96 Castle or Greenan. 



cas^tles that frino-e the banks of the Rhine, but looking much stei'uer 

 and more severe than they. Our chmate is less careful of the 

 relics of the past than that of the Rhineland ; and though the 

 Drachenfels and Rolandseck and the Mouse Tower of Bingenhave 

 withstood for centuries all the i-avages of the elements, the goodly 

 Castle of Greenan, not yet three hundred years old, is rapidly 

 mouldering away. Every winter sees some portion of its masonry 

 thrown down on the sands at the base of the cliff. It g^iieves one 

 to see such utter destruction, and to think that nothing is done to 

 preserve such a fine memorial of the times of old. 



The tower, which is almost all that remains of a much more 

 considerable building, is not itself of very great antiquity. Over 

 the doorway the date 1603 is still legible, along with the letters 

 J. K., the initials of John Kennedy, the proprietor who built it. 

 From the evidence of various records there can be no doubt, how- 

 ever, that a stronghold existed on the spot centuries before. The 

 chartulary of Melrose contains an entrj^ regarding a grant of the 

 Doon fishings, made in the reign of William the Lion by Roger de 

 Scalebroc, vassal of Duncan, Earl of Carrick — he was a M'Dowall, 

 and ancestor of the M'Dowalls of Logan and Garthland, in Gallo- 

 way — to the monks of Melrose. These " holy friars " seem to 

 have had the knack of g-aining possession of some of the richest 

 land in the Lowlands of Scotland. In the same monarch's reign 

 they obtained a grant of Friars' Carse and other monk lands in 

 Nithsdale from the Lady Affrica of Stranith, who afterwards 

 became the wife of Olaf, King of Man. It was of them that the 

 evidently truthful rhyme was composed : — 



" The monks of Melrose made good kail 

 On Fridays when they fasted, 

 Nor wanted they good beef and ale 

 As long's their neiglibours' lasted." 



We need not be astonished, then, at the fact that shortly after- 

 wards they were in possession not only of the rights of fisln'ng in 

 the Doon — which presumably they valued as a provision for their 

 Fridays' fare — but also of the whole lands of Greenan. Passing 

 from the hands of the Church into those of the Lords of the Isles, 

 the barony of Greenan was in 1475 feued to John Davidson, wliose 

 descendants — known as the Davidsons of Penuyglen, near Cul- 

 zean — retained it until 157(5. In that year it was transferred to 

 Paul Reid, a burgess of Ayr, in a deed which mentions a tower 



