Greenan Castle

Greenan Castle stands on a sea cliff roughly two and a half miles southwest of Ayr, its ruined tower house a stark silhouette above the Firth of Clyde. The headland has been fortified far longer than the surviving walls suggest: an early promontory fort gave way to a motte-and-bailey (an earthen castle mound with a walled courtyard) in the twelfth century, and a tower house rose on the site in the centuries that followed, ringed by four concentric curved ditches each around three metres wide. A lintel above the entrance carries the inscription “JK 1603 FND”, read as a mark of John Kennedy of Baltersan and his wife Florence NickDowall. The lands changed hands repeatedly. Held first by the Lords of the Isles, they were forfeited for treason in 1476 when John, Earl of Ross lost his titles, and were granted by James IV to William Douglas in 1493 before passing to the Kennedy family. In 1602 Sir Thomas Kennedy was murdered near the castle, a killing tied to the feuds of the day and later dramatised by Sir Walter Scott as “An Ayrshire Tragedy”. Today the tower is a roofless ruin on private ground, not open to the public.