# Culzean Castle

country house incorporating earlier castle and tower house fabric, near Maybole, South Ayrshire, Scotland, UK

South Ayrshire, United Kingdom

Palace · Fortification

## Story

• Culzean Castle stands on a cliff above the Firth of Clyde near Maybole in Carrick, the former seat of the Kennedys and of the Marquess of Ailsa.
• David Kennedy, 10th Earl of Cassillis, had Robert Adam rebuild an older tower house between 1777 and 1792, with a drum tower, a round saloon, and an oval staircase.
• Scipio Kennedy, taken from West Africa as a child, was freed here in 1725, and the walled garden stands on the ground of his house.
• In 1945 the family gave the castle to the National Trust for Scotland and set the top apartment aside for Dwight D. Eisenhower, who first stayed in 1946.
• Excavation has found a kitchen garden of 1733 under the Fountain Court and a medieval doorway in the caves, above Iron Age occupation dated to AD 135–325.

## Visiting

From 2 November to 19 March 2027 the castle opening hours list the building as closed, except for entry on 5, 6, 12 and 13 December. In that winter period the country park is open daily from 10.00 to 16.00. Winter country park admission is 8 pounds for an adult, 6 pounds for a concession, 4 pounds for a child, 22 pounds for a family, 12 pounds for one adult with children, and 1 pound for a Young Scot. On the festive weekends of 5 to 6 December and 12 to 13 December, castle and country park admission is 11 pounds for an adult, 8 pounds and 25 pence for a concession, 5 pounds and 50 pence for a child, 27 pounds and 50 pence for a family, and 16 pounds and 50 pence for one adult with children.
Admission is free for members, and a complimentary ticket is available for a personal assistant. Admission does not require a ticket bought before the visit. Barbecues are not allowed in the country park. Dogs are not allowed inside the buildings or the adventure playgrounds except assistance dogs, and a dog must be on a lead in the walled garden.
General entry to the caves beneath the castle is not allowed, while summer tours of the caves are offered.

## History

Culzean Castle stands on a cliff above the Firth of Clyde, near Maybole in Carrick, South Ayrshire. The name is pronounced cul-AYN. It was the seat of the Marquess of Ailsa, chief of Clan Kennedy, a family described as descendants of Robert the Bruce. Since 1945 it has belonged to the National Trust for Scotland, inside a country park whose extent is given variously as 240 acres, 228 hectares, 260 hectares, and more than 240 hectares.

The headland was a defensive site long before the present house. Cliffs guard the north-west and the north-eastern end, and a hollow, later filled to make a garden and then raised as the Fountain Court, guarded the south-east. A tower may have stood here from the late fourteenth century. The core that Robert Adam rebuilt was an L-shaped tower house of the Kennedys, of the sixteenth century and perhaps of the 1590s.

From about 1600 it was enlarged, though only as a temporary home, so the work was uneven. Adam’s rebuilding left one medieval wall clearly visible, the thick wall between the armoury and the drawing room.

A drawing of 1776, thought to be Adam’s own, shows the earlier castle from the south-west, with a sea-gate, a possible bastion, a tower of several floors and an attic, a kitchen, and a two-storey range on the cliff with fourteen windows toward the water. He later turned the pedimented farm-court gatehouse into the clock tower. The line of the old pediment can still be seen.

Scipio Kennedy, born in West Africa about 1694, was brought to Scotland as a child and came to Culzean in 1705 with Jean Kennedy. He was freed in 1725, married Margaret Gray, and had eight children. A map of the 1750s marks his house, Sipios, near the present walled garden, which is said to stand on that ground. He died on 24 June 1774 and is commemorated at Kirkoswald.

The site of his house was excavated in 2007.

Sir John Kennedy’s kitchen garden of 1733, drawn by John Foulis in 1755, lasted until about 1782, when Adam’s workmen demolished it and a new garden was hidden from the house. In 2017 the older walls were found under the Fountain Court lawn during drainage work, and the grass was laid back over them.

David Kennedy, tenth Earl of Cassillis, succeeded his brother Thomas in 1775. Thomas had already chosen to modernise Culzean rather than move to the main family house. David, who never married, hired Robert Adam to make a seat worthy of the earldom. The work ran from 1777 to 1792 in four stages: the start of the fabric, wings and a north front over the sea, the drum tower and circular saloon, and, about 1787, the oval staircase that tied the old tower to the new rooms.

Adam, born in Kirkcaldy in 1728 and trained in Edinburgh and Rome, died in March 1792. David died that December, and the Culzean baronetcy died with him.

