Calder House

Calder House is an occupied historic house in private estate lands to the south of Mid Calder, but can be seen above the garden wall to the south-east. The house is principally 16th century work, at which point it was one of the most impressive houses in Scotland, but may incorporate parts of an earlier building. The estate was part of the extensive Douglas lordship of Douglasdale, and the Sandilands family held Calder from the Douglases from the mid 14th century, acquiring it to hold from the Crown after 1388.

Calder remains in the possession of the Sandilands family to this date and is occupied by them. From what may have been a 15th or early 16th century tower, the house was extended multiple times until it formed an extensive L-plan mansion. In 1563, James Sandilands became Lord Torphichen as he had gained the estates of the Knights Hospitaller in Scotland. This made him extremely wealthy, and the family appear to have largely survived all the variations of fortune of the civil wars without serious problems, being pillars of the establishment. The house, certainly, was never sacked.

HES Canmore database entry