CHIEF:  Alastair Ivor Gilbert Boyd 7th Baron Kilmarnock                                  

Richard G. and Jerri Lynn Boyd

568 W. Friedrich Street

Rogers City, Mich. 49779

PENKILL CASTLE, AYRSHIRE
Home of Dr. Elton (AL) Eckstrand  (The Lawman) 
by Michael Hall

When, in 1857, the last of the Boyds of Penkill in the direct male line decided to rebuild his ancestors' castle he re-awoke fading memories of a famous family. Boyd had been a distinguished name in Scottish history since the 13th century; Sir Robert Boyd was a commander at Bannockburn, and a later Robert became regent of Scotland in 1466. One of his grandsons was the ancestor of the presents baron of Kilmarnock; another, Adam, was the first laird of Penkill.

Adam acquired the estate shortly after his marriage in about 1532. Thirty years later the previous owner was still claiming at law that he had been
wrongfully ejected. It was an age when property rights often gave way to
force; in 1558 Adam had to endure a four-day siege when a neighbor tried
to wrest the castle from him.

Penkill was well equipped by its site to withstand attach. It is on a western ridge of the Carrick Hills, four miles east of Girvan and the sea. The north and west the grounds falls steeply into a narrow glen carved by Penwhapple Burn. This picturesque setting has entranced almost every visitor. In 1888 William Morris wrote to his daughter Jenny: "the place is lovely: it lies on the hill-side on a spit of ground with a beck running on each side just like Naworth -----from the tower you can see the great wide firth (of Clyde) Ailsa Craig plain to see, & the mountains of Arran lying in the distance.

However, Morris's conservationist principles deplored the drastic rebuilding of the castle itself. Adam built----or perhaps took over----a simple, square, four storied tower, which had bartisans at its northwest and south-east corners. The stone-vaulted ground floor was a stable, above which were three chambers, the top one lit on the east wall by a fine, triangular-headed dormer ornamented with a rope moulding. A wing was added on the north side of the old tower in 1628 by Thomas Boyd, Adam's great-grandson, who also built a circular staircase tower in the angle between the two; a date panel over the entrance bears his monogram and that of his wife, Marion Mure of Rowallen.

In 1750 Thomas's grandson, Alexander Boyd, died childless and the laird-
ship passed to a cousin, Robert Boyd of Trochrig. Robert died in 1761,
bequeathing his estates to his nephew Spencer Boyd, who lived in Virginia. Neither Spencer nor his eldest son James, ever left America, and Penkill, uninhabited since 1750, fell into ruin.

Then, in 1792, Spencer's youngest son, also Spencer, inherited the Scottish estate from his brother and decided to live there. He moved in an 18th century house called Piedmont (now GLENDOUNE House) in Girvan, on land owned by the Boyds since 1544. A captain in the Ayrshire Fencible Cavalry, he had five children, and in 1807 set an unhappy precedent for the remaining Boyd generations by dying young. His only surviving son another Spencer, was married to Margaret Losh. 

Her family were industrialists with interest in both their native Cumberland and Newcastle upon Tyne. Margaret's father, William, was a partner of George Stephenson and manager of the Walker Iron Works at Newcastle, founder by his brother John. Another brother, James, was a good friend of Wordsworth, and the whole family had strong literary and artistic interests.

One of John's daughters was the celebrated Sarah Losh (1785-1853), 
architect of the remarkable Romanesque church at Wreay, near Carlisle

It is this background that must explain the artistic bent of Margaret's children, Spencer, a talented carver, and Alice, who became an accomplished painter. The death of their father of consumption (TB) only a year after Alice's birth in 1825 meant that the Loshes provided the children's sole family circle until their mother remarried. It was their grandfather, William Losh, who encouraged and paid for the rebuilding of Penkill.

A watercolour of the ruins (now at Penkill) and the sketch and plans published by MacGibbon and Ross in "Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland" (1887-1892) make clear what was done by Spencer's rather obscure choice of a architect, Alexander George Thomson of Glasgow (who had no known connection with his famous namesake, Alexander "Greek" Thomson). Although trained as a civil engineer rather than as an architect, he confidently deployed a robust medieval idiom at Penkill, his only recorded country-house commission (Fig 1). Little more than the west gable wall survived of the 1628 wing, which had to be completely reconstructed, but the original tower required only reroofing and the addition of a bulky new flue for the chimneys.