In 1783 he had entailed the castle on his cousin Captain Archibald Kennedy, a Royal Navy officer living in New York, whose means helped to finish the house. Archibald became eleventh earl in 1792 and died in 1794. His son, also Archibald, became Earl of Cassillis and, in 1831, first Marquess of Ailsa, raised to that title by his childhood friend King William IV. On 14 November 1817 the castle was the setting for his daughter Margaret’s marriage.

He filled the armoury with more than a thousand weapons, including 716 used flintlock pistols bought from the Tower of London.

In the same room a teak propeller hangs from the ceiling. It comes from the aircraft in which Leefe Robinson shot down the airship SL 11 over Cuffley on the night of 2 and 3 September 1916, the action for which he received the Victoria Cross. He died in the influenza of 1918. His squadron later presented the propeller to the third marquess.

Other pieces in the house include a bone model of the frigate Hortense made by prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars, a silver clock for the yacht Bloodhound, a white papier-mâché dining-room ceiling commissioned by the third marquess, a barrel organ by Broderip and Wilkinson, and two views of the castle painted by Alexander Nasmyth in 1816.

About 1794 the Earl of Cassillis raised a troop of fencible cavalry at Culzean, the beginning of the Ayrshire Yeomanry. The regiment served in South Africa, at Gallipoli, in Palestine, and on the Western Front, and in 1940 it became artillery. On 24 June 1961 General Sir Horatius Murray, a veteran of El Alamein, Sicily, Normandy, and the Italian campaign, presented its first guidon at the castle.

A gas house north of the castle supplied town gas until 1940. The manager’s house now holds an exhibition on William Murdoch, the Ayrshire engineer to whom gas lighting is attributed in the 1790s, beside the remains of the gasometer. The fourth Marquess opened talks to give the estate to the nation and died in 1943.

In 1945 the fifth Marquess completed the gift, and Lady Frances, widow of the fourth, asked that the top floor be an apartment for Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe. He first stayed in 1946, once while he was president, and for the longest time in retirement. After his death the apartment, with six bedrooms, was opened for guests.

A bequest from William Lindsay, who had never seen Scotland, paid for a refurbishment, and the castle reopened in April 2011. In 2025 it received 334,000 visitors. From 1972 to 2015 it appeared on the Royal Bank of Scotland’s five-pound note. Christopher Lee filmed The Wicker Man here in the autumn of 1972.

In 2002 Karl Beattie and Derek Acorah came with a television crew to report the castle’s ghost stories. An engraving by James Fittler was published in 1804.

Under the cliff, caves used in the Iron Age, with charcoal dated to AD 135–325, were later medieval cellars. In 2018 a buried doorway 1.1 metres wide was uncovered in the Stables Cave. A dig on the West Green was set for 26 September 2026 to look for the defensive walls and gardens of the pre-Adam castle. The designed landscape was designated on 1 July 1987.

## Photographs

- [Culzean Castle — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Culzean_Castle.JPG)
- [GreatBritain, Culzean Castle — I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/2007-07-03-06040_GreatBritain_CulzeanCastle.jpg)
- [At The Swan Pond Looking along the retaining wall of the Swan Pond in Culzean Country Park. The resident Mute Swan family is visible in the background - 2 — Mary and Angus Hogg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/At_The_Swan_Pond_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1112408.jpg)
- [Art In The Woods At Culzean This is an ongoing project created by an Ayrshire artist. This will be worth revisiting when finished. It's near the path between — Mary and Angus Hogg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Art_In_The_Woods_At_Culzean_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1229863.jpg)
- [Culzean Castle, Scotland — CC BY-SA 2.0 de](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/2007-07-03_GreatBritain_CulzeanCastle.jpg)
- [Culzean Castle — Thomas Hosmer Shepherd](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/MA%281829%29_p.232_-_Culzean_Castle_%282%29_-_John_Preston_Neale.jpg)
- [Ailsa Craig from Culzean Castle in 1830, South Ayrshire, Scotland — Rosser1954](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Ailsa_Craig_from_Culzean_Castle_in_1830.jpg)
- [http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/396000.html " target="_blank"> Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. — Son of Groucho from Scotland](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/..._the_head_that_wears_a_crown._%282364015638%29.jpg)
- [Across the Swan Pond - Culzean Castle — Anthony Parkes](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Across_the_Swan_Pond_-_Culzean_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3481540.jpg)
- [Adventure Cove, Culzean Country Park — Billy McCrorie](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Adventure_Cove%2C_Culzean_Country_Park_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4780486.jpg)

