Comlongon Castle

Comlongon Castle stands a kilometre west of Clarencefield in Dumfries and Galloway, and it has been shut since April 2019, when the hotel that occupied it went into sequestration. Its ghost story is unusual in having a document behind it. On 17 October 1570 James VI granted away the lands of Marion Carruthers, co-heiress of Mouswald, because they had fallen to the Crown through her "wilfull slaying of hir self in leiping ovir the wall of the Castell touer and fortalice of Cullyngane" three weeks earlier. Marion was twenty-eight, and she had spent twenty-two years resisting a guardian — Sir James Douglas of Drumlanrig, who owned the gift of her marriage and wanted her barony. Comlongon was the house of the uncle who defended her, not a prison her family kept her in. The oldest printed folklore, published in 1888, amounted to a patch of ground on the battlements where the grass would not grow. The Green Lady, the smell of apples and the bookable haunted bedroom arrived four centuries after her death, with a castle hotel that sold them.

Comlongon has been called a fifteenth-century castle for so long that the label has stuck to it in gazetteers and in the statutory listing. The documents point a little later. A licence recorded in the Register of the Privy Seal of Scotland, immediately after an entry dated 1501, gave leave "to big a towre and fortalice"; the building appears by its own name in 1508, as the turris ac fortalicium de Cunlungane. The likeliest builder is John Murray of Cockpool, who had succeeded his father in 1493. The Murrays had held the ground since the early fourteenth century, when Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, granted Comlongon to his kinsman William Murray of Cockpool. The woman whose name the castle now carries was never its owner. Marion Carruthers was the younger of the two daughters of Simon Carruthers, tenth laird and fifth baron of Mouswald, a few miles east across the Lochar Moss. A retour expede at the court of Lochmaben on 13 March 1563 records that she had turned twenty-one at the feast of Saint Andrew last past, which fixes her birth at 30 November 1541. Her father was killed in July 1548 in a fight with the broken men of the Debatable Land, in the same season that carried off Lord Carlisle and the lairds of Kirkmichael, Kirkconnell and Logan. He left no son. On 13 August of that year Queen Mary granted the ward and marriage of his two daughters, Janet and Marion, to Sir James Douglas of Drumlanrig. That grant is the whole of the story, and it is worth stating plainly because the popular version gets it backwards. Marion was not being pressed into marriage by her own family. She was six years old when the gift of her marriage became a piece of property belonging to a neighbouring laird who wanted the barony of Mouswald, and her family spent the next twenty-two years trying to get her out of his hands. On 21 March 1558 her three Murray uncles, Charles Murray of Cockpool, Archibald Murray and Cuthbert Murray, obtained letters from the Lords of Council commanding Sir James to produce Janet and Marion, then "now past tuttorie and 14 years of age complete", because he would not allow them the liberty to visit their friends. Janet gave way. She married Thomas Rorison of Bardannoch, and by a contract of 14 March 1560 her half of Mouswald passed to Douglas, in exchange for a dowry, an infeftment in Glencairn, and two years' keep for her household. Marion did not give way. In January 1563 she was in Edinburgh before Queen Mary and the Lords of Secret Council. On the 29th Sir James raised letters of restraint complaining that she had absolutely refused the husband he had offered and intended to marry whom she pleased. On the 30th he came to her in person and offered her John, son and heir of James McMath of Dalpeddar, requiring her to complete the contract in the kirk of Borthwick; the record notes that Marion refused, and "declarit that sche wald not be at the said James' byddin". Two days later she was placed with her kinsman John, Lord Borthwick, for forty days, and neither she nor Lord Borthwick was allowed to move her without notice to the Queen and Council, under a penalty of £2,000. That September her guardian tried a different lock. On 13 September 1563 Thomas Borthwick of Pryncado and Michael Borthwick of Glengelt entered a bond in the caution-book of the justiciary court binding themselves for a thousand pounds that "Marione Carutheris, ane of þe twa heretrices of Mowswald", should not marry "ane cheif tratour nor uþer brokkin man of þe cuntre". It is one of the few papers in the case that still survives in the original register, and both sureties signed it. By 1564 Marion was at Comlongon, in the house of her uncle Charles Murray of Cockpool. On 24 June that year Queen Mary confirmed a charter making over her lands to him; the deed itself was executed at Comlongon, witnessed by William Somervell, vicar of Kirkbean, and Matthew Sadler, rector of Pennersax. It was a shield, and it did not hold: Douglas obtained letters of inhibition on 16 February 1565 arguing that his gift of ward and marriage barred her from disposing of her own heritage, and he won. On 25 September 1570 Marion Carruthers died at Comlongon. She was twenty-eight. Twenty-two days later, on 17 October, King James VI granted the escheat of her lands to Sir William Douglas of Hawick, and the deed states why they had fallen to the Crown: "throw the said Marioun Carrutheris wilfull slaying of hir self in leiping ovir the wall of the Castell touer and fortalice of Cullyngane, upoun the twenty-five day of September last bipast, and thairthrow wilfullie breaking of hir awin craig and banis quhairof sche deit". Craig is the neck. Suicide forfeited the estate to the Crown; the Crown gave it to a Douglas within three weeks. The family's own historians, writing in 1934, declined to choose between despair and murder, and so does this page. The tower outlived everyone in the case. A mansion was built beside it around 1610 and by 1624 the tower itself seems to have been abandoned as a dwelling; another house went up on the east side about 1730 for David Murray, 5th Viscount Stormont. In 1890 the Dumfries architect James Barbour designed a Scots baronial replacement, which burned before it was finished and was rebuilt around 1900 by Barbour with John McLintock Bowie. The new roof was heavy enough to push the old tower's walls outward, and oak bracing had to be inserted early in the twentieth century to hold them. From January 1942 until February 1952 the mansion was a Barnardo's home, first for children under five evacuated from the bombed cities and later a reception home and a training centre for nursery staff. In 1984 William Murray, 8th Earl of Mansfield, sold the estate to Tony Ptolomey, who spent seven years converting tower and mansion into a hotel and handed it to his son Philip in 1995. The hotel traded until 22 April 2019, when the partnership behind it went into sequestration and every booking was cancelled. It has been shut ever since.

