Dunure Castle

Dunure Castle stands on a rocky headland on the South Ayrshire coast. The lands were held under a charter as early as 1256, and from 1357 they belonged to the Kennedy family, for whom the castle became the oldest seat of the surname. The ruins that survive today are chiefly of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century work: an irregular keep raised on a precipitous rock, its walls some five feet thick, with lower ranges that once included two kitchens. A beehive-shaped dovecot of similar age, with room for some two hundred nesting boxes, survives beside it.

The castle is bound up with two well-remembered episodes. In August 1563 Mary, Queen of Scots lodged here for three days as a guest of Gilbert Kennedy, fourth Earl of Cassillis. Seven years later, in 1570, the same earl seized Allan Stewart, lay Commendator of Crossraguel Abbey, and roasted him over a brazier in the castle’s Black Vault to force the signing away of abbey lands.

By 1694 the castle was wholly ruined, its stone likely stripped for building elsewhere, though fishermen occupied part of it into the nineteenth century. It has since been excavated and consolidated, and now presides over Kennedy Park.