Dundurn Castle, Historical mansion and military museum in Hamilton, Canada

Dundurn Castle is a forty-room neoclassical mansion on York Boulevard in Hamilton, Ontario, completed in 1835 to designs by Robert Charles Wetherell for Sir Allan Napier MacNab. It covers 1,700 square metres and was built on the foundations of Richard Beasley's brick house. Inside, a dark wooden staircase with turned balusters and a red, blue and gold patterned runner rises from a tiled floor of brown, tan and blue squares. The grounds hold the Hamilton Military Museum.

Sir Allan Napier MacNab bought the Burlington Heights land from early settler Richard Beasley and had architect Robert Charles Wetherell build the house on the foundations of Beasley's brick home; it was finished in 1835. Pillars and a portico were added in 1855 for the wedding of MacNab's daughter Sophia. After MacNab's death the estate served as an institution for the deaf, and the City of Hamilton bought it in 1899. It was restored in the late 1960s as a Centennial project and is now a National Historic Site.

The rooms are furnished as they were in the 1850s, with costumed interpreters showing how wealthy Canadian families lived and spent their days. You can observe the routines and customs of that era as people moved through the spaces.

Costumed interpreters lead tours of the forty rooms, restored to their 1855 appearance, and the route ends in the kitchen with a taste of period dishes. The Hamilton Military Museum occupies an outbuilding moved there when York Street was widened in the 1970s; its library is open by appointment. The walled garden near the park's east edge supplies the castle kitchen, with surplus given to a local food bank.

The grounds include a historic kitchen garden growing more than two hundred old vegetable varieties in traditional ways. The harvested produce is partly donated to local food banks in the area.