An impressive ruin, Lennox Castle can be found hidden in the woods, shining brightly in the winter sunshine, and being overshadowed by the snow-covered Campsie Fells.
The ruin itself looks out over the training ground used by Celtic FC. It’s an odd combination of things to see together. When the players are practicing for the upcoming game, do any of them look up and wonder what’s going to happen? Do they hear the screams of the people who used to live there as the wind blows down from above?
In the 1830s, construction began on the castle. It was converted into a mental institution at the turn of the 20th century. It was thought to be revolutionary at the time, but it eventually became too crowded, didn’t have enough staff, and didn’t have enough money. It was more of a dumping ground for society’s problems, including truants, unmarried mothers, wayward teenagers, and children who had difficulties learning than it was a mental health institution. Abuse and neglect were pervasive problems.
Those individuals who attempted to escape were given chase by dogs through the surrounding forest. Patients might be given drugs before being abandoned on mattresses. Other patients remember being chased around the castle barefoot and hit with baseball bats when they failed to address a member of the staff as “sir.” According to the findings of a study that was published in the British Medical Journal in December 1989, one quarter of the patients at Lennox Castle were grossly underweight and malnourished.
In June of 2002, after a period of phased closure and the residents’ relocation, the doors of the hospital were finally closed for good.
When exploring this ruin, however, there was no sense of its gloomy and tragic past. This is due in part to the fact that the history and the personal aspects of the ruin have been removed, and in part to the fact that sunlight is streaming through the arches, windows, and gaps where the ruin has collapsed. Walking into the pitch blackness of a storage bunker was one of the most unsettling aspects of the scene. The top-heavy building components gave the impression that they could crumble at any moment.
The remains of the structure were more than just a shell. There were some service rooms that had not been damaged, as well as a staircase that led nowhere and appeared to be about to give way. There were ruins of a grand entrance hall, which gave the impression that the building had once been grand. The rusted remains of a fire stairway could be seen running up the side of the central block, crossing the gap where there had once been a roof to support it, and then disappearing into thin air. Someone had gone to the trouble of tying knots in a very long rope and then suspending a tire from the end of it.
Naturally, I gave it a shot. Only after I had made sure, twice, and then triple checked, that my weight would not bring the stairway down on me from a great height.