## Sources

- [Culzean Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culzean_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Robert Adam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adam) — Wikipedia
- [Dwight D. Eisenhower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower) — Wikipedia
- [Leefe Robinson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leefe_Robinson) — Wikipedia
- [Horatius Murray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatius_Murray) — Wikipedia
- [Christopher Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lee) — Wikipedia
- [James Fittler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fittler) — Wikipedia
- [Derek Acorah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Acorah) — Wikipedia
- [Karl Beattie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Beattie) — Wikipedia
- [Scipio Kennedy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipio_Kennedy) — Wikipedia
- [David Kennedy, 10th Earl of Cassilis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kennedy,_10th_Earl_of_Cassilis) — Wikipedia
- [Archibald Kennedy, 11th Earl of Cassilis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Kennedy,_11th_Earl_of_Cassilis) — Wikipedia
- [Archibald Kennedy, 1st Marquess of Ailsa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Kennedy,_1st_Marquess_of_Ailsa) — Wikipedia
- [William Murdoch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Murdoch) — Wikipedia
- [Ayrshire (Earl of Carrick's Own) Yeomanry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrshire_(Earl_of_Carrick%27s_Own)_Yeomanry) — Wikipedia
- [Culzean Castle before Robert Adam](https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/culzean-castle-before-robert-adam) — National Trust for Scotland
- [The Great Eight at Culzean Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/the-great-eight-at-culzean-castle) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Hidden doorway revealed at Culzean caves](https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/hidden-doorway-revealed-at-culzean-caves) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Lost 18th Century walled garden unearthed at Culzean Castle](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-39790523) — BBC News
- [Planning your visit: Culzean Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/culzean/planning-your-visit) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Culzean Castle](https://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/landscapes/culzean_castle/) — BBC Scotland
- [Scotland's White House](https://ntsusa.org/culzean-scotlands-white-house/) — National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA
- [National Trust for Scotland leads Culzean Castle public dig](https://www.ayradvertiser.com/news/26505463.national-trust-scotland-leads-culzean-castle-public-dig/) — Ayr Advertiser
- [Culzean Castle.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Culzean_Castle.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2007-07-03-06040 GreatBritain CulzeanCastle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2007-07-03-06040_GreatBritain_CulzeanCastle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [At The Swan Pond - geograph.org.uk - 1112408.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:At_The_Swan_Pond_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1112408.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Art In The Woods At Culzean - geograph.org.uk - 1229863.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Art_In_The_Woods_At_Culzean_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1229863.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2007-07-03 GreatBritain CulzeanCastle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2007-07-03_GreatBritain_CulzeanCastle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [MA(1829) p.232 - Culzean Castle (2) - John Preston Neale.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MA(1829)_p.232_-_Culzean_Castle_(2)_-_John_Preston_Neale.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Ailsa Craig from Culzean Castle in 1830.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ailsa_Craig_from_Culzean_Castle_in_1830.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [... the head that wears a crown. (2364015638).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:..._the_head_that_wears_a_crown._(2364015638).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Across the Swan Pond - Culzean Castle - geograph.org.uk - 3481540.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Across_the_Swan_Pond_-_Culzean_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3481540.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Adventure Cove, Culzean Country Park - geograph.org.uk - 4780486.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adventure_Cove,_Culzean_Country_Park_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4780486.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Culzean Castle stands on a cliff above the Firth of Clyde, near Maybole, in the district of Carrick in South Ayrshire, on the west coast of Scotland. The name is said cul-AYN. In Scots it has been written Culzean, Culȝean, and Colean. It was the home of the Marquess of Ailsa, chief of Clan Kennedy. The Culzean branch of that family has been described as one of the oldest in Scotland, and as descendants of Robert the Bruce. Since 1945 the house has been owned by the National Trust for Scotland. The house sits inside a country park that also holds a walled garden, other estate buildings, shops, cafés, and a playground. The castle opens to the public through the summer, and the wider estate stays open all year.

The size of the grounds is not given as one figure. The country park is described as 240 acres, about 97 hectares. The core of the Kennedy estate handed over in 1945 is given as 228 hectares. Another account of the same grounds puts them at 260 hectares, and the visitor information speaks of more than 240 hectares to walk. The headland itself explains why a castle was put here. Cliffs defend the north-west side and the north-eastern end. A natural hollow guarded the south-east. That hollow was once deeper than it looks now. It was filled in the seventeenth century to make a walled garden, and it was raised again in the nineteenth century to form the Fountain Court. The easiest approach may have been from the south-west.

A tower may have stood on this cliff from the late fourteenth century. The basis of the present building was an L-shaped tower house built for the Kennedy family in the sixteenth century, and one account of the fabric still inside the house puts that tower in the 1590s. From the turn of the seventeenth century the tower was enlarged. As a castle became less a fort and more a show of wealth, gardens and terraces were laid out around it. Because the place was then only a temporary residence, those improvements were erratic. Robert Adam’s later work changed the inside and the outside so thoroughly that the only part of the medieval tower still clearly visible is the thick wall between the armoury and the drawing room on the ground floor.

