Carleton Castle

The legend of False Sir John

Local tradition identifies the castle with the ballad of May Colvin, or May Collean. In the Ayrshire version, False Sir John repeatedly marries wealthy women and takes them to the cliffs at Games Loup, where they meet their deaths. His final intended victim realises what is about to happen and turns the tables, sending him over the cliff instead.

It is a dark piece of Carrick folklore, but not reliable biography. May Colvin belongs to a much wider family of European folk tales, catalogued as Child Ballad No. 4, Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight. Versions place the events in different parts of Britain; the association with Carleton, Games Loup and the Kennedy family of Culzean developed as part of the local tradition.

There really was a John Cathcart of Carleton. National Records of Scotland, however, records that he lived at Killochan, married Helen Wallace and died in 1612. The surviving documentary evidence does not establish the murderous career later given to False Sir John.

What remains today

Carleton is now a roofless and heavily reduced ruin. Historic Environment Scotland records the remains of the vaulted ground floor and hall, while nineteenth-century surveys show that considerably more fabric survived before further collapse.

It is the combination that makes Carleton memorable: a lonely medieval tower, the earthwork of an earlier stronghold only metres away, the sea below and one of Ayrshire’s darkest pieces of folklore attached to the hillside.