Castle Levan

It passed from the Mortons to William, second Lord Sempill, in 1547, and much later to the Shaw Stewarts of Ardgowan, who in the 19th century built a large house beside it and confusingly gave it the same name. Castle Levan is said to be haunted by a White Lady — Sempill's widow Marion Montgomery, who supposedly murdered her tenants, was condemned by Mary of Guise and was starved to death in the tower by her own husband. The court record printed in 1833 tells the same story inside out. Her servants really did kill a man, Gilbert Rankyne, in 1553; she was charged with sheltering them, and with holding two prisoners in the castle for twenty-four hours without food or drink. There was no death sentence, her husband was already dead, and she went on to marry the man who stood surety for her. The bed and breakfast that briefly opened the tower to guests closed in 2022.

Castle Levan stands on the steep bank of the Leven Burn between Gourock and the Cloch, with the whole width of the Firth of Clyde in front of it. It is not one building but two joined at the corner, and the join is the key to reading it. The northern block is a rectangular keep of the late 14th or 15th century, about 10.6 metres by 7.9, with walls a metre and a half thick, rising three storeys to a garret inside a corbelled parapet with roundels at the angles. Inside are two vaulted cellars, a straight stair set in the thickness of the wall, and a first-floor hall whose windows have square recesses fitted with stone seats. Early in the 16th century a second three-storey tower was raised on the line of the barmkin's east wall and welded to the south-east corner of the first, bringing with it what the older tower lacked: a kitchen. MacGibbon and Ross, surveying it in 1887, judged from the style of the ornamental corbel table that the wing was added "about the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the old keep seems to have been remodelled, and the same cornice continued all round the building" — and argued that the big newel stair between the two towers was inserted at the same time, since the straight stair and the guarded entrance lobby were plainly the original arrangement. The first owners were a family surnamed Morton. George Crawfurd, writing in 1710 and reprinted with additions by William Semple in 1782, records that the line "failed in the person of Adam Morton of Leven, who alienated these lands, anno 1547, to William lord Semple", and that Robert, Lord Sempill made over Leven to his uncle Andrew, Master of Sempill, in 1584. Crawfurd's 1547 marks a change of owner, and it may not even be the date of the sale. Nigel Tranter, in 1970, has Adam Morton of Lavane selling the property to William, second Lord Sempill, "previous to 1539", the year Sempill had the lands of Lavane incorporated in his free barony; Morton's son James then raised an action to stop Sempill "uplifting the mails, fermes, proffittis and dewties of the landis of Lavenbrayis", and lost the long litigation. MacGibbon and Ross had added a guess to the 1547 date — "it is not unlikely that the remodelling was carried out about that time" — and closed their entry with a sentence written from 1887: "It is now the property of the Shaw Stewarts." Later summaries fused the guess and the sentence, and a 16th-century Sempill remodelling ended up credited to an 18th-century family. The Sempill who bought it, William, second Lord Sempill, is well documented. The Scots Peerage records that he bought the lands of Auchinfour and others in the parish of Inverkip from Sir James Hamilton of Finnart on 31 August 1529; that he sat on the Privy Council of James V and was Justiciar and Bailie of the regality of Paisley; that he was acquitted in February 1533-34 of art and part in the slaughter of William Cunynghame of Craigends; that he sat on the jury at the trial of Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, in July 1537; and that he took a remission in March 1540 for every crime short of treason. He married three times. Sources disagree on when he died — Crawfurd says 1547, Pitcairn says 1548, the Scots Peerage says Edinburgh, 3 June 1552, citing the Acts and Decreets — but on the point that matters they agree: by the middle of the 1550s his widow was a widow. Her name was Mariota, or Marion, Montgomery, and she is the reason anyone tells stories about this tower. What she actually did is on record, and it is on record because she was tried for it. On 8 November 1555 she appeared before the Justiciary Court in Edinburgh. Robert Pitcairn printed the entry in his Criminal Trials in Scotland in 1833. The charge is headed "Ratihabition of Slaughter, Wounding, &c. — Imprisoning — Usurpation of the Queen's authority", and it says that her servants killed Gilbert Rankyne in Lecheland on 17 March 1553, "under silence of night"; that at the same time they cruelly hurt and wounded John Fynné, mutilating his arm, and wounded John Roger in sundry parts of his body to the effusion of his blood; that she received those servants red-hand that same night within the Castle of Laven; that two more men, Humphry Malcolmesoun and Archibald Scherare, were taken and brought to the castle by them; and that she held those two prisoners inside it "by the space of twenty-four hours, without food or drink; thereby usurping the Queen's authority". She came in the Queen's will — that is, she submitted rather than stood trial — during the regency of Mary of Guise, and a note in the margin of the record reads Deletur, quo ad partem Regine, per preceptum: the Crown's part of the penalty was struck out by warrant. The jury is named, the local gentry of Renfrewshire among them. And the man who stood surety for satisfying the injured parties was John Campbell of Skipness — the man she went on to marry, between 31 August 1553 and 20 December 1556. After the Sempills the estate passed to the Stewarts of Ardgowan, said to have taken it in 1649, with a ratification of 1672 in favour of Sir Archibald Stewart of Blackhall naming Levan. In the 18th century that family became the Shaw Stewarts. In the 19th they built a large new house a short distance north of the old towers and called it Castle Levan as well, which is why the medieval tower is "Levan Castle" and the mansion is "Castle Levan" and almost every account since has muddled them. The parish minister writing the New Statistical Account in January 1842 lists both among the inhabited houses of Inverkip — "Leven House, belonging to Mrs M'Inroy; and Leven, the seat of Mr Crooks". Hugh Macdonald walked up to it in the 1850s and was let in by Mrs Crooks, who "generously permits such wayward wanderers as ourselves to spend a passing hour or two in the tower of other days", and found it ivy-smothered and roofless inside, with nettles on the hearth and wallflowers in the crevices, and open to any passing stranger except on Sundays. By 1879 the property is said to have belonged to John Polson, co-founder of the Brown & Polson cornflour firm; through the early 20th century the tower survived as a picturesque folly in the grounds of the newer house. A housing proposal brought the archaeologists. Renfrewshire's planning authority needed to know how far the barmkin and outbuildings ran, and after first work in 1966 there were seasons in 1970, 1971 and 1972. They traced the barmkin, found foundations in the courtyard read as a possible gatehouse, and dug a kitchen midden against the east side of the south tower holding some 5,000 fragments of bone and shell — oysters among them — with green-glazed pottery of the mid-15th to early 16th century, continental imports included, and a spurred clay pipe bowl of the mid-17th. When the tower was listed at Category B on 10 June 1971 the record described it in four words that date it exactly: "Roofless, existing to wallhead", with an archaeological dig in progress. The mansion was listed separately at Category C on 10 September 1979, as "3-storey; plain; stone-built; slated; (early XIX cent.)". Reconstruction began in 1980; between 1984 and 1987 the architect Ian Begg carried out a full refurbishment for the owners, the advertising executive and art collector David Pearson and his wife Sheila. They lived in it until they retired and sold in 1995, after which it became a bed and breakfast. Kim Munro took it on in 2016 and renovated again, and on 11 July 2018 she and Maria Hockin registered Castle Levan Bed and Breakfast LLP at the castle, both as designated members. The partnership shortened its accounting period to 31 December 2021, filed its last accounts in March 2022, applied to be struck off on 12 May and was dissolved on 9 August 2022.