Three sketches made before that rebuilding show the tower house from the south-west, the east, and the north-east. They are kept in London and in two collections in Edinburgh. The south-west view is thought to have been drawn by Robert Adam himself in 1776. It shows a path coming up from the shore along the line of the overgrown way later called Laundry Maid’s Walk. The path reaches a doorway, a postern or sea-gate, in a straight stretch of curtain wall with a slightly crenellated wall-head. An angled bastion may stand nearby, with a small roofed structure outside it and a single window in the gable. A smaller lean-to sits at the foot of that bastion, with an opening that may be a door. Beyond is a building that may be the end of a tower, at least two floors high, divided by a string course and topped with a crow-stepped gable, and a chimney stack seems to rise at its inner edge.

Inside the barmkin, the main tower block runs from south-west to north-east. Three rows of windows face south-east. Two windows in the south-west gable probably lit the attic, with a small window on the floor below. The ground floor is hidden behind the courtyard wall, so the tower appears to have had a ground floor, three floors above it, and an attic. The roof slopes to the eaves, with no battlements. A chimney stands at each gable, and there may be a third in the middle of the north-east wall. A square jamb is attached to the north-east side of the tower at its northern end. Its pitched roof runs at right angles to the main roof and may be slightly higher. It has two chimneys, one at the north-west gable and one where it meets the main tower, and a small dormer in the roof. A horizontal line on the south-west face of the jamb, above the third floor, may mean that an extra floor was inserted and the roof raised. A feature descending two storeys on that wall could be a corbelled stair turret. A square, flat-roofed stair tower seems to fill the re-entrant angle between the main block and the jamb. From a distance that arrangement recalls the stair at neighbouring Killochan Castle, near Girvan.

Trees appear on the south-east side of the tower, between it and the barmkin wall, and they may be fruit trees from a terraced garden down the slope. Above them is the gentle pitch of a pedimented roof belonging to the gatehouse of the farm court. Robert Adam later gave that building a castellated parapet and turned it into the clock tower, but the line of the old pediment can still be seen on its north-eastern face. On the opposite, north-western side, a gable of at least two storeys butts against the jamb. It has a large window in the south-western gable and at least three chimneys, and it was likely the kitchen. A last building stands clearer than the rest, alone on the cliff edge and at a slight angle to the main group. It is of two storeys, with a pitched roof, four chimneys spaced along its length, and two rows of seven windows facing the sea. Another chimney may have stood at the far end, on the cliff side.

The Kennedy household on this cliff included a man who had been enslaved. Scipio Kennedy was born about 1694 in the Guinea region of West Africa. Around 1700, when he was five or six, he was taken onto a slave ship in the Gulf of Guinea. He was probably carried first to the Caribbean, and in 1702 he was purchased by Captain Andrew Douglas of Mains, near Milngavie in Dunbartonshire, and brought to Scotland. Douglas is thought to have chosen the name Scipio, after the Roman general Scipio Africanus. Douglas’s daughter Jean married John Kennedy in 1705, and Scipio went with her to Culzean. In March 1711, on his father’s death, John Kennedy succeeded as the second baronet. Scipio learned to read and write, and he learned something of textile work.

A manumission of 1725, signed by John Kennedy and by Scipio and kept among the national records, freed him to take work elsewhere. It speaks of clothing, maintenance, and education given with more than ordinary kindness. It also sets a nineteen-year contract that could be broken, paying twelve pounds Scots a year besides his share of the drink money. He stayed with the family. In 1728 he was recorded as the father of a daughter, Elizabeth, by Margaret Gray, which the parish treated as a scandal, and he married Margaret later that year. They had seven further children. An estate map drawn in the 1750s by John Foulis of Redburn, a copy of which is kept in the castle, marks a building about 800 metres from the house, near the present walled garden, with the name Sipios written over it. The house cost ninety pounds to build and was probably a substantial stone building. The walled garden of the grounds is described as standing on the site of his home. Sheltered by the lie of the land and by crenellated terrace walls from Robert Adam’s time, its borders hold a mild climate for fruit, tender shrubs, flowers, and dwarf rhododendron. The castle cooks once took herbs and produce from it. A later plan set out to bring it back as a working nineteenth-century kitchen garden for fruit, vegetables, and cut flowers, at a budgeted cost of ninety thousand dollars. Jean Kennedy’s will of 1751 left “to Scipio Kennedy my old servant, the sum of ten pounds sterling,” a gift close in scale to what she left each of her grandchildren, who shared forty pounds. In Kirkoswald Old Church graveyard a stone put up by his son Douglas Kennedy reads that Scipio Kennedy died on 24 June 1774, aged 80, and that Douglas himself died on 21 July 1781, aged 49. The ground where the house stood was excavated in 2007, and some of the objects found may have been Scipio’s own.

