The first Tain tolbooth was built in 1631 with one striking detail: its bell came from the Netherlands. Michael Burgerhuys of Middelburg, one of the great Dutch foundrymen of his age, cast the bell specifically for the new building. Why a Highland burgh of perhaps a thousand souls reached across the North Sea for its bell rather than to a Scottish founder is an open question - probably trade connections through the Baltic ports, possibly a Tain merchant who knew Burgerhuys's work. Whatever the reason, the bell arrived, rang for three-quarters of a century, and then survived the destruction of the building that housed it. In 1675, the non-conformist minister Thomas Ross was locked up in this tolbooth for refusing to acknowledge the bishops; he was held for the better part of a year. In 1703, a storm tore down the steeple. The building had to come down. The bell did not.

Alexander Stronach designed the replacement, completed in 1708 in the Scottish baronial style - coursed stone, a three-stage tower, small sash windows climbing the upper levels. Twenty-five years later, in 1733, the upper part was crowned with corner bartizans and a spire, giving the silhouette that still defines Tain's High Street today. The Dutch bell, recovered from the wreckage of 1703, was hung in the third stage that same year. A clock followed in 1750. The tolbooth was always meant to be more than ornamental: alongside it stood a two-storey council house extending southeast along the street, where the burgh's business was done. That council house was eventually demolished in the early 1820s, and the tower's relationship with its neighbour reset.

The foundation stone of a new courthouse went down in 1825, to a design by Alexander Gordon, and was completed around 1826. Six years later, it burned. The 1833 fire took the courthouse but spared the tower, and the rebuild produced the asymmetrical four-bay frontage you can see today: round-headed doorway in the second bay from the left, gabled right-hand bay, paired round-headed windows on the ground floor, bi-partite mullioned windows above, a crenelated parapet with corner turrets at roof level. Andrew Maitland added a four-bay block to the rear in 1876. A new clock went into the tower in 1877. Through all of it, the bell from Middelburg kept time.

When the Ross and Cromarty District Council was enlarged in 1975, Tain stopped being the local seat of government. The council chamber became the meeting place of the Royal Burgh of Tain Community Council, and the building continues as the venue for hearings of Tain Sheriff Court. The 1907 portrait by George Fiddes Watt of Alexander Wallace - Honorary Sheriff Substitute for Ross and Cromarty and Sutherland - watches over proceedings. A Category A listed building, the Tolbooth is the kind of structure that quietly insists places have memories. Three centuries on, the bell from the Middelburg foundry still marks the hour over the High Street.