Cardoness Castle

Cardoness Castle stands on high ground just south-west of Gatehouse of Fleet, in the old county of Kirkcudbrightshire. The McCulloch lairds raised the present tower house in the late fifteenth century, and it survives today in remarkably good condition. The MacCullochs of Myreton had held the estate by 1466, but their tenure ended in trouble: in 1622 the mortgaged lands passed to the Gordons of Ardwall, and the two families remained at odds for decades. The feud turned deadly in 1690, when Sir Godfrey McCulloch shot William Gordon of Buck o’Bield. He fled to France, yet was recognised and seized in Edinburgh in 1697, then beheaded on the Maiden, Scotland’s version of the guillotine. The McCullochs left the castle before the century was out, and it slipped into ruin. A darker tradition, recorded in 1864, tells of an earlier laird who threatened to drown his wife and daughters unless she bore him a son; in the telling, it is the laird himself who drowns when the ice gives way during a winter revel. The building passed into state care in 1927 and is today looked after by Historic Environment Scotland as a scheduled monument, open to visitors.