Sir John Kennedy of Culzean, the second baronet, is also credited with a kitchen garden of 1733. It appears on an estate map drawn by John Foulis in 1755. It probably served as a kitchen garden until about 1782. In that year it was given up, and Robert Adam’s workmen demolished the walls as part of the improvements around the castle. A new walled garden was then built out of sight of the house, which was the late-eighteenth-century fashion, so that the old site could be landscaped and the view from the castle improved. In May 2017, during work to put in a new drainage system, the footings of that earlier enclosure were found under the lawn of the Fountain Court. The garden had been marked on the estate map, but until the turf was opened it was not known that any of it survived. The drainage was meant to make the court fit for large public events. Once the lawn was sown again, the buried garden went back under the grass.

David Kennedy, tenth Earl of Cassillis, was the man who ordered the house that visitors see now. He was born before 1734, the third son of Sir John Kennedy, second baronet, and Jean Douglas, and he died on 18 December 1792. He sat in Parliament for Ayrshire from 1768 to 1774. On 30 November 1775 he succeeded his elder brother Thomas, the ninth Earl, who had died without a son. David became tenth Earl of Cassillis, twelfth Lord Kennedy, and fifth baronet. He was a Scottish representative peer from 1776 to 1790. He never married. His brother Thomas, who had become ninth Earl in 1762, had already chosen to stay at Culzean rather than move to the main Cassillis house, and had begun to modernise it. David carried that choice much further. He hired Robert Adam to turn a plainer building into a country house fit to be the seat of the earldom. The work ran in stages from 1777 to 1792. The result was a showpiece that joined European classicism with the romantic taste for a castle on a cliff.

Robert Adam was born on 3 July 1728 at Gladney House in Kirkcaldy, the second son of the architect William Adam and of Mary Robertson. He was a delicate child. From 1734 he attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh, where the lessons were in Latin, and he read Virgil, Horace, Sallust, Cicero, and, in his last year, Livy. In the autumn of 1743 he entered the University of Edinburgh. The Jacobite rising of 1745 interrupted his studies when the Highland army occupied the city, and illness kept him away. He seems not to have returned, after only two years. In 1746 he joined his elder brother John as apprentice to their father. He worked on Inveraray Castle and on the extensions at Hopetoun House. His early ambition was to be an artist, and his first architectural drawings have the picturesque manner of Salvator Rosa. William Adam died in June 1748. John took on the family practice and the post of Master Mason to the Board of Ordnance, and Robert became his partner, later joined by their brother James. Their early work included the state apartments at Hopetoun and the new house at Dumfries, and for the Board they were the main contractor at Fort George.

In 1754 Robert Adam left for Rome and stayed nearly five years, studying with Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Back in London, with his brother James, he developed what became known as the Adam style, and a theory of movement in architecture drawn from antiquity. He was Architect of the King’s Works from 1761 to 1769. He led the first phase of the classical revival in Britain from about 1760 until his death, and he designed interiors and furniture as well as houses. Much of his practice was the remodelling of older houses, together with romantic, pseudo-medieval country houses in Scotland. He was member of Parliament for Kinross-shire from 1768 to 1774, the same years in which David Kennedy sat for Ayrshire. He died on 3 March 1792, the same year the Culzean campaign reached its end, and nine months before the earl who had hired him.

At Culzean he could not clear the site and start again. He had the sixteenth-century tower house to absorb, and part of it remains inside the present building. The first phase began in 1777. A few years later a second phase added wings, taking away the old L-shape and giving the house a north front over the sea. Those wings included a brewhouse, a milk house, and more bedrooms and living rooms. A third phase knocked down more of the older buildings and raised the drum tower, with its round rooms and a circular saloon looking out to the water. That work left an awkward stair in the middle. About 1787, in a fourth phase that had not been part of the first plan, the centre of the house was opened and an oval staircase was built for the space that remained. A circular stair would not fit. In an ordinary house the rooms radiate from the stair. Here the stair was the last piece, and it was the piece that tied the old tower, the new wings, and the drum together.

Lord Cassillis died unmarried on 18 December 1792, and the Culzean baronetcy died with him. The earldom and the other titles passed to a distant cousin, Captain Archibald Kennedy, who was living in New York. Archibald had been born in 1720, the son of an earlier Archibald Kennedy and of Maria Walter. His father was a direct descendant of the second son of Gilbert Kennedy, third Earl of Cassillis. The younger Archibald joined the Royal Navy, passed for lieutenant on 11 December 1744, and was promoted five days later. He served in the sloop Otter, the frigate Centaur, and, as a commander from March 1756, the sloop Halifax, which the French captured that August. He was made post-captain on 4 April 1757 and given the new frigate Vestal. Later commands included Flamborough, in which he was at the Raid on St Malo in June 1758, and then Quebec, Blonde, and Coventry. In November 1766, still in Coventry, he was the senior captain on the North American station and served as commander-in-chief there until the following July. From 1746 to 1758 he owned the island in New York Bay that is now Liberty Island, and used it as a summer house. He lived in the city at 1 Broadway. His first wife, Katherine Schuyler, died in 1765, and on 27 April 1769 he married Anne Watts. Their eldest son was Archibald, later the first Marquess of Ailsa. Anne died on 29 December 1793. The eleventh earl died on 30 December 1794.

