Qualla: Buchanan Castle

Buchanan Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1954 the roof of Buchanan Castle came off. Not by accident, and not because of war damage. The Duke of Montrose's family had moved out in 1925, the building had served as a military hospital during the Second World War and briefly as the Army School of Education after it, and now the property carried a tax liability that no one wanted to pay. Removing the roof made the structure legally a ruin, and a ruin is taxed differently from a house. So down it came. Today, a mile west of the village of Drymen, the great Scottish baronial walls of Buchanan Castle still stand at full height inside a perimeter fence, slowly being absorbed by the trees that have moved in through the empty window-frames.

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Buchanan Castle: The Christmas Fire

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The castle you see today is not the original Buchanan seat. That building, Buchanan Auld House, stood half a mile to the northwest. It had been substantially rebuilt around 1724, altered by John Adam in 1751, and considerably enlarged in 1789 by William Playfair into a grand mans...

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Buchanan Castle: From Buchanans to Grahams

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The land had been Buchanan country since at least 1231, the family seat of the chiefs whose clan name the area carries to this day. By the late seventeenth century, however, the direct chiefly line had failed - the 22nd Chief, John Buchanan, inherited significant debt and watched...

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Buchanan Castle: Burn's Castle in Brief Glory

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

William Burn was one of the most successful country-house architects of nineteenth-century Britain, and Buchanan Castle was a confident exercise in the style he had helped popularise: turrets, crow-stepped gables, tall chimney stacks, ornamental machicolations that suggested medi...

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Buchanan Castle: What the Trees Have Done

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today, Buchanan Castle is a Category B listed building, sits on the Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland, and has been a ruin longer than it was ever inhabited. The walls remain intact at their full height and are considered structurally sound. A perimeter fence keeps explorer...

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