John Buchan

Huntingtower. John Buchan

Huntingtower is a 1922 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It is the first of his three Dickson McCunn books. The action takes place in Scotland, in the district of Carrick in Galloway. Having sold his Glasgow grocery-store business, 55-year old Dickson McCunn decides to start his retirement with a walking holiday in the district of Carrick in Galloway. At a local inn he meets John Hermitage, a poet and ex-soldier, as well as an unnamed young man who asks after a place called 'Darkwater' that nobody has heard of. McCunn and Heritage decide to spend the next night at the village of Dalquaharter where they are taken in by a local widow, Phemie Morran. They investigate the local big house, Huntingtower, where - although the place is ostensibly empty - they hear a woman singing. Hermitage recognises the voice as that of a Russian princess he had fallen in love with from afar when his battalion had been posted to Rome some years earlier.