Drochil Castle

Drochil Castle stands as a ruined sixteenth-century palace above the Lyne Water in the Scottish Borders. It lies ten kilometres north-west of Peebles and eight kilometres south of West Linton. James Douglas, the fourth Earl of Morton and Regent of Scotland, began building it in 1578. He planned to retire there, but the castle was never finished and remained half built when he was executed three years later. The structure rises four storeys with a garret and was designed as a double-tenement with a wide central corridor on every floor. The castle’s unusual layout opens suites of rooms off this corridor on both sides. Two round towers, each seven and a half metres across, stand at diagonally opposite corners. Each tower has two gunloops to defend the walls. On the first floor, the great hall measured fifteen metres by seven metres. Morton sold wool from his Drochil estates to a merchant named John Provand, whose tenants carted it to Edinburgh. In 1686 the castle passed to William Douglas, the first Duke of Queensberry. Its outer walls are whinstone rubble dressed with red sandstone, quarried at Broomlee Hill. In the early nineteenth century stone was taken to build the nearby farm. Today the ruin remains protected as a scheduled monument and is still owned by the Duke of Buccleuch’s descendants.