Rubble remains of Turnberry Castle _Illustration from 'The British isles - Cassell Petter & Galpin Part 6 Picturesque Europe. Picturesque Europe was an illustrated set of Magazines published by Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. of London, Paris and New York in 1877. The publications depicted tourist haunts in Europe, with text descriptions and steel and wood engravings by eminent artists of the time, such as Harry Fenn, William H J Boot, Thomas C. L. Rowbotham, Henry T. Green , Myles B. Foster, John Mogford , David H. McKewan, William L. Leitch, Edmund M. Wimperis and Joseph B. Smith.
The mysterious rubble remains of Turnberry Castle surrounding the now iconic lighthouse appear to be a confused muddle of grassy mounds. "However in the late 13th century this site was the great coastal stronghold of the Bruce family of Annandale, Earls of Carrick",said Andrew Spratt, monument manager at Dirleton Castle who, in his spare time painstakingly researches, reconstructs, and then brings long disappeared or ruinous castles back to life on canvas. He's spent the last 30 years producing paintings of many such castles around Scotland after spending the summer working beside his father at Tantallon Castle as a teenager. He began by doing an ink drawing of King James's blockade of Tantallon as his first reconstruction. Author Nigel Tranter was his mentor and from whom he borrowed a huge library of reference material. Andrew refers to his work as being a bit like putting together a huge jig-saw puzzle. Old prints supply vital clues for his reconstruction work. But, he admits, piecing together what Turnberry Castle actually looked like was a real challenge as there was only a few stumps of wall remaining on the site and there were no prints to use as a reference point. It took Andrew two days of mapping the site to determine that it had been divided into two parts with a gatehouse and keep courtyard and an upper main keep and boathouse. Andrew says it was possible to determine what Turnberry Castle had looked like by carefully charting, level-by-level, its original architectural elements. "Turnberry, a stone castle, was perched on the rocky promontory protected on three sides by the sea and defended on the landward side by a great dry ditch, still evident today", explained Andrew. "Inland sat the original village of Turnberry, with the usual collection of wood and wattle constructed buildings with thatched roofs. Containing houses, storage barns, stables, brewhouses and so on. Further still inland this castle-town would have been surrounded by a wooden
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