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Doom Castle

by Neil Munro

First published: 1901
Pages: 247

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11 h 3 min · 41 parts

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Count Victor Comes to a Strange Country
7:22
The Pursuit
25:28
Baron of Doom
31:28
Wanted, a Spy
24:24
The Flageolet
7:14
Mungo Boyd
17:50
The Bay of the Boar's Head
10:59
An Apparition
17:24
Trapped
17:00
Sim MacTaggart, Chamberlain
26:16
The Woman at the Window
15:59
Omens and Alarms
19:09
A Lawyer's Good Lady
26:04
Clamour
20:27
A Ray of Light
21:13
Olivia
16:44
A Sentimental Secret
10:50
"Loch Sloy!"
11:27
Revelation
16:55
An Evening's Melody in the Boar's Head Inn
12:56
Count Victor Changes his Quarters
9:50
The Lonely Lady
23:14
A Man of Noble Sentiment
18:58
A Broken Tryst
12:02
Reconciliation
9:24
The Duke's Ball
13:50
The Duel on the Sands
13:53
The Duel on the Sands - Continued
8:11
The Cell in the Fosse
17:28
A Ducal Disputation
18:34
Flight
20:04
The Indiscretion of the Dutchess
17:14
Back in Doom
19:17
In Days of Storm
19:20
A Damnatory Document
15:11
Love
18:29
The Futile Flageolet
14:23
A Warning
9:51
Betrayed by a Ballad
7:04
The Day of Judgment
10:38
Conclusion
9:32

Doom Castle (1901) is a public domain work.

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About this book

Doom Castle is one of Neil Munro's serious historical novels, set in the Scottish Highlands in the years following the failed Jacobite rising of 1745. Munro was a Scottish journalist and novelist working at the turn of the twentieth century, best known to many readers for his comic Para Handy stories about the eccentric crew of the puffer steamboat Vital Spark plying the waters of the Clyde and the Western Isles. His more serious novels, including the Highland romances, earned him a substantial reputation in his own day among readers of historical fiction.

The novel is set in a period when the Highland clans had been broken by the disastrous defeat at Culloden, when the wearing of tartan and the playing of bagpipes had been outlawed, when the old chiefs were either dead in exile or being slowly transformed from clan leaders into Anglo Scottish landlords. Doom Castle, the eerie old house that gives the novel its name, sits in this transitional landscape, and the plot moves through the political and personal complications that the post Culloden period imposed on the Highland gentry. There is a young French volunteer who has come north for reasons of his own, an old Jacobite chief, a beautiful daughter, a family secret, and the kind of slow building gothic atmosphere that the title promises.

Munro had a real ear for the language and rhythms of Highland speech, and his prose captures the particular quality of Scottish Gaelic culture in transition into English. The pacing is slower than modern historical fiction and the prose is in the formal late Victorian style, but readers who settle into the rhythm find a strong, atmospheric novel about a particular moment in Scottish history that Munro understood deeply. The novel was popular enough in its day to have been adapted for the stage, and it remains one of the better remembered of Munro's serious historical works.

For readers interested in Scottish historical fiction, in the literature of the Highlands after Culloden, or in Neil Munro's catalogue beyond the Para Handy stories, Doom Castle is well worth knowing.

About the author

Neil Munro

Munro edited a Glasgow paper and wrote two entirely separate things. The Para Handy stories follow the crew of a Clyde puffer in Glasgow dialect, have never been out of print in Scotland, and were published under a pen name because their popularity mildly embarrassed him.