Qualla: Plunton Castle

Plunton Castle: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billy McCrorie, CC BY-SA 2.0. Andrew Lennox of Plunton built this tower around 1575 for himself and his future wife Janet - who was also his cousin. By 1684, when Reverend Symson came through writing his Large Description of Galloway, the place was still inhabited and he called it 'a good strong house.' By 1838, when George Colomb painted Ruins of Plunton Castle, Scotland (now in the New-York Historical Society), the roof was gone and the dressed stone around the windows had been plundered for use elsewhere. Five centuries on, the tower is still there - three storeys plus an attic, walls more than a metre thick, the turrets at the corners almost intact. It is sitting in a Galloway field, waiting for someone to decide what to do with it.

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Image: Billy McCrorie | CC BY-SA 2.0

Plunton Castle: An Unusual Floor Plan

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LeCardinal, CC BY 4.0. Tower houses across Scotland followed a fairly standard layout, but Plunton breaks the pattern in one specific way. Its ground floor is divided into two tunnel-vaulted storage chambers - and the two chambers do not connect to each other. The southern one is reached through the st...

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Image: LeCardinal | CC BY 4.0

Plunton Castle: Burns, Ditches, Marsh

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Greig, CC BY-SA 2.0. The site itself does much of the defensive work. Plunton sits on a shallow rise, but it is well protected by Plunton Burn on the west, a steep ditch to the north, and marshy ground on the other two sides. An attacker would have had a wretched time getting close enough to bring we...

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Image: Ian Greig | CC BY-SA 2.0

Plunton Castle: The Great Hall and the Turrets

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Goose assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Climb the turnpike stair and the first floor opens out into what would have been the castle's great hall. The plain fireplace in the middle of the west wall is about 1.8 metres wide, with a corbelled-out lintel and a stone cupboard - an aumbry - tucked to its left. Windows in all...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Goose assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Plunton Castle: How the Estate Came Together

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MSD, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1455, when the king's feud with the Douglas family ended in their lands being forfeited, the crown divided Plunton into two parts. King's-Plunton went to the Lennoxes of nearby Cally; Plunton-M'Gee, originally owned by the McGhie family, was acquired by the Maclellans of Bombi...

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Image: MSD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Plunton Castle: Devorgoil and the Future

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Paxman, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walter Scott visited Plunton and was struck by its romantic setting. He used it as the model for the dungeon-haunted ruin in his melodramatic play The Doom of Devorgoil. The play flopped - it remains one of Scott's least successful works - but the connection has kept Plunton on t...

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Image: Richard Paxman | CC BY-SA 2.0