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Seagate Castle, Irvine Seagate Castle, Irvine Seagate Castle, Irvine westwards over the centuries by the localised Aonghus MacKechnie pile up of accumulating sandbanks.⁸ A similar story can be told regarding Musselburgh, Quarried for its materials in 1746,¹ ruinous by Midlothian, whose medieval harbour was 1760,² with some remedial works undertaken silted beyond use by the late 17th century. by the Earls of Eglinton in 1810 and 1883 and by public authorities in the late 20th century, Irvine’s medieval burgh plan – street front this structure remains fragile and slowly buildings with parallel backland strips or tofts declining.³ – is essentially orthodox,⁹ except in relation to Seagate. Here, a street – also called Documents are few, the best being in stone Seagate – splays off towards the castle, on the building: the joint armorials of Dame cutting a diagonal slice across the backlands, Agnes Drummond (c.1535-1590) and Hugh its alignment being precisely that of the Montgomerie (1531?-1585), 3rd Earl of castle’s front wall, which faces south-west. Eglinton, providing a date range of 1562, That the splay begins not on the street front, when they married, and 1585, the year where a gushet site would be usual, but at Montgomerie was assassinated.⁴ But the what seems the back of demolished houses, castle’s story is more complicated. may suggest that the castle site was pre- The barony of Cunninghame, together with existing when given a new connection to the Dryburgh and Lauder, appears to have been town, and that the castle’s amenity granted by King David I (1124-53) to Hugh de outweighed burghal matters. Linlithgow’s Morville (d.1162), soldier and courtier, town plan was modified around 1540 to constable of Scotland, ‘foremost Anglo- accord with the palace’s new south entrance, Norman supporter of the Scottish crown after so the idea of a fairly radical urban planning David I’s enthronement’.⁵ Perhaps the story intervention existed in the Renaissance age. of Irvine’s castle begins then. But in any event, However, whether Seagate marks the there is a consensus that a castle existed at medieval castle site still remains not proven. Irvine by 1184,⁶ while the fact of the Treaty of There was surely no great ashlar-faced Irvine 1297, during the Wars of Independence structure such as Bothwell, to judge from the (begun 1296), strongly implies a secure absence of such masonry either at the site or military stronghold existed at that date.⁷ in re-use nearby. Successors to the de Morvilles came and The castle awaits a proper archaeological went, and Seagate Castle was for long the survey. It is clearly evident, though, that it is Irvine town house of the Montgomeries, Earls not of one build, and therefore cannot be of Eglinton, whose main residence was dated simply by the armorials alone. It is Eglinton Castle, 3km to the north. immediately clear that the front wall But does Seagate denote the medieval castle, comprises more than one building phase: the or its site? Coastal Scotland’s early stone stonework at the lower level/ground floor castles tended, where possible (as in the case consists of what seem randomly-gathered of nearby Turnberry), to occupy a navigable stones of different types and colours (for location. Seagate, however, is 200m from the instance, black whinstone, light-coloured river. Yet it is possible that the site was once freestone). This contrasts with the masonry immediately navigable, because it is well above, which is of a fairly uniform brown documented that the sea was pushed stone, evidently quarried for the specific THE CASTLE STUDIES GROUP 80 JOURNAL NO. 34 Seagate Castle, Irvine ABOVE: Fig. 1. Seagate Castle: oblique view of main front showing differentiation between low level masonry and the more consistently brown masonry above, indicating different building phases, 2019. (Copyright: author). LEFT: Fig. 2. Seagate Castle: view of main entrance, showing neo- Romanesque dog-tooth moulding. The ashlars are thinly bedded into the surrounding stonework, suggesting the entrance has been inserted into pre-existing walling, 2019. (Copyright: author) THE CASTLE STUDIES GROUP 81 JOURNAL NO. 34 Seagate Castle, Irvine ABOVE: Fig. 3. Seagate. Plans: ground and first floor. MacGibbon and Ross, Vol. 4. 237: BELOW: Fig. 4. Seagate. View from the courtyard. MacGibbon and Ross, Vol. 4. 