Kerelaw Castle

Timothy Pont's early-seventeenth-century survey of Cunninghame records Kerelaw — also given as Kerila or Turnlaw — as held by the Lockhart family from Richard de Morville, Constable of Scotland, as far back as 1191, after Stephen Lockhart, or Loccard, received a grant of land in Ayrshire; the barony took his name as Stevenston, and its manor-place became Kerelaw. The castle and barony later passed to the Campbells of Loudoun and then to the Cunninghames of Kilmaurs.

In 1488, while it belonged to the Cunninghames, Kerelaw was sacked and burned by the 2nd Lord Montgomerie, one episode in the long-running feud between the Montgomeries and the Cunninghames. The Cunninghames, led by the Earl of Glencairn, took revenge in 1528 by burning Eglinton Castle to the ground.

Rebuilt after 1488, Kerelaw is reported to have carried carved coats of arms of the Scottish nobility taken from Kilwinning Abbey. Local tradition also held that the castle had been a residence of the Abbot of Kilwinning, a story that may stem from the third son of Alexander Cunningham, 1st Earl of Glencairn, becoming Commendator of the abbey after the Reformation and possibly living at Kerelaw. Gothic windows on the surviving south wall are said to echo those of the abbey, though they may themselves be a nineteenth-century addition to the buildings.

In 1545 nine fishermen from Saltcoats held leases in return for shipping the Earl's furniture from the Creek of Saltcoats to Finlayston on the Clyde every spring, and carrying it back to Kerelaw each autumn when the family returned for the winter, along with a half barrel of herrings yearly.

Kerelaw was sold to Sir Thomas Boyd in 1609 and soon after to Sir William Cunninghame of Cunninghamhead; thirty years later it passed to Sir Robert Cunninghame of Auchenharvie. The sale out of Cunninghame hands is dated variously to 1655, when Alexander Hamilton — grandfather of the American founding father of the same name — is said to have bought the castle and renamed it Grange, and to 1685, with the buyer named as John Hamilton and the seller as Robert Reid Cunninghame of Seabank House, whose mining ventures were causing him financial difficulty.

The castle remained a Hamilton residence until 1787, when another Alexander Hamilton, second cousin of the American statesman, built Kerelaw, or Grange, House nearby; the old castle quickly fell out of use. The estate was sold in 1838 to Gavin Fullerton, who restored the name Kerelaw.

Three walls of Kerelaw Castle survive, fenced off within grounds owned by North Ayrshire Council, and the site has been a scheduled monument since 1999. Repairs were carried out in 2014, when overgrown trees and shrubs were cleared from the structure, and a heritage-trail plaque and interpretation board stand at the site.