Newark Castle

Newark Castle stands on the south shore of the Clyde estuary, at the point where the firth gradually narrows and navigation upriver is made difficult by shifting sandbanks. For centuries seagoing ships were offloaded here, and Port Glasgow grew up close around the castle on either side and to the south.

The castle was built in 1478 by George Maxwell, when he inherited the Barony of Finlaystone in the parish of Kilmacolm. What he raised was a tower house within a walled enclosure, or barmkin, entered through a large gatehouse; a hall and ancillary buildings such as a bakehouse and brew house are thought to have stood inside the walls. Of that outer defensive wall, only fabric from one of the original corner towers survives.

In the late 16th century the castle was inherited by Sir Patrick Maxwell, a powerful friend of King James VI, and a man notorious for murdering two members of a rival family and for beating his wife, who left him after bearing sixteen children. In 1597 he expanded the building, raising a new north range in place of the earlier hall in the form of a three-storey Renaissance mansion, with the original tower house modified and linked into it. The barmkin wall was demolished but for the north-east tower, which was converted into a doocot. Through these years Maxwell was in a feud with his neighbour Robert Montgomerie of Skelmorlie.

In 1668 the Glasgow authorities purchased eighteen acres of land around Newark Castle from Sir George Maxwell, then the laird, and developed the harbour there into what they called Port Glasgow. The last Maxwell died in 1694, and the castle passed through a series of non-resident owners.

An early tenant was a ropemaker called John Gray, who also dealt in wild animals such as big cats and bears, obtained from ships visiting the Clyde and often housed in the castle cellars. The cellars and gardens were later rented by Charles Williamson, who blocked the access from the hall to stop the joiner John Gardner, who rented the hall, from stealing fruit stored below. In 1895 John Smith recorded that the stump of the dule tree was carefully preserved in the castle grounds.

When dredging techniques made the Clyde navigable as far as Glasgow, the port became a shipbuilding centre and the castle was surrounded by shipyards. Ferguson Shipbuilders, the last shipyard on the lower Clyde, stands close to the west of the castle; the yards to the east were removed around the 1980s and landscaped ground formed in their place, opening views of the castle and across the Clyde from a new bypass road.

Newark Castle came into state care in 1909 and has been a scheduled monument since 1921. It is now a property of Historic Environment Scotland, open to visitors.