Qualla: Kenmure Castle

Kenmure Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander Nasmyth, Public domain. Some ruins fall to siege. Kenmure fell to a roofer's tape measure. In 1958 the castle's interior was stripped, the roof was taken off, and a 17th-century Gordon seat that had welcomed Mary Queen of Scots, hosted Robert Burns, and survived four centuries of Galloway weather was deliberately unmade. The story most often told is that it burned. It didn't. Someone simply decided to stop holding it up.

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Image: Alexander Nasmyth | Public domain

Kenmure Castle: The Mound Above New Galloway

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown Victorian photographer, Public domain. Kenmure stands on a partly natural mound a mile south of New Galloway, in The Glenkens, where the River Ken broadens into Loch Ken. The site has been defended since the early Middle Ages - the mound itself may have been shaped by hand for that purpose. The Gordons arrived from Be...

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Image: Unknown Victorian photographer | Public domain

Kenmure Castle: Royal Guests, Pious and Otherwise

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arjayempee from Perth, Western Australia, CC BY 2.0. James IV came to Kenmure in March 1508, riding back from a pilgrimage to Whithorn. The royal accounts record what kings do when nothing is on fire: he played 'tables,' an old form of backgammon, and tipped the laird's servants generously on his way out. Half a century later, Mary...

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Image: Arjayempee from Perth, Western Australia | CC BY 2.0

Kenmure Castle: Viscounts, Visitors, and One Enormous Fish

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Val Dobson, CC BY-SA 4.0. Charles I created the Gordon laird Viscount of Kenmure in 1633, and the line continued through the 18th century. Robert Burns and his close friend John Syme stayed three days in July 1793, guests of the then laird. Eighty years later John Ruskin visited his cousin Joan Agnew and ...

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Image: Val Dobson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kenmure Castle: The Unmaking

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Parnell, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1790 Kenmure was already described as a ruin once, then rebuilt and re-roofed in the 19th century. Brigadier-General Maurice Lilburn MacEwen, late of the 16th The Queen's Lancers, leased and then bought the castle in 1923 and ran the local Stewartry Home Guard from it during t...

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Image: Tom Parnell | CC BY-SA 4.0