Castle Levan is not open to visitors, and the bed and breakfast that made it briefly visitable has closed. Castle Levan Bed and Breakfast LLP, registered at the castle on Stirling Drive, Gourock PA19 1AH, applied to be struck off the register on 12 May 2022 and was dissolved on 9 August 2022. Its website was last captured by the Internet Archive in October 2021 and the domain no longer resolves — an old castle-levan.com link now returns nothing. Booking aggregators still carry the listing; it is stale. Do not travel on the strength of it, and do not turn up at the door expecting a tour. This is a private house. What can be done is to look at it. The tower stands on the seaward side of Cloch Road, the A770, at the south-west edge of Gourock, on the rim of the Leven Burn ravine, at grid reference NS 21584 76365 — 55.9471, -4.8587. It is a Category B listed building. The coast in front of it is public and worth the walk: Cloch Road runs south-west along the shore to the Cloch Point lighthouse, first lit on 11 August 1797 and built by Thomas Smith and Robert Stevenson, and on to Lunderston Bay, which has parking, paths and a beach. Gourock's railway station and the ferry terminals for Dunoon and Kilcreggan are some three kilometres north-east, and buses along Cloch Road pass the castle. One thing to settle before you go looking, because nearly every account confuses it: there are two buildings here with the same name. The medieval tower is listed as "Levan Castle (restored ruin)"; the plain three-storey early 19th-century house eighty-odd metres to the north is listed separately as "Castle Levan and West Lodge". That mansion has since been divided into flats and is now addressed as Castle Levan Manor, Cloch Road, PA19 1AY, where individual flats changed hands in 2023. The tower with the corbelled parapet and the round angle turrets — the one photographed on this page — is the old one. Note that the photograph shows it roofed and harled, as Ian Begg left it in 1987; the listing text, written in 1971, still calls it roofless. The other castles of the parish are mostly gone. Chrisswell, Gourock and Dunrod survive as sites only, and Inverkip Castle is about 3.6 kilometres away. The Kempock Stone, a standing stone long bound up with local superstition, is in Gourock itself, under three kilometres off, and makes a better stop than a locked gate.