Castle by the Week

"The great houses," mourned Gloomy Dean W. R. Inge of St. Paul's some years ago, "will never again be lived in by their owners. Like the ruined castles and the abbeys . . . they will be the tombs of a social order which has passed away forever."

One of Britain's great houses is vast and dour Buchanan Castle, near Drymen (rhymes with women), Stirlingshire. Back in 1935 James Graham, Sixth Duke of Montrose, decided that Buchanan cost too much to live in. He had already sold the mountain--famed Ben Lomond--that stood in the castle's backyard. He built himself and his Duchess a cosy, eleven-room house on the castle grounds, leased 60,000 acres of shooting land to a Glasgow businessmen's association, and turned the castle itself into a hotel.

In 1938 it closed. During the war the castle took a brief new lease on life when the government used it as a hospital and military training center, but when peace came, there it was back on the Duke's hands, a great, solid, sprawling white elephant, too new (built 1850) to be historic, too old to be livable. The Duke, who has another castle on the Isle of Arran, decided to sell the old family home. He asked $70,000. There were no takers.

Last week in desperation, the Duke of Montrose took an ad in the paper, offered Buchanan, complete with its 40 bedrooms, 16 baths, 40 acres of woodlands, nine acres of gardens and incomparable view of Loch Lomond, for $28 a week to anyone who would keep the place in repair.

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