Buchanan Old House, Buchanan Castle

Buchanan Old House is what remains of a prestigious 18th-century mansion, also known as Buchanan Place or the Place of Buchanan. The building now serves as a golf club house, two flats, and estate offices, with the surviving 18th-century structures connected by additions built circa 1936.

The house was erected in the late 1720s by the first Duke of Montrose as a substantial southeast-facing building, replacing an earlier house demolished around 1724. The original structure was a long, fairly plain block of three storeys with two-storey flanking wings and further service wings to the rear. Subsequent additions and alterations were carried out throughout the 18th century, notably by John Adam in 1751–2 and James Playfair in 1789. The house was destroyed by fire in 1850, and the ruins were removed. Only the remains of two wings that had extended northwest from the northeast end of the main house were retained.

The northeast wing consists of a substantial three-storey rectangular-plan block with a piend roof to the southeast. It has six bays (seven to the first floor) of irregularly disposed windows. At the centre of the southwest elevation is a square stair bay, which sits in the south re-entrant angle of a small two-storey transverse wing with a pend to ground floor. This transverse wing would have connected to the adjacent southwest wing. The northwest gable is linked by a slate-roofed pend to a long single-storey rectangular-plan range, which now forms part of the golf club premises.

Continuing the line of the southeast gable is a substantial rubble wall, the lower portion of which is battered; this is probably a remnant of the rear wall of the demolished main block. A large round-arched opening in this wall would have given access to the southwest wing. All that remains of the southwest wing at the southeast end is the seven-bay southwest wall, reduced to first-floor cill level, and some low walling which may be the remnants of the northeast wall.

At its northwest end, the southwest wall of this wing joins the circa 1936 clubhouse, a near-rectangular block standing on the footprint of the northwest end of the original wing. The clubhouse incorporates some 18th-century fabric at the northwest end, including a small rectangular piend-roofed block with three bays, double-height round-arched windows, and a cavetto eaves cornice, which may have formerly been a chapel or meeting hall. The clubhouse entrance is at the jerkin-headed southeast gable, in a slightly advanced central bay with a long and short quoined door surround with keystone detail. Two square-plan ashlar gatepiers with pyramidal caps mark the entry to the courtyard formed between the two wings.

The estate office at the southeast end of the northeast wing retains several 18th-century features, including bolection moulded cornicing to all floors and several classical timber chimneypieces, some reeded or with roundels, with register grates inserted. There is a timber stair with timber-boarded walls against the southeast gable. An open hearth exists at the southeast end of the arched-windowed hall of the clubhouse.

The building is rendered, with tooled roughly squared sandstone long and short quoins to the northwest end of the northwest wing and the arched-windowed hall of the southwest wing. Exposed rubble, some brought to courses, is visible on the southeast wall and southwest wall of the southwest wing. Most windows are 12-pane timber sash and case, with some timber casements. Roofs are mostly piended with graded slates. There are two ridge stacks to the three-storey block and a gable-head stack to the transverse wing, with several ridge and wall-head stacks to the remainder; the cans are a mix of circular and octangular forms.

To the southeast of Buchanan House stands a sundial, mid-18th century, made by Thomas Wright (1711–1786), 'Instrument Maker to his Majesty' (as inscribed on the dial). The sundial comprises a horizontal copper dial mounted on a sandstone pillar with a square base and stop-chamfered octagonal shaft. The pillar is surrounded by large stone and concrete slabs.