MacLellan's Castle

In the centre of Kirkcudbright, MacLellan’s Castle rises beside the remains of the Greyfriars monastery it replaced. Its compact L-plan is typical of a Scottish tower house, but the great hall’s hidden listening room gives the building an unusually theatrical detail.

Built for Thomas MacLellan in the late sixteenth century, the castle was never fully completed and later fell into ruin. State care preserved it from 1912, so its masonry still offers a clear view of an ambitious urban residence.

In 1569 Thomas MacLellan of Bombie was given the site of a ruined Greyfriars monastery in Kirkcudbright. That monastery, built around 1455, was demolished apart from its chapel — now Greyfriars Church — and an L-plan castle raised on the ground. Construction began around 1577 at Thomas’s instigation, and the work is commonly dated to 1582 on the strength of that year carved into a stone panel above the entrance.

Though never entirely finished, the castle housed MacLellan’s descendants until 1752, when it was sold to Sir Robert Maxwell. By then it was ruinous and the roof had fallen in. Thirty years later Maxwell sold it to Dunbar Douglas, fourth Earl of Selkirk, and the Earls of Selkirk held it from 1782 to 1912.

MacGibbon and Ross, in The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland of 1887, remarked that the whole building was a mass of ivy, giving it the appearance of a huge haystack, green rather than yellow — though they judged that apart from the roof it was in good condition. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland was created in 1908 to preserve the country’s historic buildings, and as part of that growing concern twenty buildings, eight of them castles, were taken into state care between 1911 and 1913. This was among them, handed over in 1912, and it is now in the guardianship of Historic Environment Scotland.

The plan is an L of two wings meeting at right angles, a type of tower house typical of Scottish architecture and generally dating from between 1540 and 1680. One wing runs north to south and the other east to west, meeting at the south-west corner. The simple L is embellished with an additional tower attached at that corner and with projections in the inner angle where the wings meet.

The castle has four storeys, with a kitchen on the ground floor and a great hall on the first for entertaining, the upper floors most likely given over to accommodation. Behind the fireplace in the great hall is a peephole, and on the other side of it a small room known as the Laird’s Lug, from which conversation in the hall could be overheard — not an uncommon feature in Scottish tower houses.

Entry was at the inner angle where the two wings join. Above the doorway on the exterior is a panel in three parts, the two lower ones carved with the arms of Thomas MacLellan, for whom the castle was built, and of his wife, G. Maxwell.