Having sold his Glasgow grocery-store business, 55-year-old Dickson McCunn decides to start his retirement with a walking holiday in the district of Carrick in Galloway.

At a local inn he meets John Heritage, a poet and ex-soldier, as well as an unnamed young man who asks after a place called 'Darkwater' that nobody has heard of.

Heritage recognises the voice as that of a Russian princess he had fallen in love with from afar when his battalion had been posted to Rome some years earlier.

On a camping holiday nearby are the Gorbals Die-Hards, a group of street urchins from Glasgow that McCunn had recently supported via a contribution to a charity fund.

Saskia explains that she is a fugitive from Bolshevik elements in Russia, and that she came to Huntingtower at the invitation of its owner, her childhood friend Quentin Kennedy.

Although the normal forces of law and order are powerless, revolution in Britain is averted by the down-to-earth, middle class views of McCunn, the grocer.

[2] In The Interpreter's House (1975), David Daniell called the book "a stirring adventure of royal Russian exiles and wicked Bolsheviks", and he noted its high spirits and outrageous wisdom, as well as the author’s exuberance of imagination and his sensitivity to countryside and to weather.

It is the Die-Hards, according to Daniell, that lift the book to its true level: "it is their individuality, passion and energy, and forthright sense … which must finally rescue Buchan from the foolish judge of snobbery".

[7] In 1957 Huntingtower was adapted by Judith Kerr for a six-part BBC children's television series starring James Hayter as McCunn.