Auchans Castle: A Seventeenth-Century Mock Military Mansion in Scotland
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- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Kingdom of Scotland
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Castle
On this page12 sections
History
Auchans Castle, also known as Auchans House, House of Auchans, or Old Auchans, is a seventeenth-century mock military mansion near Dundonald in the United Kingdom. It stands about 1 kilometre west of Dundonald, in the parish of Dundonald, South Ayrshire. Designed as a residence with the visual language of a castle, it developed from an earlier building on an estate recorded as Achynche.
The Wallace estate and the seventeenth-century house
The Wallaces of Dundonald held the estate from 1527, when a predecessor building was already present. A building described at the end of the sixteenth century may have been that earlier house or an early phase of the present one. The existing castle was begun after the estate passed to Sir William Cochrane of Cowdon in 1640, although the extent to which the older structure was incorporated remains uncertain.
Auchans was enlarged and altered during the seventeenth century. James Wallace is credited with adding a fashionable square stair tower in 1644. The tower occupied the re-entrant angle, the inward corner formed where two wings met, and included a viewing platform and broken pediments. Date stones recorded in 1876 carried the years 1644 and 1667, reflecting the building’s successive development.
The house passed successively among the Wallace, Cochrane, and Montgomerie families. Colonel James Wallace, the last member of his family to occupy Auchans Castle, supported the Solemn League and Covenant, an agreement formed by Scottish Covenanters to defend Presbyterian church government. In November 1666 he led the rising at Pentland, an unsuccessful armed revolt against the policies of the restored monarchy, and died in exile at Rotterdam in 1678.
Sir William Cochrane suffered during the Civil War, the series of conflicts that unsettled the kingdoms of Britain and Ireland in the seventeenth century. After the Restoration of the monarchy, he was created Earl of Dundonald in 1669 in recognition of his service to the Crown. His son, the second Earl of Dundonald, lived at Auchans for a period with his mother, Lady Katherine Kennedy, after his father’s death around 1679. The circumstances in which the estate later left the earl’s possession are uncertain and have been linked to unsuccessful scientific speculation.
The Eglinton connection
Auchans later became closely associated with the Montgomerie family and the Earls of Eglinton. Susanna, Dowager Countess of Eglinton, moved from Kilmaurs Place to Auchans as a dower house resident. A dower house was a residence provided for a widowed aristocratic woman after she left the principal family seat. She lived there permanently from the marriage of her son Archibald in 1772 until her death in 1780.
Susanna’s withdrawal from her former social position followed the murder of her son Alexander, the 10th Earl of Eglinton, by Mungo Campbell in 1769. A tradition connected with her life at Auchans tells of ten or twelve rats that she supposedly tamed. They were said to come to her table when she tapped on an oak wall panel and opened a small door.
James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Susanna at Auchans in 1773. Johnson later described her as a leading arbiter of Scottish elegance. At their farewell, she told him that she was old enough to be his mother and would adopt him as her son. After Susanna’s death in 1780, the castle housed families of estate workers for a period, while Archibald, 11th Earl of Eglinton, also lived there for some time.
Decline, reuse, and ruin
By 1846 Auchans Castle was chiefly occupied by Lady Mary Montgomerie’s servants. Parts of the building were then untenanted and locked. Changes made to accommodate workers included the removal of ornate marble fireplaces to the separate Auchans House, which has since been demolished. Estate foresters occupied the ground floor in 1875, when the roof was still being maintained. In 1885 stones were removed for cottars’ houses, although part of the west wing was re-roofed. Janet Gilchrist remained caretaker until 1897.
After the death of Archibald William, 14th Earl of Eglinton, in 1892, his daughter Lady Sofia Constance Montgomerie inherited the Auchans estate. Her inheritance included the castle, its policies, and the farms of Bogside, Broomhill, Clevance, Crooks, Girtrig, Guilliland, Highlees, Kilnford, Laurieston, Parkthorn, and Ploughland. The estate’s managed grounds included gardens, an orchard, woodland, a deer park, a rabbit warren, and an artificial fish-stocked loch.
The castle housed German prisoners of war during the First World War. By 1922 its roof had largely collapsed, and the building subsequently became a substantial ruin. Scotland’s Category A listing, the country’s highest level of statutory architectural protection, was applied in 1971. Auchans was entered on Scotland’s Register of Buildings at Risk in 1992. Occasional restoration efforts have included interest from the Clan Wallace Society, and the property was at one stage reacquired by the Earl of Dundonald, who owned the separate Auchans House in 1951.
The principal building and surrounding park walls were largely built with stone robbed from Dundonald Castle. In the 1880s, a large collection of Eglinton family papers was discovered in an apartment at Auchans and rescued while the building was in terminal decay. Many other papers had already been lost through neglect. The site also retains evidence of earlier activity in its wider setting, including rig-and-furrow cultivation, a form of farming that left parallel raised ridges and furrows, and references to a fort at Hallyards and a vitrified fort near Kemp Law, whose stone walls were partly melted or fused by intense burning.
