Mains Castle

lbride gifted a whole forest to support a phase of Glasgow Cathedral’s construction (and her Comyn son failed to undo it in court after her death). And, as his, her grandson Edmund, the last Comyn of Kilbride, chose to fight and die in Edward I's service at Bannockburn in 1314.

• Edmund's daughters Euphemia and Mary , aged just 8 and 2 and sheltering in England, were seized and sold into marriage by Edward I (but seem to have done well in the end). His widow Mary, herself a Comyn, accused of trying to spirit the elder child away, protested her innocence and persuaded a jury of it, but soon came North for a gift of new lands from Robert the Bruce.

• This freed up all of Kilbride, as revealed by later tax claims (some things never change!) for a transfer to the Bruce's daughter Marjory and her new Stewart husband. It was from the Stewarts, before they became Royalty, that the Lindsays obtained the Mains of Kilbride, probably about 1359.

• The 1383 charter confirms this earlier grant of the Mains and other lands in Kilbride for "services rendered"; older histories connect this to the family's early support of Robert Bruce - but more tellingly, they had been loyal and useful through thick and thin to the Stewarts ever since.

• The castle itself seems to have appeared on the scene sometime in the mid/late 1400s to support the family’s growing business and political ambitions in Glasgow and beyond. It's hard to date it exactly from its architecture, but conceptually it's a "bow & arrow castle" pre-dating the fashion for defences designed for personal fi****ms.

• Staying useful and loyal was nearly a lot less rewarding in May 1568 when Robert Lindsay of Dunrod was one of many local landowners to sign a bond in support of Mary Queen of Scots, just before the Battle of Langside. Luckily, given the lack of follow-up, it seems to have been spirited away, only for a spy's secret copy to resurface some 200+ years later in the English national archives...

• Whether Mary slept here as rumour demands (even for 20 minutes after lunch) is anyone’s guess - but someone has scratched “1568” in the wall of the Great Hall! She certainly passed close by as she left Scotland, but can't have had time to stop.

• Nasty rumours that the last Laird of Dunrod was cruel to his people and a practicing warlock seem bitter and unfounded. One of his last acts on the way out was to pull in such favours and scrape up such value as he could from a shrinking and horribly mortgaged estate to support his daughter Nicola in the 1620s, when she married the local minister.

• Previous residents did leave us a cauldron, an anvil and a thriving colony of bats, though, so in a less prejudiced age, we're happy to go along with it! And whatever the cause, a change in fortunes in the early 1600s certainly led to the loss of all Lindsay of Dunrod lands.

• Neighbours and relatives came forward with loans and what would now be called mortgages to help out; more than a few, as Alexander Lindsay noted himself, with distinctly mixed motives. What is less well known, though, is who and what came next.

• The Hamiltons of Maynes (as they called themselves) came from Duncanrig, and purchased the castle and surrounding lands from Alexander Lindsay’s creditors in 1637. 20 years later they emigrated to Ireland, and were replaced by one of the Judges appointed by Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth years - Mr Andrew Ker, advocate. He was Judge Ker to his friends in the Cromwellian system, but The Right Honourable Lord Ker of Maynes when his wife was doing the introductions!

• In 1670, he sold the castle to George Thomson of Mains, a married but childless Edinburgh merchant from a family of preachers with Aberdeen and covenanting connections (Mr William Thomson, outed from Mearns in 1663, and Mr Thomas Thomson of Cocklaw). We're still investigating what, if any, use they made of the castle.

• Such Thomson fortunes as remained after all this excitement were, on George’s death in 1689, invested in developing William’s lands near Aberdeen, after selling off the Mains in 1691. George’s widow appears to have been persuaded by Thomas to invest a large part of her share, like so much of the country's wealth, in the Darien Scheme, so that it must have been entirely lost.

• From 1691, Mains was part of the Stewart of Torrance estate. Under the Stewarts, for reasons that surely made sense at the time, the house once known as the Place (Palace) of the Maynes of Kilbryde was de-roofed about 1720 and the “outbuildings” that had made it a “Place” (probably more modern accommodation around a courtyard) were dismantled and left to ruin.

• The castle itself was tougher, though; consolidated and re-roofed in the early 1880s, it became roofless again in March 1922 following a severe storm. However, it remained largely complete to the wallheads.

• An award-winning restoration by Mike Rowan, begun in 1976, led to the castle again being inhabited. Last in this list, but certainly not least, this amazing (and televised!) recovery is surely now the greatest story there is in the history of Mains Castle.