Dunmore Park House

We took the dogs on a different walk today just for a change and came across Dunmore Park House. It is situated in Dunmore Park Estate which is most famous for The Pineapple. The house was built 1820 and designed by the architect William Wilkins for George, 5th Earl of Dunmore. The Dunmore family owned the house until 1893 when it was sold to Claud Hamilton Hamilton of Barns and Cochna who had been renting it from the Earl of Dunmore for some time. In 1917, when the whole estate was broken up, the house and grounds were sold to Albert Wilkinson who then sold them on two days later to the Jones family, timber merchants from Larbert. It ceased to be a family home in 1955 and for a short time it became St. Maray’s girls’ school which closed in 1961. From then, until 1971, part of the building was occupied by the gamekeeper of the estate, but finally it lay empty and was left to the mercy of nature and vandals, neither of which had any respect for its former glory.