239 THE CASTLE STUDIES GROUP 82 JOURNAL NO. 34 Seagate Castle, Irvine purpose of building that area of wall. The unlike Linlithgow palace’s porch) to the contrast is matched by a change in the colour courtyard, or close. The two vaults south-east tone of the south-west quoins from reddish of the entrance seem equal-sized and thus, below to yellowish above. There are superficially at least, part of a uniform building irregularities even within the superficially phase; the fact that the arch orientations to uniform brown-coloured walling; for the north-west conflict with these may be example, towards the left hand side of the unremarkable, because frequently the kitchen front, there are changes in the nature of the vault – as here – was aligned with the main walling as opposed to the more front walling. The same is seen at, say, homogenous-looking central wall area. The Cortachy Castle, Angus, or, nearer home, and north-west gable inset (that is, where the prior to its demolition, Ardmillan Castle, gable walling narrows in thickness) seems to Carrick, Ayrshire. accord with a break in the front wall’s From the close, a stair would have been construction, as there is a horizontal line necessary for access to the floor above, which with neater masonry at the higher level than was the principal floor or piano nobile. Upon what exists below. At ground level, blocked, entering the close there are two unequal- and sourced from two different quarries, sized stair turrets on the right. However, it is there are four wide-mouthed gun-holes of a difficult to read a coherent two-/three-room form generally said to have been introduced apartment such as is set out so lucidly at, say, into Scottish architecture from France in the the effectively-contemporary Castle Menzies, early 16th century by the Duke of Albany at Perthshire which was reconstructed from the blockhouse at Dunbar Castle, East 1572; there, a stair deposits the visitor at the Lothian. lower end of the hall, with one or more So the ruins are not all of one date. More, smaller but grander rooms leading from the though, can be said regarding the hall’s ‘high’ end, beyond, including a chamber Montgomerie-Drummond phase, namely of dais. At Seagate, it is tempting to suggest that its decoration ties it firmly to the Haggs- that the legacy of older walling restricted Kenmure group, that is the fashion popular what was achievable, and that the hall in South-West Scotland around the 1570s- occupied the area south-east of the off-centre 1600s. This style is characterised by a gable which was lower than the remainder of Romanesque revival using features such as the front. A moulded plinth stone within that dog-tooth and chequer-corbelling. A space projecting from the north-east side wall carefully-chosen fine-grained light-coloured may indicate that a grand fireplace was once Ayrshire stone capable of being tooled with there, as one might expect for a castle hall of the finest detailing was used for the the period (e.g. Elcho Castle, Perthshire, and highlights. Amongst anomalies suggesting Baberton House, Edinburgh) rather than in a much of this work was inset into pre-existing gable, as was a frequent earlier pattern seen masonry are the short ‘tails’ on the main at the 15th-early 16th-century great halls of entrance where longer tails would be the royal palaces of Linlithgow, Stirling and expected in primary work. Edinburgh. The castle’s layout is difficult to interpret.¹⁰ It is not immediately clear how or where a The arched main entrance – central on the prestigious entrance, necessarily at the hall’s front wall – leads via a vault (ribbed, not lower end, would have existed to serve such a THE CASTLE STUDIES GROUP 83 JOURNAL NO. 34 Seagate Castle, Irvine plan, but to accord with the normal castle-plan formula of the period, the part-extant circular ² National Records of Scotland, RHP 3/25. south-east tower, smaller than the off-centre ³ https://irvinescotland.info/irvine_that_ was/ one, may have given access to the lower end seagate-castle/ Accessed October 2019. of the hall. Perhaps the more substantial stair ⁴ The assassin was Sir David Cunningham of tower was for the earl’s access to the high end Robertland, afterwards King James’s archi- tect, 1602-7 (Aonghus MacKechnie, ‘Sir David of the hall, although the present appearance Cunningham of Robertland: Murderer and of the walling certainly does not suggest this. Magna Britannia’s First Architect’, Architec- Alternatively, access may have been via a tural History, 52 (2009), 79-115). now-lost chamber on the south-east. The ⁵ Keith Stringer argued that although ‘conclusive general point is that the normal ‘rules’ are proof is lacking’ Hugh de Morville was ‘most difficult to apply confidently, and, again, we are likely’ granted lands in Cunninghame with Largs dealing with a complex legacy of multi-phase by King David I, ‘whose main castle was erected work. The single cross-wall within the more at Irvine’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biogra- extant north-west element seems rather thin, phy (Oxford, 2004), 39, 444-5 at 444). but according to the MacGibbon and Ross plan ⁶ Anne Turner Simpson and Sylvia Stevenson, it had been intended from the outset to carry Historic Irvine: the Archaeological Implica- two back-to-back projecting chimneys by tions of Development (Glasgow, 1980), 7.
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