In the tower's first-floor room Thomson provided an almost grossly flamboyant stone chimneyhood (Fig 12), designed, William Bell Scott later said, to give the room "the character of a hall in a larger edifice". The most radical change was the replacement of the badly ruined staircase tower with a much enlarged version. Its pepper-grinder profile lends the castle a toy-fortress air.

By 1858 Spencer was able to move in and begin to furnish the rooms in an
antiquarian manner with old oak furniture and tapestries. He was an enthusiastic collector of antique pieces of carving and soon became known in the neighborhood for paying good money for "auld trash". His taste is most evident in the present dining room (Fig 11), a rich ensemble of tapestry and wood carving.

In March 1859, when Alice was staying in Newcastle with her grandfather to recover from the death of her mother the previous autumn, she had the meeting which was to determine the future course of her life and the history of Penkill. In need of a new interest, she decided to devote herself seriously to painting and so was given an introduction to the master of the Newcastle branch of the government School of Design, William Bell Scott, who had known Sarah Losh. 

Scott then aged 49 is an artist best remembered today for his paintings in the hall of the Trevelyan's home,  He was also a much-admired teacher and a prolific writer on art. Yet it was his poetry rather than his painting which attracted the attention of the young D.G. Rossetti and led to their meeting in 1847. This was Scott's introduction to the Pre-Raphaelites. His talents and gift for friendship meant that he rapidly became a highly valued member of Rossetti circle, a compensation for the quiet misery of his private life since his marriage in 1839.

In July 1860 he visited Penkill for the first time, and his relationship with the beautiful, eagerly affectionate Alice rapidly deepened into lifelong intimacy. "The `friendship at first sight' was confirmed," he recalled. "Time could not strengthen it, but the impression or instinct of sympathy was changed by experience into satisfied conviction and confident repose...My wife had faith in us too, and A.B.'s brother as well." He painted a beautiful double portrait of Spencer and Alice on the roof of Penkill (Fig 3), against a backdrop of glen and sea.

This unlooked-for happiness was abruptly marred by the death of Spencer
Boyd from heart failure in February 1865. Realizing that the unconventional nature of their household might now attract comment, Scott proposed painting a mural on the staircase wall as an excuse for his long visits. His interest in wall decoration went back to his unsuccessful entry in 1842 in the competition to provide murals for the palace at Westminster. At Wallington, he had painted in oil on canvases which were then fixed to the wall, but at Penkill he decided to paint directly onto the plaster.

As Scott explained in a lecture to the Institute of British Architects in 1868, the medium was wax dissolved in turpentine: "when employed on a surface of plaster not previously touched, the turpentine is absorbed with a portion of the colour and the oil in which the colours were originally ground, while the wax retains a great deal of luminosity." The almost glossy brilliance of much of the colour today proves the experiment successful. However, damp seemed an unconquerable enemy and within months the painting began to decay. The solution eventually adopted was to line the staircase with sheets of zinc at the points where the wall backed onto the exterior.

Scott chose an appropriately Scottish subject for the murals (Figs 4-7): The Kings Quair, a long poem written by James I of Scotland when he was imprisoned in Windsor Castle. The captive glimpses his beloved , Lady Jane Beaufort, in the garden, and in a dream is transported to the courts of Venus and Minerva. Portraits of friends appear throughout: Spencer Boyd, posthumously, as one of the castle guards (Fig 7); Christina Rossetti as Lady Jane; Swinburne and W.M. Rossetti as courtiers of Venus, together with Scott himself (Fig 4), accompanied by Alice's pet duck, Quasi.

