Drochil Castle

Drochil Castle stands unfinished, a ruin in the hills of the Scottish Borders that never saw the life its builder intended. James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton and Regent of Scotland, began raising it in 1578, meaning it as a retreat where he might withdraw from the burdens of government. He got no further than the walls: three years later he was executed under James VI, and the building was left barely half complete. What survives shows an unusual design for its date. Rather than a single tower, Morton planned what has been described as a double-tenement house, with a broad corridor running the full length of the building on each of its four storeys, apartments opening off either side. Two round towers, each roughly twenty-five feet across, guarded diagonally opposite corners; both were pierced with gunloops to keep attackers from the foot of the walls. A great hall some fifty feet long occupied the first floor. The masonry mixes whinstone rubble with red sandstone. In 1686 the property passed to William Douglas, 1st Duke of Queensberry, and its ruins remain with his descendants, the Dukes of Buccleuch. Early in the nineteenth century stone was carted away to build a neighbouring farm.