Dundaff

Dunduff Castle
Dunduff, South Ayrshire, Scotland GB grid reference NS2719216370
Dunduff Castle from the south following restoration
Dunduff Castle
Coordinates	55°24′39″N 4°43′52″W / 55.410704°N 4.731241°W / 55.410704; -4.731241
Site information
Owner	Private
Open to the public	No
Condition	Restored
Site history
Built	Circa 1696
In use	17th century
Materials	Stone

Dunduff Castle is a restored stair-tower in South Ayrshire, Scotland, built on the hillside of Brown Carrick Hills above the Drumbane Burn, and overlooking the sea above the village of Dunure.

As a place name Dunduff may contain the Gaelic elements for "hill" or "fort" and "stag", as in Dundaff near Fintry. Other suggestions are that Duff is a personal name, therefore "Fort of Duff" or "Black Hill Fort" from the Gaelic 'Dun Dùbh.

Glennie identifies Dunduff Castle with Dindywydd, a site mentioned by Aneirin or Neirin, a Dark Age Brythonic poet, in one of his Arthurian poems as preserved in a late 13th-century manuscript known as the Book of Aneirin.

Lying to the east of Dunduff Farm on a rocky knoll, this tower castle was built to an L-shaped plan, with a square three floored stair-tower in the re-entrant angle on the south. Three barrel-vaulted chambers are on the ground floor and these were accessed via the lobby of the tower. A private chamber on the first floor was accessed by a corridor that ran the length of the main block. A fireplace in the wing heated the hall, with its splayed window embrasure. An intermediate floor once existed, as indicated by joist sockets. Window and door features of the original ruin suggest construction in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

The General Roy map of 1747–55 shows a Dunduff Mill associated with the castle; this mill is also recorded in a charter of 1581. William Aiton's map of 1808 shows Dunduff Castle, however it is not annotated as a ruin, although Dunure is.

Groome refers to the ruin in 1903 as a baronial fortalice.

In 1696 the castle was recorded as being nearly finished. Smith sees it has having been left unfinished. The cartographers show a Dunduff Castle as entire from Pont's maps (1560–1614) until the advent of Armstrong's map of 1775, which marks Dunduff as a ruin.

There is therefore some considerable doubt that Dunduff Castle was ever completed. Abercrummie in A Description of Carrict lists Dunduff among the houses of the Gentry in Carrick as "a house on the coast never finished".

In 1891 the Rev R Lawson in his book, Places of Interest about Maybole with Sketches of Persons of Interest, states:-

On the hill side above stand the ruins of the unfinished castle of Dunduff a local illustration of that searching question of our Lord's—" Which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build and was not able to finish."