Hoddom Castle

Hoddom Castle stands in Dumfries and Galloway, an L-plan tower house raised in the sixteenth century by Sir John Maxwell. Maxwell had come into the estate through his marriage to Agnes, Lady Herries, heiress to lands earlier held by the Herries and Carruthers families. Its position on the western Borders made it a prize during the turbulence of the 1560s. On 21 June 1568 the Regent Moray laid siege to the castle, which gave in after ten hours; supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots retook it the following year, before an English force under Lord Scrope wrecked the tower. Later generations softened the fortress into a country seat. Seventeenth-century courtyard ranges were added, and around 1826 General Matthew Sharpe commissioned neo-Jacobean extensions from the architects Wardrop and Anderson. The army requisitioned Hoddom during the Second World War, after which it was never lived in again, and the Victorian wings designed by William Burn were pulled down in the 1970s. The tower now stands derelict on Scotland’s Buildings at Risk Register, its grounds given over to a caravan park. On nearby Trailtrow Hill rises the Repentance Tower, a rare mid-sixteenth-century watch tower carved with the single word ‘Repentance’.