Culzean Castle

Culzean Castle stands on a clifftop overlooking the Firth of Clyde near Maybole, in Carrick on the west coast of Scotland. It was the home of the Marquess of Ailsa, chief of Clan Kennedy, and is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland.

The 10th Earl of Cassillis ordered its construction, instructing Robert Adam to rebuild a more basic existing structure into a fine country house fit to be the seat of his earldom. Adam built it in stages between 1777 and 1792 to an L-plan, incorporating a large drum tower with a circular saloon inside overlooking the sea, a grand oval staircase and a suite of well-appointed apartments.

The Ayrshire (Earl of Carrick’s Own) Yeomanry, a British yeomanry cavalry regiment, was raised by the Earl of Cassillis at Culzean in about 1794. The regiment returned to the castle on 24 June 1961 to be presented with its first guidon by General Sir Horatius Murray.

On 14 November 1817 the 1st Marquess of Ailsa’s daughter, Margaret Radclyffe Livingstone Eyre, was married here to Thomas, Viscount Kynnaird. She would become a noted philanthropist.

The Kennedy family gave the castle and grounds to the National Trust for Scotland in 1945, avoiding inheritance tax in doing so. They stipulated that the apartment at the top of the castle be given to General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, in recognition of his role as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War. Eisenhower first visited in 1946 and stayed four times, including once while President of the United States.

The castle reopened in April 2011 after a refurbishment funded by a bequest from the American millionaire William Lindsay, who had never visited Scotland but asked that a significant portion of his $4 million go to Culzean; he was reportedly interested in Eisenhower’s holidays there. The castle received 334,000 visitors in 2025.

It sits within the 240-acre Culzean Castle Country Park, which also holds a walled garden, other estate buildings open to the public, shops, cafés and a playground. The castle opens to the public through the summer and the wider estate all year. Eight self-catering properties are available for holiday rental in the park, including the Brewhouse Flat inside the castle itself, and the castle can be hired for private events.

The walled garden stands on the site of the home of Scipio Kennedy, a man enslaved by the Kennedy family.

Several features are worth knowing about. The armoury holds a propeller from a plane flown by Leefe Robinson when he shot down a German airship north of London in 1916. A bay to the north contains the Gas House, which supplied town gas to the castle until 1940 — the group comprises the gas manager’s house, now holding an exhibition on William Murdoch, the Retort House, and the remains of the gasometer. Sea caves beneath the castle are not generally open but are toured through the summer.

The castle is reputed to house at least seven ghosts, among them a piper and a servant girl.

An illustration of it appeared on the reverse of five-pound notes issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland from 1972 until 2015.

It has been filmed often. It served as the castle of Lord Summerisle, played by Christopher Lee, in the 1973 film The Wicker Man, shot here between October and November 1972. It appeared in the 1997 PBS documentary series Castles of Scotland and in the 2001 Bollywood film Pyaar Ishq Aur Mohabbat; the Most Haunted team explored its reported hauntings for an episode broadcast on Living TV in 2002; the BBC’s Coast visited for series 2 episode 3 in November 2009; TLC’s The Little Couple filmed the Series 9 pilot here in 2016; and two episodes of Antiques Roadshow were filmed in 2020 and transmitted in February and April 2021.