SEVENTEEN
Even Naples in imagination cannot efface the quiet fertile comeliness of Penkill in reality, and when, beyond the immediate greenness, a gorgeous sunset glorifies the sea distance, one scarcely need desire aught more exquisite in this world.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, Letter to Anne Gilchrist (1870)
ONE OF THE ‘Ayrshire Alps’, Dersalloch Hill, is crowned by 23 wind turbines which dominate the horizon, and the ecotycoons want more, and bigger. Nearby, in irony, sits the 18th-century conservation village of Straiton, the realm of the Save Straiton for Scotland pressure group formed in 2013 to object to their being insidiously surrounded by giant turbines 50 metres higher than Blackpool Tower.
Despite the turbines, Straiton advertises itself as walking country, The village signpost even sports the slogan ‘Rambler Territory’. Like turbines or loathe them, it is worth a ramble to Lambdoughty glen and its chain of gurgling waterfalls up in the foothills. One of them, Tairlaw Linn, even features in the annals of English literature. It is here, during a day out with his friend, William Bell Scott, in the summer of 1869, that the troubled painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, contemplated suicide. Rossetti’s wife had died of an overdose of laudanum, and he had become an alcoholic. He was prone to thought disorder and addicted to whisky and chloral hydrate (‘knockout drops’, an ingredient made famous by one Mickey Finn, a crooked saloon owner in Chicago, who drugged customers with it, and then robbed them.).
William Bell Scott recorded in his Autobiographical Notes (1830 to 1882): ‘Never shall I forget the expression of Gabriel’s face when he bent over the precipice, peering into the unfathomed water dark as ink, in which sundry waifs flew round and round like lost souls in hell.’
Rossetti had told Scott: ‘One step forward, and I am free!’ He decided not to throw himself down the burn, however, although he would try to kill himself three years later, in England. He saw people staring at him from hollowed-out walls. He heard voices and was a hypochondriac. One doctor diagnosed ‘effusion of serum on the brain’ and said he was beyond all hope. If he recovered, he would have brain damage.
Penkill Castle, ensconced in cutely wooded Penwhapple Glen, was a summer haunt for such as Scott, Rossetti, his sister Christina, and William Morris, with whose wife Jane, Rossetti was conducting an affair. Rossetti wrote the poem The Stream’s Secret at Penwhapple Burn near the castle, which was a shrine for the Pre-Raphaelite movement. During a visit to Penkill, half a mile from Dailly, Rossetti wrote sonnets in a cave named after a covenanting fugitive. Wrote Scott: ‘Here I used to find him face to the wall lying in a shallow cave that went by the name of a seventeenth-century Covenanter, Bennan’s Cave, working out with much elaboration and little inspiration.’
Rossetti tried to get Jane Morris to spend what has become known as a dirty weekend with him (his friend William, who was so close to him that Rossetti named his pet wombat after him, wasn’t invited along).
I looked for the cave along Penwhapple glen, but it seems it vanished long ago as a result of some landslide. Penkill is still there, however. Campaigners fought to ‘buy it for the nation’ in 1995 but its American owner, Elton Eckstrand, a wealthy drag racing driver and lawyer, sold it to Scots-Canadian businessman Don Brown, who then sold it to a Chile-born film producer Patrick Dromgoole.
The previous owner, Evelyn May Courtney-Boyd, a descendant of Scott’s mistress, had become involved financially with the local milkman, Willie Hume, who reputedly told her that he and his wife would feed her if they moved into the lodge. He then asked to buy it. Later they moved into the 25-bedroom castle. Paintings from the collection began to appear in Scotland’s salerooms, including The Night-Hag, which now lives in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of them, painted by Scott, remained fastened above the mantelpiece with an inscription, ‘Move not this picture. Let it be. For love of those in effigy’.
Apparently, Hume tried to prise the painting from the wall with a poker, but he choked, and then died of angina. His wife suddenly left the castle and bought a pub, which failed. She then became a cleaner in a hospital. For the record, Penkill Castle appeared on Channel 4’s Come Dine with Me in 2011. I’ve no idea what happened to the milkman’s spouse.
