Legend has it that Isobel, the the daughter of Alexander Fraser, 8th laird of Philorth (c. 1536-1623), had fallen in love with an inappropriate suitor, a servant piper. The laird was not happy about this at all and had the piper tied up in the Selches Hole (Seals Hole), a cave underneath the Wine Tower at the water's edge. Fraser then locked his daughter in the upper floor of the tower and retired for the night to Kinnaird Castle, farther up the coast. Unfortunately there was an abnormally high tide due to a storm that night and the poor piper servant drowned in the cave. When Isobel was informed of her lover’s demise, she jumped to her death from the top of the Wine Tower onto the rocks below. The rock that she fell on is still painted red to this day.
It is said that Isobel's ghost is seen as an omen prior to bad weather, and that you can hear the sound of pipes being played by the ghost of the piper for his lost love.
The 16th century Wine Tower is built right on the cliff edge and is an unusual building, It is reachable only by a difficult path, with its door being only a few feet from the edge of the cliff. Immediately below that is a large cave, known as Selches Hole, now inaccessible. The tower has no internal stairs and no way between the basement and first floor. The first floor can only be reached by a trap-door from the second floor, which itself was reached by an outside ladder from the ground. Since there is also no window in this first floor chamber, it was probably intended as a hiding place, which might have passed unnoticed by strangers.
Despite the Wine Tower's unsophisticated and inconvenient character, its upper vault has three finely carved heraldic pendants with mottoes, with the Fraser arms and Royal arms of James V. An inscription in the Wine Tower declares "The Glory of the Honorable is to Feir God".
The Wine Tower (or Winetower) is a small three-story tower located approximately 160 ft from Kinnaird Head Lighthouse on a headland projecting into the North Sea, within the town of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire on the east coast of Scotland.