Sanquhar Castle

Sanquhar Castle stands in ruins just outside the Dumfriesshire town of Sanquhar, its surviving tower a weathered marker of a stronghold begun in the 13th century by the Ross family. The site was chosen for defence: the River Nith guards its western flank, a burn runs to the north, and a deep ditch once closed off the remaining approaches. In the 14th century the castle passed to the Crichton family, who held it through its most eventful years. When King James VI and I broke his journey here in July 1617 on the way to Glasgow, the Crichtons laid on a welcome so extravagant that the effort is said to have bankrupted them. By the mid-17th century the property had been sold to Sir William Douglas, 1st Duke of Queensberry, and thereafter it slid into decay. In 1895 John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, bought the ruins and commissioned the architect Robert Weir Schultz to begin a restoration, but the work stopped when the Marquess died in 1900. What remains today is a telling mixture of original medieval masonry and unfinished Victorian repair, now a scheduled monument reached from the Southern Upland Way.