Crookston Castle
Crookston Castle
Crookston Castle - Aerial Footage. Brockburn Road, Glasgow, United Kingdom.Crookston Castle is an unusual castle in an imposing hilltop location surrounded by a deep and well preserved defensive ditch. It is also surrounded by the southern suburbs of Glasgow, lying as it does some 4 miles south west of the centre of Glasgow and a little under 3 miles east of Paisley. Urban castles can sometimes be a disappointment, offering more evidence of repeated visits by local youths wielding cans of spray paint than of the people who for centuries lived in them. Crookston Castle, in pleasant contrast, turns out to offer far more of interest than the casual visitor might expect.Your first problem is finding the castle. It lies within a mile of Junction 2 on the M77, or of Pollok Park. If you are not familiar with the south side of Glasgow and have a GPS, the simplest option is to let it take you to "Castleside Road", where you park and walk up the grassy slope towards the cottage that guards the gate in the railings surrounding the castle itself.Within the railings you follow a track that crosses a gap in the deep defensive ditch which would once have been protected by a guardhouse, and approach the west end of the castle, an end that shows fairly heavy signs of restoration. As you make your way round to the east end of the castle you find evidence of two large towers, one of which stands to an impressive height, and gain an opportunity to admire Crookston Castle from its "best" side.The door to the castle is on its north wall, in the protected angle formed by the north east tower. Inside you find an unusually complex structure with considerably more than you might expect to explore. Highlights include the superb ribbed vaulting of the basement level and the view upwards from the hall above it, a view that suggests that most of the levels in the castle were originally vaulted. Of particular interest are the holes in the north wall beside the main door. These connect to a chamber off the basement housing the well and are though to be sockets for a wooden machine used to draw water from it. www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk
SKYLINEDRONE - AERIAL FOOTAGE
