Today I took a trip to Dunmore Park which is in Central Scotland near Falkirk. I had recently heard about a ruined mansion located in the forest near there which sounded pretty cool, so of I went to find it !
It wasnt that easy to get to. Google points you in the direction of a private road which is barriered off. Instead I had to drive to the Dunmore Pinapple (another cool building) - park there, and then make my way through woodland tracks and fields to get there.
Although I did pretty much manage to walk directly to it without much deviation, it was still pretty hard to find. It was about a 40-60 minute walk from the Dunmore Pineapple. Its so surrounded by trees that you dont begin to see it until you are fairly close.
As soon as I got past those first few trees I was quite amazed at the ruin. Thats the main entrance above, with the coat of arms of the family that built and lived there - the Earls of Dunmore !
I didnt expect it to be as big as it was. The big surprise for me was that there is a full level below ground level. The pic above is taken from ground level, and it shows an extensive corridor running the full length of the house below. In fact, on getting down there I found out that the basement layer covered the entire area of the house.
It was pretty easy to get down into the basement, with a ramp down to it at one side. It was clear that the basement was used as the service and storage part of the house, noting that when this was built in 1822, that they would have had a full suite of servants/staff to look after the family. As can be seen above, there were lots of vaulted cellar rooms, which would have been for storage and the like.
One of the highlights was finding the old wine cellar down there. The pic above (which I took in complete darkness) shows above a fifth of the cellar area. It was huge, with all the shelves numbered. They must have had an incredible wine collection back in the day !
I was a little tickled by the pac-man graffiti that I found on the back wall. You can see the date, 1822, above the door. According to a quick google search the building was inhabited until around 1972 (150 years) after which it was demolished due to tax reasons.
The building was quite large, with around 4 levels in total, and a lot of grand features throughout - like the lovely arched windows you can see above.
Next to nothing remains of what the internals might have been like and all of the wooden floors are long gone. I did find some of the old plasterwork (above), which gives a smidge of an idea as to what it might have been like inside.
I have to say I really did enjoy exploring the house, and particularly the basement layer, which I was not expecting at all. I was there for around 40minutes or so. 3 other people turned up while I was there, also to explore it, otherwise I didnt see anyone else the whole time I was there (nor during the walk to and from it).
I was surprised that it wasnt barriered off or anything. Nor were there any warning signs. On the whole the structure looked fairly stable, however, I'd normally expect some kind of signage warning you away, even if just to say that it was private property or unsafe. Plus I didnt see anything around at all that said you couldnt go there.
I really did enjoy exploring this place, including the walk to and from it. I'm glad I went and I'd certainly go back again - it was way better than I thought it would be. Highly recommended !