Corse House: Forbes Heritage for Sale
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Corse House is nestled in a quiet hollow just north of the Corse Burn, roughly three miles north-west of Lumphanan, Aberdeenshire. The abandoned and ruined Corse Castle is not far -- a mere five-minute walk – but distant by time. For centuries, the castle was the home of the Forbes of Corse, known for their respected clerics and as the family that gave rise to the Forbes of Craigievar. However, the castle was vacated in the nineteenth century for the comfort of a more modern home. Now, the house may also be abandoned by the Forbes of Corse.
The history of the Corse estate goes back to the fifteenth century. Patrick Forbes was a younger son of James Forbes, 2nd Lord Forbes, (circa 1424 – 1462.) He served as armor-bearer to King James III, who rewarded him with a charter for the Barony of O'Neil and Corse. Through his descendants, the estate passed in succession: to his son David (known by the evocative nickname "Trail the Axe"), then to David's son Patrick, and then to Patrick's son William, who succeeded as 4th Laird of Corse in 1568. In 1581, he began construction of a new, fortified stronghold — the structure that we now know as Corse Castle — bearing his initials and the date on the lintel of its entrance doorway. The result was a compact, Z-plan tower house standing by the Corse Burn, built to withstand exactly the kind of raids that had so humiliated his predecessors.
Sir William Forbes proved not only a builder but a patriarch of extraordinary consequence. He fathered seven sons, and the prominence those sons achieved across church, commerce, military service, and landed society is a remarkable testament to the family's vitality in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The eldest son, Patrick Forbes (1564–1635), became one of the most distinguished churchmen in Scotland and was appointed Bishop of Aberdeen in 1618. The second son, William Forbes, took to commerce and made himself wealthy enough to purchase the nearby, unfinished Craigievar Castle in 1610. He completed that extraordinary pink tower house by 1626, founding the Forbes of Craigievar line — a dynasty whose descendants would eventually reunite with the Corse estate in later centuries.
The third son, John Forbes (c.1565–1634), also entered the church. He served as minister of Alford, Aberdeenshire, and was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of Aberdeen in 1605, in defiance of royal orders. This act led to his imprisonment, trial for treason, and eventual exile by James VI, after which he spent years in the Netherlands founding and ministering to Scottish congregations in Middelburg and beyond. Though he never returned permanently to Scotland, he was held in great honor by Reformed churches across Europe.
The sixth son, Arthur Forbes, was granted lands in Ireland and founded what would become the Earls of Granard — a dynasty whose Irish seat, Castle Forbes in County Longford, carried the name of Corse into the heart of Irish aristocracy.
For over two and a half centuries, Corse Castle remained the principal residence on the estate, though the structure aged and its defensive character became an anachronism in a more settled era. By the mid-nineteenth century it was clear that the old tower house could no longer serve comfortably as a family seat; its cramped Z-plan rooms, designed for security rather than ease, were poorly suited to Victorian ideals of domestic comfort and social entertaining.
The catalyst for change was the inheritance of the Corse estate by James Ochoncar Forbes (1837–1900), the second son of Sir John Forbes, 7th Baronet of Craigievar, who came into possession in 1869. James Ochoncar Forbes of Corse was a man of means and ambition, and he resolved to build a new house befitting the status of a Victorian country gentleman.
The new house he commissioned was extraordinary — not a Scottish Baronial pile in the fashion of the day, but something altogether more unexpected for this corner of Aberdeenshire: an elegant Italianate villa, the architectural dream of a later generation of the Forbes family, designed to sit beside the artificial loch that had been created by damming the Corse Burn. The commission went to the Aberdeen architect Alexander Ellis, working in what appears to have been a temporary partnership with the artist James Giles, Royal Academician — a pairing of architectural and artistic sensibility that produced one of the most refined buildings of its type in north-eastern Scotland. The building contractor was Alexander Mitchell of Aberdeen.
The result was a two-story, five-bay, square-plan Italianate villa with a four-stage belvedere entrance tower rising from its center — a feature that echoes Ellis's own house, The Firs, at Torphins. The exterior is squared granite rubble, harled white, with granite detailing — margins to openings, quoins, base course, and eaves course — giving the whole a crisp, Mediterranean quality quite at odds with the heather-covered hills behind. On the principal eastern elevation, the central tower draws the eye upward through mullioned windows and semicircular-arched bipartite openings, with a projecting dentil-molded cornice separating the upper stages, the whole capped by a square-topped roof.
By 1887, when David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross published their monumental survey The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland, they noted both the ruinous castle and the new house in their description of the estate: "The Corse Burn, which runs through the hollow adjoining, has been dammed up, and forms a fine sheet of water to the south of the castle... The castle, and modern mansion near it, now belong to James Ochoncar Forbes, Esq."
James Ochoncar Forbes died in 1900, and the estate passed to his son John Walter Forbes. John Walter died unmarried in 1912, and the property then descended to his younger brother, Lieutenant Colonel James Ochoncar Forbes (1867–1945), who served as a Deputy Lieutenant for Aberdeenshire. His son Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Walter Forbes (1914–1979) likewise lived on the estate and in turn served as a Deputy Lieutenant.
Patrick Walter Forbes was succeeded by his son Major Andrew Iain Ochoncar Forbes (1945–2023), who held the baronetcy of Craigievar — one of the ancient Scottish baronetcies that the family had long held — as the 13th Baronet. He married Jane Elizabeth Dunbar-Nasmith in 1984 and served as an officer in the Gordon Highlanders. In his later years he lived near Corse Castle at Winds'eye Farm on the estate.
Upon his death in 2023, the estate and baronetcy passed to his son, Sir James Patrick Ochoncar Forbes, 14th Baronet of Craigievar and of Corse — born in 1986 and now the current representative of this ancient Forbes line.
Today, the Forbes connection to Corse faces its most poignant chapter yet. Sir James has sought to maintain the ancestral estate and to breathe new energy into it,. His plans include the development of holiday cabins near Winds'eye Farm. Yet the financial burden of the Italianate villa that Alexander Ellis built for his forebears has proved insurmountable. Corse House, after suffering a succession of damaging tenancies and falling into a sorry state of repair, faces a restoration bill that Sir James estimates at over a million pounds. With reluctance, he has resolved to sell the house, acknowledging that it would be a happy outcome if it could be kept within the wider Forbes family. When the sale is completed, Corse House will pass out of Forbes ownership.
There is a melancholy symmetry to the story of Corse. Sir William Forbes built his castle in 1581 because the old house could no longer protect his family. His descendants built Corse House in about 1863 because the castle could no longer comfort them. Now, in the twenty-first century, Corse House itself has been found wanting — too costly, too damaged, too large for a young family trying to make a life on a working estate. The castle is a roofless ruin. The house is dilapidated. Two buildings, each the answer to the inadequacies of what came before, have both outlasted their usefulness to the family that created them. Without a Clan Forbes buyer for Corse House, the Forbes of Corse may soon find themselves custodians of a heritage that the modern world has made impossible to maintain.
Comments