In 1783, while the rebuilding was still under way and the cost was rising, Earl David had entailed the castle and the expectation of the earldom on this cousin, a naval captain with means in America. The American money is credited with keeping the estate intact so that the Adam house could be finished. On the tenth earl’s death in December 1792, Archibald was called from New York to Culzean to take the title of eleventh Earl of Cassillis and thirteenth Lord Kennedy.

His son, also Archibald Kennedy, was born in February 1770 and died on 8 September 1846. He was styled Lord Kennedy from 1792, became Earl of Cassillis on his father’s death in 1794, and was created Marquess of Ailsa in 1831, of the Isle of Ailsa in the county of Ayr. He had already been made Baron Ailsa in the peerage of the United Kingdom in 1806, which gave him a permanent seat in the House of Lords, after sitting as a Scottish representative peer from 1796 to 1806. He was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society on 18 February 1819. In 1820 George IV made him a knight of the Thistle. He was a childhood friend of King William IV, and it was William who raised him to the marquessate. He voted for the Reform Bill in 1832. On 1 June 1793 he married Margaret Erskine of Dun. Their children included a son Archibald who died in his father’s lifetime, and Lady Margaret Kennedy, born in 1800. On 14 November 1817 the castle was the place of that daughter’s marriage to Thomas, Viscount Kynnaird. She became a noted philanthropist, and she lived until 1889.

The first marquess filled the armoury. The room now holds 716 flintlock pistols that have been fired, many of them bought from the Office of Ordnance at the Tower of London as they were taken out of service, together with hundreds of swords. The weapons altogether number more than a thousand. The earliest pistol is from 1738, and others are from the early nineteenth century. They belong to the age of the Jacobite risings, the American Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Peninsular War, and the campaigns of the East India Company, though it is hard to tie any one pistol to a particular battle. In the same room, mounted on the ceiling, is a large teak propeller. It comes from the aircraft in which Leefe Robinson shot down a German airship north of London in 1916.

William Leefe Robinson was born on 14 July 1895 in Coorg, in India, the youngest son of Horace Robinson and Elizabeth Leefe, and he was raised on the family’s coffee estate. He was at school in Bangalore, then at the Dragon School in Oxford, and from 1909 at St Bees in Cumberland. He entered Sandhurst in August 1914 and was commissioned in the Worcestershire Regiment that December. In March 1915 he went to France as an observer with the Royal Flying Corps, was wounded over Lille, trained as a pilot, and joined No. 39 Squadron, a night-flying unit at Sutton’s Farm near Hornchurch. On the night of 2 and 3 September 1916 he was flying a converted B.E.2c night fighter, number 2693, against the largest airship raid of the war, sixteen airships sent over England. The ship he met over Cuffley, then in Essex and now in Hertfordshire, was the wooden-framed Schütte-Lanz SL 11. For years it was mistaken for the Zeppelin L 21.

He had taken off at about 11.08 on the night of the second, with orders to patrol between Sutton’s Farm and Joyce Green. He climbed to 10,000 feet in fifty-three minutes. At 1.10 in the morning, searchlights south-east of Woolwich picked up an airship. By then he was at 12,000 feet. He attacked at 11,500 feet, closing to within 500 feet and firing incendiary and explosive bullets in alternate rounds. Two passes failed. With his third and last drum he concentrated on one spot. The airship caught fire and fell in a field behind the Plough Inn at Cuffley. Hauptmann Wilhelm Schramm and his crew of fifteen were killed. Robinson was the first British pilot to bring down a German airship over Britain, and the first man awarded the Victoria Cross for an action in the United Kingdom. In the three months that followed, five more airships were shot down by the method he had shown. The account kept with the propeller at Culzean says he was about a thousand feet higher than he should have been when he chose to attack, that he was later a captain, that he was shot down and captured and badly treated, and that he died in the influenza of 1918 at the age of twenty-three. He died on 31 December 1918. After the war his squadron moved to the airfield at Turnberry, on land that then belonged to the third Marquess of Ailsa, and called itself No. 1 Fighting School. The squadron presented the propeller to the marquess.

