Dream castle: New Milford man builds stone castle in homage to ancestors

BY JOSH McAuliffe
Times-Shamrock Writer

Ron Hall comes from hardy Scottish stock.

The clan he descends from, the MacLeods, trace their lineage to the Vikings, and were among those fighting alongside William Wallace in the battles depicted in the film “Bravehart.”

Like a lot of clans, the MacLeods are the proud owners of a nearly 1,000-year-old castle, Dunvegan, located on the Isle of Skye.

Mr. Hall has spent his life in the bucolic Susquehanna County

hamlet of New Milford, and has never set foot in Scotland. But that didn’t stop him from building his very own castle.

Thirty-seven years ago, Mr. Hall got it in his head that he wanted to pay homage to his roots, and put his formidable stone-laying skills to the test, by erecting a 36-foot-tall, 33-foot-wide-by-44-foot-long castle on his 1-1/3-acre property off state Route 848.

Twenty-seven years and 125 tons of stone later, Mr. Hall had accomplished his goal.

Today, his Valhalla Castle — named for the Viking version of heaven — has become, like the Iowa cornfield baseball field built for the film “Field of Dreams,” a bona fide tourist attraction in its own, smaller-scale way.

The unique backyard dwelling, located about 100 feet from the home Mr. Hall shares with his wife, Joyce, features three towers, an elevated walkway, Tudor-style designs, turrets and a courtyard. A drawbridge stretches over a waterfall-fed moat that snakes along the front of the castle.

“We have everything you’re supposed to have,” said Mr. Hall, 72, who used no mortar to bind the stones, none of which were cut.

To paraphrase an oft-quoted line from “Field of Dreams,” Mr. Hall built the castle, and people come — dozens each year.

Couples have had their engagement photos shot at Valhalla. It’s been the site of nine weddings and several birthday parties. A Pittsburgh television show did a spot there, and it’s been written about in several publications, including Pennsylvania magazine.

Plenty of random folks simply show up at the Halls’ door after noticing the castle from the road.
There’s a guest book and donation jar in one tower. And, when visitors complained there weren’t any souvenirs to take home, Mr. Hall had 300 Valhalla Castle T-shirts made up.

“People come here and want to know if I had engineering plans. All I had was a pencil sketch,” said Mr. Hall as he led two visitors through the castle on a blustery, cold recent afternoon.

“It’s fun,” he said, “to do something that no one else does.”

Mr. Hall’s Scottish ancestors on his father’s side first arrived in the American colonies during the early 1700s. Around 1810, his family settled in Susquehanna County.

He grew up on his family’s New Milford dairy farm. There, while other kids his age were constructing treehouses, he was busying himself building walls from piles of accumulated fieldstones.

As an adult, Mr. Hall went on to work for Ansco in Binghamton, New York, while doing stone work on the side.

“Nobody does stone work anymore, so you can charge what you want to charge,” Mr. Hall said. “The longer you do it, the better you get. I can pick up a stone and I know right where it’s going to go. I never cut anything.”

While tracing his family’s history, Mr. Hall learned that the MacLeods were castle owners. Around the same time, he had just erected a stone wall on his property.

Then, it occurred to him — Why not try to build something a little more challenging than a wall? Why not, say, a castle?

His father, Delbert, a professional carpenter by trade, “thought it was a bad idea,” Mr. Hall said with a laugh.

But, as Mr. Hall pointed out, Scotsmen are often known for their stubbornness, and in 1978 he cast aside all doubt and dove headlong into the project, relying on little more than some books on castles and sketches he drew on used time cards during idle periods at work.

Methodically, he began hauling fieldstone — sandstone, specifically — from the surrounding woods and other nearby properties. He’d do jobs and get paid in stone. One guy gave him 13 tons.

“I had no idea what it was going to look like. I was just going to build one tower,” Mr. Hall said.
Alas, once that first tower was completed, Mr. Hall felt he needed to do more. And so the project continued, and continued, and continued. He got help from his two sons, Brian and Erik, and made use of an old apple tree to lift bigger stones. The moat was entirely hand-dug.

Finally, in October 2002, Mr. Hall laid the final stone. He has no clue how many there are all together. “A lot of people want to know why I didn’t count them. I would have never gotten done,” joked Mr. Hall, who’s also an avid sailor.

From there, he spent the next three years building the wooden enclosures on top of the stone. The walls are made of concrete and masonite.

“There’s no way to fasten wood to fieldstone. So if we ever get a tornado, we’re done,” Mr. Hall said.
The castle, not surprisingly, gets most of its visitors during the summer and early fall. There’s no heat or plumbing, so the township can’t tax Mr. Hall for having an extra building. He refers to it as “landscaping.”

The Scottish flag billows in the wind from atop one tower, and Mr. Hall has furnished the rooms with a variety of theme-appropriate decorations, from a wooden barrel that held MacLeod clan Scotch whiskey to a suit of armor to a throne (actually a chair from an old church) to swatches of MacLeod tartan fabric to crests of the MacLeods and other Scottish clans that Mr. Hall painted himself.

The dragon sculptures on the roof are another nod to the Vikings, while the bull’s head that sits above the balcony has an inscription that reads, “Hold Fast,” the MacLeod Clan motto and, Mr. Hall said, a testament to never giving up.

Certainly, the term applies perfectly to his whimsical, labor-intensive yet ultimately successful bid to bring a bit of Scottish culture to the Northeast Pennsylvania countryside.

“Eighty-five or 100 years from now, the wood will wear away, and it’ll only be stone,” Mr. Hall said of the castle. “Maybe people will think they’re ancient ruins.”

For more information on Valhalla Castle, call Mr. Hall at 570-465-3218. Tours are free.