Extract from:
Gourock, Inverkip & Wemyss Bay in Old Picture Postcards
William Holland
ISBN 90 288 4739
Castle Levan, Gourock. Located close by the 19th century mansion house of the same name, the ancient 15th century Castle Leven with 16th century additions, stands on a bluff of land above the Cloch Road, no distance at all from the Firth of Clyde two miles south of central Gourock. Owned first by the Mortons, then the Sempills, it was by the 1890s in the hands of the Shaw Stewart family. For a long time the castle was a ruin, until its restoration around 1980. Hugh MacDonald states in his book ‘Days at the Coast’ that in 1857 the interior of the castle was telling ‘a sad tale of the encroaching elements: whilst the nettle domesticated on the silent hearth’. He adds that the building was wrapped in a great massy shroud of ivy and that, at the time of his book ‘the castle was open at all times (Sundays excepted) for the inspection of the stranger’. He also stated this was a ‘lonely edifice’.
