Cessford Castle

Cessford Castle was built around 1450 by Andrew Ker, near the village of Cessford midway between Jedburgh and Kelso, in the historic county of Roxburghshire and now the Scottish Borders. It is possible that the building incorporates parts of an earlier structure. The castle is the caput of the Barony of Cessford, and Andrew Ker was an ancestor of Robert Ker, 1st Earl of Roxburghe, and of the Dukes of Roxburghe; the Duke still takes his subsidiary titles from the place, as Baron Ker of Cessford and Marquess of Bowmont and Cessford.

Cessford was the principal stronghold of the Kerr family, notorious Border Reivers, many of whom served as Wardens of the Middle March. The fortalice they held was built on an L-plan, a main keep with a wing of almost the same magnitude, rising to as many as six storeys, two of them barrel vaulted, with walls up to 13 feet thick, which made it a formidable place of defence. The angle of the building was closed by a single-storey defensive gatehouse, and the whole was ringed by a barmekin and defensive earthworks.

After Berwick upon Tweed was captured by Richard, Duke of Gloucester in July 1482, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland burnt a number of places in the area. At the end of his campaign, on 22 August 1482, he knighted twenty of his soldiers at the mains of Cessford.

The castle was besieged in 1523 by the Earl of Surrey, whose English troops had to use an escalade to gain the castle courtyard, a record that in turn attests to the barmekin and earthworks around it. Surrey afterwards remarked that it "might never have been taken had the assailed been able to go on defending". Cessford was abandoned in 1650, and what survives is a large ruin, protected as a scheduled monument since 1936.