Living the Highland Life: Creating A Scottish Castle in LEGO [Feature]
When I volunteered to help run the new Tales of Old game (it’s a medieval LEGO RPG!) on EuroBricks in September 2025, I had no idea I’d have a massive castle keep sitting in the middle of my build area a month later!
In the game, I created a character named Duncan, who is loosely based on real-world medieval Celtic and Gaelic cultures. Duncan has a Scottish tam hat from the bagpiper CMF, and kilted-torso from the Highland Warrior CMF, plus he sports a large black mustache and BrickArms claymore.
Once I’d put together his character, I began to think about what the rest of his clan might look like and where they’d live in the highlands. This entailed some BrickLink searches for big beards and mustaches, and more tam hats of course! During that research I discovered that there was a very suitable new ochre yellow mustache element released in the recent One Piece sets – so I picked it up!
With some more clan members in place, I next put together a quick Scottish clan figbarf. I thought it would be fun if they all sported massive facial hair of some sort, so I pulled the beards off of my Hobbit dwarf figures and created the clan members. I topped off their outfits with some custom Black Watch kilts from capes4minifigs. The Black Watch tartan pattern seemed to fit pretty closely with the blue and green tartan that was on the Highland Warrior CMF torso.
Once I had the clan built out, I needed to visualize where they lived. I remembered seeing pictures years ago of a picturesque Scottish castle keep on an island. The castle is called Castle Stalker, and is located in the highlands. That would be a gorgeous place for them to live!
So without much planning, I began to build! I got started by trying out a new base technique where I placed a 48×48 baseplate on top of 32×32 baseplates to make a 64×64 build with a removable center. I figured this would help me down the road to transport the castle while keeping the keep as a single structure itself. If you rest a baseplate on top of another baseplate/studs, the LEGO math works out such that it is pretty spot on height-wise with full plate increments.
Once I had a rough green base, I next started on the keep structure. As Castle Stalker was pretty plain, I just used light bluish gray bricks with dark tan accents. I planned to build a light bluish gray / dark bluish gray corner tower using the classic prefab pieces, but the dark bluish gray there could be explained away as a later addition to the castle.
Most of the interior of the build was empty space, but I knew I wanted to give it a roof so I used technic bricks to create a lattice of connected beams that a roof could sit on. The beams were capped with large plates and then I used a wide variety of black slopes to create an interesting roof geometry, including a little walkout roof deck for minifigures.
The build also incorporated lit candles in all of the windows. These were wired into the center of the castle and then placed in front of each clear window using ball joint plates. Stud LEDs were attached to an effects processor so the candlelight slowly throbs realistically. Additional lights were added near the front door and to the rooftop deck.
Next, I determined the castle’s clan needed its own sigil. I wanted to use a purist design, so I looked at available flags and came across the red diver warning symbol that has a white slash on it. I picked up a couple from BrickLink, as well as the 1×1 danger tile that looked pretty similar! I also put together a brick-built larger flag to match the design.
Finally, I added some quick landscaping around the castle using green claws and olive / dark red stem pieces. The last item to be built was a large autumn-colored tree. I placed 1×1 quarter tiles of various autumnal colors on the base to act as fallen leaves.
All-in-all, quickly putting together a Scottish-inspired castle keep was tons of fun! It took a few weeks to build, and I had time while I was waiting for BrickLink orders to be delivered to think about each next step. I found it very helpful to put myself in the shoes of the character in the build, allowing me to envision things like a rooftop deck. If you’d like to join in with your own character builds, check out the Tales of Old LEGO RPG over on EuroBricks – it’d be fun to play together :)
Evan Crouch is an AFOL out of Colorado, a historical MOC builder, contributor to Brethren of the Brick Seas and the Builder Improvement Initiative, and founder of Rocky Mountain Minifigs. You can find his work on Instagram.
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