The same armoury is not the only curious object in the house. A model of the French forty-gun frigate Hortense was made by her crew after they were captured in the Napoleonic Wars, between 1803 and 1815, and imprisoned at Portchester Castle. They built the ship from bones saved out of their beef rations. A silver clock commemorates the racing yacht Bloodhound, built by Fife and Son of Fairlie for Archibald Kennedy, third Marquess of Ailsa, in 1874. The yacht won him a large sum, about two thousand pounds in 1877 alone, and he commissioned the clock from the silversmith Alexander Crichton. Its scenes are taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. The dining room was once two rooms. The third marquess threw them into one and commissioned a ceiling in the manner of Robert Adam, based on an Adam ceiling in the house of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn in St James’s Square in London. The London ceiling is coloured in the eighteenth-century way. The Culzean ceiling is white, and it is made of papier-mâché, layered and pulped paper that looks like plaster.

A barrel organ in the Blue Drawing Room is inscribed Broderip and Wilkinson of London, a firm active from 1789 to 1808. A handle turns barrels fitted with pins, like a music box, which open valves. There is a set of bellows and a drum, and each of the four barrels holds six or seven tunes. The gilt pipes on the front are only for show. It still plays, though the handle has to be turned quickly, about once a second, to get a tune. In the Long Drawing Room hang two views by Alexander Nasmyth, both painted in 1816 and commissioned by the twelfth Earl of Cassillis. One is Culzean Castle from the North with Ailsa Craig. The other is Culzean Castle from the Sea. Nasmyth did not sign his paintings. On the yacht in the foreground of one of them are the initials A N.

About 1794 the Earl of Cassillis raised an independent troop of fencible cavalry at Culzean. It entered the Army List in 1798 as the Ayrshire Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry. The yeomanry of those years was meant to meet a French invasion, and in practice the regiment spent its early life helping the civil power against riots in Ayrshire and beyond, notably at Paisley. In 1897 it was allowed the title Ayrshire Yeomanry Cavalry (Earl of Carrick’s Own), in honour of the future King Edward VII, because Earl of Carrick is a title of the Princes of Wales drawn from this district. It later served in the South African war, at Gallipoli in 1915, in Egypt and Palestine, and on the Western Front in 1918. Thomas Caldwell, of the regiment, won the Victoria Cross at Oudenaarde on 31 October 1918. In the Second World War the regiment was not kept as cavalry. In 1940 it became two field regiments of artillery, the 151st and the 152nd. On 24 June 1961 the regiment came back to the castle to receive its first guidon from General Sir Horatius Murray.

Horatius Murray was born on 18 April 1903 and died in 1989. He was commissioned into the Cameronians in 1923, transferred to the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders in 1935, and in 1941 took command of the 1st Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders. The battalion went to Egypt in June 1942 with the 51st Highland Division, and he was badly wounded early in the Second Battle of El Alamein. He returned in April 1943, soon commanded the 153rd Infantry Brigade, and took it through the invasion of Sicily and, on the afternoon of D-Day, into Normandy. In August 1944 he was sent to Italy to command the 6th Armoured Division after Gerald Templer was wounded. The division fought on the Gothic Line, and in the spring of 1945 it crossed the Po, met the United States Fifth Army, and on 8 May crossed the Austrian frontier, the first part of the British Eighth Army to enter German-held territory. He later commanded in Palestine and, after the Korean ceasefire, the 1st Commonwealth Division, which he left in November 1954. It was this officer who presented the guidon at Culzean in 1961.

North of the castle, in a bay, stands the gas house that supplied the estate with town gas until 1940. The group includes the gas manager’s house, the retort house, and the remains of the gasometer. The manager’s house now holds an exhibition on William Murdoch. Murdoch, whose name is sometimes spelled Murdock, was born on 21 August 1754 at Bello Mill in Lugar, near Old Cumnock in Ayrshire, and he died on 15 November 1839 at Handsworth, near Birmingham. He was a chemist, inventor, and engineer in the firm of Boulton and Watt. Gas lighting is attributed to him in the early 1790s, and so is the word gasometer, though Jean-Pierre Minckelers had published on coal gas in 1784 and had lit a hall at Leuven from 1785, and the Earl of Dundonald had lit his own estate with gas from 1789. As a boy Murdoch is said to have tried coal gas by heating coal in a copper kettle in a small cave near his father’s mill. He did not build the Culzean plant, which was still lighting the castle a century after his death. What survives on the shore is the works itself, and an exhibition of the Ayrshire inventor whose name is attached to gaslight.