Once the mural was finished, in August 1868, Scott turned his attentions to decorative painting elsewhere----dragons on the stairs (Fig 6); sunflowers and apple blossoms in window reveals; birds and beasts on his bedroom cornice (Fig 8). He also painted furniture, as gradually the castle filled with pictures by himself, Alice and their friends. The rich results are seen at their most delightful in the laird's bedroom (figs 9 and 10). Sleepers in the bed decorated with a thickly embroidered valance and carved posts and headboard awake to a ceiling painted with a vine trailing over trellis, above which dragonflies and swallows swoop in summer clouds.

Friends also provided furnishings. D.G. Rossetti, who spent two long holidays there in 1868 and 1869, at a time when Scott was one of his closet confidants, sent crates of old carvings, pieces of tapestry and blue-and-white china, which became part of what he called "those ingenious Chinese puzzles of arrangement which share with the reproving eyebrow the softer palpitations of W.B.s soul". Several of Rossetti's letters of 1868-1869 capture the castles relaxed atmosphere of art and animal, whisky, friends and endless talk.

In the winters Alice stayed with the Scotts at their London home and in summer the household moved to Penkill. There Scott, helped by Spencer's former factor, laid out an "old-fashioned" garden , with almost Art Nouveau ironwork in gates and fences designed by Scott and still-surviving bowers of honeysuckle and clematis. The last major project was the erection of a new hall between 1883 and 1885, entirely to Scott's plans, but on a site proposed for "future extension" in 1857. A simple oblong, with crow-stepped gables (and a stone owl on the parapet), it sits comfortably with the old buildings. The barn-like interior (Fig 2), which provided a ground-floor dining room for the now elderly couple and a large, well-lit space for displaying their paintings, is paneled with narrow pine planks above a frieze of gold and brown striped wall paper against which the small pictures were hung. In the passage linking the hall with the castle are four large, embroidered panels designed by Morris in the 1960s.

The unvaried pattern of life at Penkill was eventually broken in 1885 by Scott's recurrent attacks of angina, which confined him to the castle until his death in 1890. The grieving Alice helped to edit his Auto-biographical Notes, published in 1892. Unfortunately, Scott's frankness about elements in Rossetti's personality brought down a storm of abuse from which Scott's reputation never fully recovered. Alice died in 1897, and followed her grandfather's wishes by bequeathing Penkill to the descendants of her half-brother Henry Courtney, the child of her mother's second marriage.

For the next 75 years, the castle was the home of his spinster daughters. In the last decades of the youngest's life, Penkill came close to total disaster, as unscrupulous scholars, dealers and neighbors persuaded her to sell or give away her treasures. The scandal became public in a bizarre fashion: the local milkman was attempting to wrench from the wall the portrait of Spencer and Alice, above which Scott had written "Move not this picture, let it be for love of those in effigy", when he suddenly fell dead.

Penkill's eventual sale, in 1978, might have been the sorry end to this grim fairy tale had not Dr. Elton August (Al) Eckstrand, an American lawyer and passionate admirer of Pre-Raphaelite art and philosophy, decided to buy the castle complete with contents. He has devoted his life to Penkill's preservation, replacing the lead stolen from the roof, replanting the garden and starting the repair of the murals, as well as buying back items such as Christina Rossetti's bed. 

Scott rightly compared Penkill with "the palace of Sleeping Beauty, in its enchanted and limitless repose". Twice it has faced abandonment; twice, in the late 18th century and today, American-born lairds have come to its rescue. The castle's long-term preservation, with its contents and decoration intact, is a matter of national importance.

COUNTRY LIFE March 21, 1991 Photographs by Tim Imrie. Used with permission.

The Lawman - Al Eckstrand

Return of the Lawman - Al Eckstrand

Dear Richard Boyd 

While researching lot 97 in our Modern First Editions auction to be held on Thursday 16th December I came across your website and thought I'd drop you a line in case you or any other Boyd clan member might be interested in this. There are images of three of the photos linked to the description online. 

 Best wishes

 Chris Albury
Cataloguer and Valuer
(Historical Documents, Ephemera, Autographs & Photographs)
Dominic Winter Book Auctions
The Old School, Maxwell Street, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN1 5DR, UK
Tel +44 (0)1793 611340 Fax +44 (0)1793 491727

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