Buchanan Castle

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Buchanan Castle is a large house in Stirlingshire, Scotland.

Located west of the village of Drymen, the house was built by the 4th Duke of Montrose in 1854. The original structure, the ancestral seat of the Clan Buchanan, had burned down in 1852, and Montrose commissioned William Burn to replace it. Burn designed an extravagant take on the Scottish baronial style, enclosing an L-plan tower in a clutch of turrets, bartizans and stepped gables.

Sold off in 1925, it briefly saw service as a hospital during the Second World War, during which one of the patients was Rudolf Hess. Afterwards it was de-roofed to avoid paying rates on the building, leading to the inevitable structural deterioration.

Today it remains standing to full height but progressively engulfed by trees and plants, marooned on the perimeter of a golf course after which it is named, and surrounded incongruously by modern housing. A perimeter fence surrounds the structure itself.

Ironically no Buchanan ever lived in this house.