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Auchans Castle is a mock military mansion, Category A listed, T-plan building of a late 16th-century date converted to the L-plan during the early-to-mid-17th century; its ruins stand about 1 km of Dundonald, South Ayrshire. It was held at various times by the Wallace, Cochrane and Montgomerie families.
The now greatly ruined castle stands in its woodland policies amidst a series of stone-walled parks, the walls of which are mainly in a state of collapse. The building and the park walls were in the main constructed using stone robbed from Dundonald Castle. A vast number of valuable Eglinton family papers were discovered in one of the apartments in the 1880s, rescued as the building was in a terminal state of decay. Many had already been destroyed through neglect.
Saint-Georges de Boscherville Abbey is a former Benedictine abbey. It was founded in about 1113 by Guillaume de Tancarville on the site of an earlier establishment of secular canons and settled by monks from the Abbey of Saint-Evroul. The abbey church made of Caumont stone was erected from 1113 to 1140. The Norman builders aimed to have very well-lit naves and they did this by means of tall, large windows, initially made possible by a wooden ceiling, which prevented uplift, although this was replaced by a Gothic vault in the 13th century. The chapter room was built after the abbey church and dates from the last quarter of the 12th century.
The arrival of the Maurist monks in 1659, after the disasters of the Wars of Religion, helped to get the abbey back on a firmer spiritual, architectural and economic footing. They erected a large monastic building one wing of which fitted tightly around the chapter house (which was otherwise left as it was).