Comlongon is closed and there is no visit to plan. This is the single most important thing to know about it, and almost every page online still describes it in the present tense as a castle hotel and wedding venue. The business stopped trading on 22 April 2019, when the partnership that ran it entered sequestration; Johnston Carmichael were appointed to deal with creditors and asked anyone holding a booking to contact them. The old hotel address, Comlongon Castle, Clarencefield, Dumfries DG1 4NA, and the telephone and email that still turn up in directories no longer reach anybody. The estate was later bought by David Thomson and Teresa Church, the owners of the Annandale Distillery and the Globe Inn in Dumfries, and it is now held by Comlongon Estate Ltd, which has published a phased restoration plan and eventually intends to return the buildings to hospitality use. No reopening date has been announced. In August 2026 Dumfries and Galloway Council approved a package of structural works described as necessary to secure the immediate future of the building: stabilisation and propping, removal of some internal wall linings and, tellingly, the fitting of security grilles to stop trespassing and antisocial behaviour. In other words the owners are fencing people out of a building that is being held up while it is repaired. It is private ground, it is a category A listed structure on the Historic Environment Scotland list, and going to look at it is neither welcome nor safe. If you are in that corner of the Solway coast anyway, the things that are actually open are close. The Ruthwell Cross, one of the outstanding pieces of Anglo-Saxon sculpture in Britain, stands in a purpose-built apse inside Ruthwell parish church in the same parish as the castle, on the B724 between Clarencefield and Ruthwell; it is free. Caerlaverock Castle, the moated triangular fortress of the Maxwells that appears in Marion's story as the seat of the Lord Maxwell who occupied Mouswald, is a short drive west along the coast and is in Historic Environment Scotland's care.