Carleton Castle stands on the hillside just inland of Lendalfoot, a gaunt roofless tower visible from the A77 and reached by a minor road. It was built in the fifteenth century by the Cathcarts and later passed to the Kennedys, the family who dominated Carrick from Dunure and Culzean. It was one of a chain of towers watching this coast.
What survives is a tall fragment of keep, standing several storeys but hollow and open to the sky.
The ballad of May Colvin
Carleton's fame rests on a ballad rather than a battle. In the story, a Sir John Cathcart of Carleton made a habit of marrying heiresses, bringing them to the cliffs at Games Loup nearby, and pushing them off — seven wives, seven times, each time inheriting.
The eighth was May Colvin (or Colean), who worked out what was coming. At the cliff edge she asked him to turn his back while she undressed, so that he would not see her immodest — and when he did, she pushed him over instead. She rode home, and the family parrot gave her away by squawking about her late-night return; she bribed it into silence with a golden cage.
It is a version of a story told across northern Europe, and there is no evidence any of it happened here. But the cliffs at Games Loup are real and are pointed out to this day, and the ballad was collected in several versions in the 18th and 19th centuries. As local legends go it is a superior one.
Visiting
Free, reached on a minor road off the A77 with limited verge parking — the free car park at the Varyag memorial below is a better bet, with a walk up.
The ruin is unstable and unmaintained. There is no interpretation, no fencing to speak of, and no reason to go inside: masonry falls from ruins of this kind, and this one has been left to weather for a long time. Look at it from the outside, which is where the photographs are anyway.
The reward is the setting — the tower in the foreground, Carleton Bay below, and Ailsa Craig out on the horizon. Twenty minutes, and it combines with the Varyag memorial, Kennedy's Pass and the shore geology into a decent morning. See the wild coast south day trip.
