The best-known ruins in Scotland
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
St Andrews packs three into a kilometer: St Andrews Cathedral (Ruins), St Andrews Castle and St. Mary on the Rock. Abbeys are the other thread: Arbroath Abbey in Arbroath, Holyrood Abbey 2 km from Edinburgh's center, Balmerino Abbey 8 km from Dundee, and Kinloss Abbey near Elgin, which also has Duffus Castle 5 km away. Aberdour Castle is 10 km from Dunfermline, and the Antonine Wall passes 2 km from Bearsden.
RLQuest knows 480 named ruins in Scotland, 104 with a Wikipedia article, exactly as many entries as the castles page. Roofless abbeys and kirks are a Scottish specialty on this list, Alloway Auld Kirk near Ayr among them. The app's daily quests treat each as a destination: walk there, and your route is what confirms it, with the fields around it added to your map.
Every dot is a place. The numbers mark the highlights listed below.
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
A selection, best known first, with the nearest larger town next to each.
and 428 more
RLQuest knows these places too. Which means:
Some of your daily quests lead to a real place near you. The app uses your location to check you were really there.
If you're the first person in RLQuest to complete a quest at a place, it's your first find. The Place Book shows you which kinds of place you're still missing.
Every walk uncovers tiles, each about 350 m across. Over time you can see which corners you know well, and where you've never set foot.
Place data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Borders: geoBoundaries (CC BY 4.0); Canada: Statistics Canada. As of 2026-10-02. The list shows the places RLQuest knows and isn't complete. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons; author and license are credited on each photo.
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