The fourth Marquess of Ailsa wanted the history of the estate preserved, and he approached the newly formed National Trust for Scotland about giving the castle to the nation. He died in 1943, before any decision was taken. In 1945 his brother, the fifth Marquess, carried the plan through. Lady Frances, widow of the fourth Marquess, did most of the negotiating. The gift kept the family clear of inheritance tax. Lady Frances asked that the top floor be made into a self-contained apartment and offered to General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, as thanks for his command of the Allied forces in Europe during the Second World War. Dwight David Eisenhower, born David Dwight Eisenhower, lived from 14 October 1890 to 28 March 1969. He was the American general who commanded the Allied landings in North Africa and Sicily and then the invasion of France, and he was given the five-star rank of General of the Army in 1944. He later served as military governor of the American zone in Germany, as Chief of Staff, as president of Columbia University, and as the first supreme commander of NATO, and he was president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. He first came to Culzean in 1946, when the fifth Marquess was there to meet him, and he stayed four times, one of them while he was president. His longest stay was in retirement, and the grounds gave him a place to paint and to walk. After his death the top apartment was opened for private and corporate hospitality. It has six double or twin bedrooms, for as many as twelve people, with a shared drawing room and dining room.

The castle closed for a refurbishment paid for by a gift in the will of the American millionaire William Lindsay, and it opened again in April 2011. Lindsay had never visited Scotland. He asked that a significant part of his four million dollars go to Culzean. He was said to be interested in Eisenhower’s holidays in the house. In 2025 the castle received 334,000 visitors.

From 1972 until 2015 a picture of the castle was printed on the back of the five-pound notes issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland. The house has also been used as a film set. Between October and November 1972 it was filmed as the castle of Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, released in 1973. Christopher Lee played Lord Summerisle. Lee, an English actor born in London on 27 May 1922 and knighted in 2009, was praised for that part. He died on 7 June 2015. The castle appeared in the 1997 documentary series Castles of Scotland, in the 2001 film Pyaar Ishq Aur Mohabbat, in a 2009 episode of the television series Coast, in a 2016 episode of The Little Couple, and in two episodes of Antiques Roadshow filmed in 2020 and shown in February and April 2021. In 2002 the first series of Most Haunted, led by Yvette Fielding with Karl Beattie and the medium Derek Acorah, came to examine the castle’s ghost stories and reported sightings. Karl Beattie, a director and producer, and Yvette Fielding set up their own company in 2002, and Most Haunted was its first production. Derek Acorah, born Derek Francis Johnson on 27 January 1950, was the medium associated with that programme. He died on 4 January 2020. The castle is reputed to hold at least seven ghosts, among them a piper and a servant girl. An engraving of the castle by James Fittler appeared in Scotia Depicta in 1804. James Fittler, born in London in October 1758, was an engraver of portraits, landscapes, and marine views, and George III appointed him marine engraver. He became an associate of the Royal Academy in 1800 and died on 2 December 1835.

Under the cliff are sea caves. They are not open in the ordinary way, though tours are offered in the summer. There are two groups. One lies below the stables and is open to visitors. The other lies below the castle, with a stone frontage and barred entrances. In August 2018 volunteer archaeologists, working by lamplight during a conservation camp, uncovered a medieval doorway into the caves. A wall and a doorway were already known at the mouth of the Castle Cave. At the Stables Cave there had been only a few stones on the surface. The dig found both sides of a doorway, standing up to eight courses high and buried about a metre deep. The opening is 1.1 metres wide and could have been closed with a draw bar. Charcoal from the lowest midden in the upper chamber of the Castle Cave, taken the year before and dated in the SUERC laboratory, gave the range AD 135 to 325. A similar date had come from the Gazebo Court on the cliff above. It is the earliest dated evidence from the caves, and it places people here in the Iron Age. The volunteers also found modern pottery and glass, some eighteenth-century wine bottles, and an iron strip that may have been part of a hinge. The stone walls that close both sets of caves belong to the medieval castle, probably of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Before Robert Adam turned the house above into a picturesque mansion, the caves were cellars. Stories told about them include ghosts, smugglers, and fugitives hidden from pursuit.

A further excavation of the West Green, south-west of the castle, was set for 26 September 2026, with sessions in the morning and early afternoon. Historic maps, the eighteenth-century sketches, and earlier research suggest that defensive walls and bastions, service buildings, a way up from the shore, and older garden terraces may lie there, the ground of the castle as it was before Robert Adam. The sessions were charged at eight pounds, plus a booking fee. The designed landscape around the house was designated on 1 July 1987.

Eight houses on the estate can be rented. They include the Brewhouse Flat inside the castle itself, which sleeps four, and the others are Ardlochan Lodge, the Garden House, Royal Artillery Cottage, North Firbank, North Segganwell, South Segganwell, and the Clocktower. The castle can also be hired for private events. What began as a Kennedy stronghold on a defended headland, passed through the hands of a freed African servant and an earl who never married, and was rebuilt by Robert Adam into a romantic cliff-top house, is now a public park and a museum of that family, with an American president’s rooms at the top and the caves of a much older occupation still in the rock below.

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