The Eglinton family had held land here since the Middle Ages. The original castle was burnt by the Earl of Glencairn in 1528, and a more modest fortified house occupied the site through the early modern period. The 1691 Hearth Tax records show 25 hearths in use at Eglinton - the highest count for any single dwelling in Ayrshire (the Earl had failed to pay the tax). In 1797, the 12th Earl decided on something more spectacular. The foundation stone for a new castle was laid by Alexander Hamilton of Grange, the grandfather of the American founding father Alexander Hamilton. The new building, completed in 1802, was a Gothic castellated mansion second only to Culzean Castle in Ayrshire for grandeur. A central round keep rose 100 feet; four outer towers stood 70 feet tall. It contained a chair built from oak salvaged from Alloway Kirk, the back inlaid with a brass plaque bearing the whole of Burns's *Tam o' Shanter*. The estate ran to 34,716 Scots acres - more than 50,000 English acres - including Little Cumbrae and lands at Southannan and Eaglesham.

Eglinton is best remembered for the Eglinton Tournament of 1839 - an elaborate, ill-fated medieval-revival event organised by Archibald Montgomerie, the 13th Earl. The preparations became news across Scotland, and the railway line to Eglinton was opened in advance of its scheduled date just to ferry guests in. Knights in armour, period costumes, lists, jousting, a tournament bridge over the Lugton Water. And then summer rain in characteristic Scottish quantities. The participants - including Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte - kept going as best they could, drenched in their reproduction plate. The whole affair was lavish, romantic, and absurd, and it captured the Victorian imagination for decades afterward. The Scottish writer Ian Anstruther produced a marvellously entertaining account of it in 1963 titled *The Knight and the Umbrella*. The tournament made the castle famous beyond Ayrshire - and helped exhaust the family finances that would later force its abandonment.

The cost of keeping a 25-hearth Gothic mansion running, combined with the death duties that hit the great estates in the early twentieth century, broke the Eglinton finances. In December 1925 the castle's contents went to auction. Dowell's Limited sold 1,960 lots for £7,004 19s 6d - a poor return for centuries of accumulated heritage. The 13th Earl's tournament armour, the panel from the door of the murdered 10th Earl's coach, paintings of the family and the castle - all went under the hammer, along with the famous portrait of Susanna Kennedy, Countess of Eglinton, a celebrated beauty of her age. The roof was stripped in 1926; the lead alone fetched more than the family could earn from rents. Then a stranger story. According to one of the gardeners, the castle had a room that was never opened. In 1925 a young man from Kilwinning came to scavenge oak panelling from the decaying castle and pulled away a piece that exposed the skeletal hand of a woman. A student doctor later removed the rest of the skeleton; for fear of prosecution, no one ever reported it. Substantial ruins survived into the 1940s, when the army used them for training during the Second World War, seriously damaging the building and destroying part of the iron Tournament Bridge.

In the 1970s the local authority made what remained safe by demolishing most of the structure. A single tower, a wing facade, foundations, and parts of the castle wings were retained. The 988 acres of grounds were opened to the public as Eglinton Country Park - free entry, one of Ayrshire's most popular visitor attractions. Robert Clement Wilson bought the broken estate in the post-war years and built a meat canning factory in the old stable block - an unromantic ending for grand stabling that an 1840s visitor had compared to a London hospital. Wilson also restored the grounds at his own expense. The canning factory closed after the BSE crisis of 1996. The Tournament Bridge still stands over the Lugton Water, with the Montgomerie family crest visible on the ruins. The Eglinton hunt is gone. The 25 hearths are gone. But the country park welcomes walkers, cyclists, and families - and the rain still falls, sometimes torrentially, on what used to be the lists.