Qualla: Mugdock Castle

Mugdock Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Supergolden, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1644, the south-west tower of Mugdock Castle had already watched four centuries pass. It would shortly watch a sacking, the second in three years. James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, had switched sides in the religious wars then convulsing Scotland - first supporting the Covenanters against Charles I, then turning Royalist and becoming the King's commander north of the border. While Montrose had been briefly imprisoned in Edinburgh in 1641 for his intrigues against Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll, his rival Lord Sinclair had sacked Mugdock. Now, with Montrose back in the field, the castle was sacked again. The tower stood. It is still standing today, on a low ridge in the woods two kilometres north of Milngavie, the most recognisable surviving fragment of a complex that has been rebuilt, demolished, and rebuilt again at least four times in seven centuries.

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Image: Supergolden | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mugdock Castle: Clan Graham's First Stronghold

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Sweeney, CC BY-SA 2.0. The lands of Mugdock came to the Grahams in the mid-thirteenth century, when David de Graham of Dundaff acquired them from the Earl of Lennox. The castle itself was probably built by his descendant Sir David de Graham, who died in 1376, or by his son around 1372. It may have been...

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Image: Stephen Sweeney | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mugdock Castle: Two Executions, One Castle

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Sweeney, CC BY-SA 2.0. After Charles I was defeated and executed in 1649, Montrose was hunted down and hanged in Edinburgh in May 1650. The Graham lands, including Mugdock, were forfeited to the Marquess of Argyll. The reversal was short. In 1661, with the restoration of Charles II, Argyll himself was ...

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Image: Stephen Sweeney | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mugdock Castle: John Guthrie Smith Reinvents It

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Xenophule, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the 1870s, the castle was a quiet curiosity in the Lennox countryside. John Guthrie Smith, a local historian (1834-1894) and a relative of the Smith family of nearby Craigend Castle, leased the property from 1874. He demolished the seventeenth-century mansion and commissioned ...

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Image: Xenophule | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mugdock Castle: Burnt, Bought, Donated

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Mitchell from Glasgow, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. During the Second World War the house was requisitioned by the government. In 1945, Hugh Fraser - later Lord Fraser of Allander, owner of the retail empire House of Fraser - bought Mugdock Castle from the Duke of Montrose. In 1966 the Victorian house burned down, along with the r...

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Image: Andy Mitchell from Glasgow, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mugdock Castle: Mugdock Country Park

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elliott Simpson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The estate is now Mugdock Country Park, a 750-acre publicly accessible green space two kilometres north of Milngavie on the northern edge of Greater Glasgow. The remaining tower of the fourteenth-century castle has been renovated as a small museum. The ruins are protected as a sc...

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Image: Elliott Simpson | CC BY-SA 2.0