Penkill sits on a wooded ridge above Old Dailly, five miles up the Water of Girvan from the harbour. The Boyds built a tower here in the 1400s and held it through the Covenanting years, but by the 1850s it was a romantic ruin — and that is when its interesting century began.
Alice Boyd and the Pre-Raphaelites
Alice Boyd inherited Penkill in 1856 and set about restoring it. She was a painter herself, and through the artist William Bell Scott — with whom she had a long and openly conducted relationship, in an arrangement that also included Scott's wife — the castle became a gathering place for the Pre-Raphaelite circle.
Scott painted a mural sequence on the spiral staircase illustrating The King's Quair, the poem attributed to James I of Scotland. Dante Gabriel Rossetti stayed here repeatedly, at a low point in his life in 1868 and 1869; it was at Penkill that he worked through much of the material that became his 1870 Poems, and where friends talked him into recovering the manuscripts he had buried in his wife's grave. Christina Rossetti also visited.
For a few years, in other words, this small Ayrshire tower was a genuine outpost of one of the most significant movements in British art — which is a strange thing to find five miles inland from Girvan.
Seeing it
The castle is privately owned and not open to the public. Much of its contents, including Pre-Raphaelite works, were dispersed at sale in the 1990s. It is clearly visible from the minor road above Old Dailly, and that is the extent of what a visitor can do — but it photographs well from the roadside, particularly in low winter light with the valley below.
It sits alongside Killochan and Bargany on the quiet B741 valley road, which makes a fine slow drive or cycle from Girvan — see Dailly and the Girvan valley.
