lothian, again, nothing of the structure remains visible on the site itself. However, two pineapple or acorn-shaped stone gatepost caps survived to be currently displayed in the grounds of the nearby Renaissance seat of Houstoun House. Intriguingly, two strikingly similar stones can be found being used rather less formally and more chaotically at the front and back of the same side of a private gated farm wall at Parkhead, not far from the site of Abercorn Castle.
Given what is known about the surviving fragments of Strathbrock Castle, and the fact that the latter histories of both castles are entirely coterminous (both belonging to the Douglases and both being destroyed in the same period of their civil war with James II), it is surely a rather striking coincidence that these two sets of gatepost caps exist in these similar contexts. Indeed, the coincidence is so striking that chance seems unlikely. However, further research is required in order to fully authenticate the Abercorn set.