Big Enough: The Smallest Castle in Europe
Wednesday, 19 Mar 25
"I don't think you'll want to go in there..." the woman quietly whispered to us as we approached the doorway. We'd seen from some distance that her and her partner had only just arrived at the castle, poked their heads in, recoiled, and swiftly retreated back up the hill towards us. "...someone's done a jobby in it." Six simple words that can dispel even the most seasoned of travellers. It made us second guess whether a closer look was entirely necessary, but we decided to press on for the last few metres anyway. In for a penny in for a pound.
Approaching over the rugged West Highland coastline in Scotland, the castle is perfectly camouflaged in between a patchwork of grass and jagged granite which has been exposed by thousands of years of crashing waves and wind. If you're in luck you'll accidentally drop low enough into one of the dips in the hillside and the castle will pop out, silhouetted against the sea behind it.
Many stories about the origins of the castle float around with most leaning towards it having been built in the 1950's by a mysterious architect from England. He spent six months constructing the castle, slept in it only a handful of times and was then never seen again. I like to picture him as a balaclava and rubber gloves clad guerilla builder, travelling up and down the country in the dead of night, stealthily mixing up small buckets of concrete for his next big idea. Maybe he'd gotten so sick of drawing velux windows onto town houses that he just had to let his hair down and splash some concrete around on the remote west coast of Scotland... or perhaps the origins of the castle are just an elaborate myth made up by the locals to attract tourists. Either way people are drawn to it.
The doorway is narrow and you need to turn sideways to squeeze through, but once inside the 2m high by 1.5m wide building, all the mod-cons you could ever need in a one-man castle are there. A small bed, a store room with concrete shelves and a fireplace. The walls are embedded with small glass cubes which splash light across the ceiling from outside, similar to the ones that you'd normally see on city pavements to let light into the cellars below. At this point panic washed over us as we realised we'd forgotten all about the woman's earlier jobby warning.
Nothing immediately heinous was inside and the lack of foul smell had us confused. Then we spotted the once liquid dribbles of beige concrete that had seeped through the cracks in the ceiling and solidified. These ancient stone dribbles had run down the walls and created oozing blobs, and just by the doorway was the largest of the blobs. A neat conical splash on the floor with accompanying splatter up the adjacent blockwork. The concrete replica-jobby was perfectly formed and would trick any unsuspecting visitor into believing the castle had been used as a portaloo, a practical joke in stone artefact format, accidentally left more than 60 years by the mystery English builder.
*Jobby is Scottish slang for a number 2 toilet procedure.