Mugdock Castle

Mugdock Castle stands in Mugdock Country Park, just west of the village of Mugdock in Strathblane parish. It lies within Stirlingshire, only two kilometres north of Milngavie, on the northern edge of Greater Glasgow. The ruins occupy a natural mound of hard volcanic rock beside the remains of Mugdock Loch. The earliest parts date from the mid-14th century, when the Graham family held the lands. By the mid-15th century an outer courtyard and new buildings had been added. The site is protected as a scheduled monument. The castle’s most famous owner was James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, who may have been born there in 1612. During the Bishops’ Wars he briefly supported the Covenanters before turning to the Royalist cause in 1644. His enemies twice sacked the castle, and after his execution in 1650 the lands passed to the Marquess of Argyll. The Grahams regained Mugdock in 1661 and built a new mansion inside the old walls. In the 1820s a terraced walled garden with a summer house was added to the east. In the 1880s John Guthrie Smith demolished the 17th-century mansion and commissioned a Scottish baronial house designed by Campbell Douglas & Sellars. Visitors today walk among the ruins of the 14th-century tower and the later courtyard buildings. The south-west tower, four storeys high, still shows its vaulted basement and projecting upper floors. A narrow stone bridge leads to a first-floor passage that once connected the tower to the Victorian mansion. The chapel and domestic range stand in the outer courtyard, while the remains of the outer curtain wall mark the limits of the mound. The lochside path offers views across the park, and the renovated tower now houses a small museum.