Culcreuch Castle was built in 1296 by Maurice Galbraith. It was the clan seat of Clan Galbraith from 1320 to 1624, when it was sold to a cousin, Alexander Seton of Gargunnock, to settle a financial debt. In 1632, it was purchased by Robert Napier, a younger son of John Napier, the 8th Laird of Merchiston. The Napier family held the estate for five generations. The castle was used to garrison Oliver Cromwell’s troops in 1654. In 1796, the castle was sold to Alexander Spiers of Glasgow, who built a cotton mill and a distillery in Fintry. It was sold in 1890 to J. C. Dunwaters, then again in 1901 to Walter Menzies. It passed into the hands of Hercules Robinson in the 1970s, the last of that line of the Menzies family. It was sold in 1984 to Arthur Haslam, who operated the castle as a hotel. In 2007, ownership was transferred to a holding company in Los Angeles, who took the decision to close the castle and business in 2020.
Culcreuch is a rectangular tower house, with three stories and an attic, topped by a parapet and slate roof. The north and east extensions to the original tower were built after 1721 by the Napiers, and match the original tower.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.