Associated traditions and records
The Auchans pear is traditionally said to have originated in the castle orchard from a tree brought from France or Norway, possibly during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, who ruled Scotland from 1542 to 1567. The parent tree was blown down in 1793. Pears identified at Pluscarden Abbey in 2003 as Black Aachen or Auchans pears indicate that the variety survived and spread. It was also recorded in Cheshire and was formerly known as the Toadback Pear, with related varieties called Red Auchan and Winter Achan.
John Dunlop of Whitmuir Hall served as factor to Lady Susanna Montgomery at Auchans and died in 1836 aged 61. In 1808 and 1809 he recorded rainfall at Auchans House using a rain gauge. An axe-hammer associated with the castle is preserved at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. An urn containing fragments of human bone was found near the castle when a workman dug into a small gravel mound. The crudely made vessel disintegrated after exposure, while its surviving fragments were kept for a time at Dundonald manse.
Remains
Castle fabric and layout
Main residential block
Auchans Castle stands on a slightly elevated knoll and survives as a substantially ruined building within wooded policies, the managed grounds surrounding a country house. It began as a T-plan house and became L-plan during the early to mid-seventeenth century. The structure is built mainly of whinstone and freestone, with walls generally about 65 to 75 centimetres thick. The oldest parts reach about 90 centimetres, dimensions suited to a substantial residence rather than a true fortress.
The original house had high crow-stepped gables, whose edges rise in steps rather than forming a smooth triangle, and three principal storeys. Its basement was vaulted, while the main block was not. An external stair tower originally stood centrally against the south side. The entrance was later placed in a square tower with a balustrade and a Renaissance-style doorway. The south gable contains Gothic traceried stonework, meaning decorative divisions in the window masonry, and some windows are topped by cornices. The east gable held a large traceried window that was later blocked up.
Wings, stair tower, and interiors
The re-entrant square stair tower included a viewing platform and broken pediments. A three-storey wing with a garret was added at the west end of the north wall, probably through three stages of extension. A further block extended northward and contained two towers. One was square and corbelled, projecting from supporting courses of stone, with crow-stepped gables. The basement of this block was vaulted, and vaulting also survives in the cellars of the north wing. The castle’s military appearance was reinforced by a small number of gun loops, although these features had become largely redundant by 1644.
Domestic buildings were added along the south and east sides of the courtyard. The south-side balustraded terrace was formerly enclosed within that courtyard. The western wing contained the kitchen. Principal rooms occupied the first floor, including a western room called the dining room in the 1860s. It may earlier have served as the proprietor’s private room and bedroom and contained wood panelling and an ornate marble fireplace. Bedrooms occupied the second floor, while the third floor, partly within the roof, contained a long gallery lit by dormer windows and the large traceried window in the east gable.
Historic grounds and associated buildings
Castle policies
The surrounding stone-walled parks survive in a largely collapsed condition. The former estate included flower gardens within a walled garden, an orchard, an artificial loch, extensive woodland, a deer park, and a rabbit warren. Mid-nineteenth-century mapping placed the warren between Beech Wood and the Kemp Law area. Deer were later removed from the park to the policies of Eglinton Castle. The grounds contain ancient sycamores exceeding five metres in circumference, elm-dominated woodland, ash, oak, sycamore, conifer plantations, springs, an old reservoir near Collennan, and wetland areas including Merklands Loch.
The historic landscape also included the tree-covered Old Bank hillside west of the castle, beside the former deer park, and woodland slopes extending towards the Collennan smallholdings. A substantial area of rig-and-furrow cultivation survives near the castle as an archaeological trace of earlier farming. The associated plant life includes dog’s mercury, wood melick, broad-leaved hellebore, and giant bellflower. Much of the woodland consists of derelict coppice-like growth from trees felled during the Second World War.
New Auchans House and Old Auchans
New Auchans House was a separate Italianate villa built around 1819 for the Earl of Eglinton, apparently by Monteaulieu Burgess of Coilsfield to designs by William Wallace. Its projecting glazed porch led to the hall and main staircase. The grounds included carefully preserved woodland, a flower parterre along the carriage drive, and a large conservatory forming an external wing. Ivy and other trained shrubs provided the principal decoration on the main front. Mantelpieces and surrounds removed from the old castle may have survived there, although the 1960 sale particulars specifically excluded them. New Auchans House was sold in 1947, sold again in 1960, demolished in 1970, and replaced by a housing estate.
Nineteenth-century mapping also showed a complex of outbuildings and a dwelling called Old Auchans above the castle. That property is now ruinous and may have housed estate factors before New Auchans House was built. The repeated use of the name Auchans has caused confusion between the castle, New Auchans House, Old Auchans, and other properties bearing the same name.
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