☰Kellie's Castle

Kellie's Castle, sometimes called Kellie's Folly, is the ruin of an extraordinary unfinished mansion on the road between Ipoh and Batu Gajah, about twenty minutes south of the city. The Scottish tin planter William Kellie Smith began it in 1915 in a style that mixes Scottish baronial, Moorish and South Indian elements — it was to include an indoor tennis court, an elevator (the first in Malaya) and a rooftop party courtyard, with a tunnel linking it to a nearby Hindu temple. Smith died before it was finished and the house was never completed. What remains is a roofless shell of staircases, arches and empty rooms that makes for a wonderfully atmospheric hour's wander. A few kilometres away, the descendants of the Tamil workers he brought from India still live near the temple and have put up a statue of Kellie among the Hindu gods.