Close to Prestwick Airport, a few miles from Ayr, a handsome monument stands on high ground. It was erected in the middle of the eighteenth century to commemorate a local boy, of very humble beginnings, who had made a fortune in the service of the East India Company. The monument came close to total collapse before, hurrah, a local campaign secured its future.
Macrae is said to have left his native Ayr when little more than a boy and found work on boats leaving the busy port. He worked his way up the ranks to the influential position of Governor of Fort St George, a British power base at Madras (now Chennai) in India. In his time as Governor (he held the position from 1725-1730), Macrae ‘acquired a handsome Estate’, and he returned to Britain a wealthy man in around 1731. In 1736 he was said to be laying out his fortune in ‘purchasing Lands’ and this included an estate at Monkton, near Ayr, which he called Orangefield in honour of William III – Macrae also funded the erection of a statue of William of Orange in Glasgow in 1735.
Four years after Macrae’s death in June 1744, work began on his monument. No records have been found to explain the planning behind the structure – there is no inscription and the architect is unknown. We don’t even know who commissioned the monument, although Macrae’s sole heir and executor the Countess of Glencairn, née Elizabeth Maguire, seems likely. Whilst there has been speculation that the structure was intended as Macrae’s mausoleum, his will simply requests that he be ‘decently buried’.
John Swan began work on the monument in 1748, but the near complete structure is recorded as having collapsed the following year before being rebuilt in 1750 (and this is corroborated by the discovery of damaged stone in the rubble infill during the restoration). This information, the only early history of the monument the Flâneuse can find, is recorded in the second volume of James Paterson’s History of Ayr, published in 1852, and all later descriptions of the fine monument rely on his account.
A century after it was built surveyors mapping the county of Ayrshire noted ‘Macrae’s Monument’ as a ‘very prominent object’ (earlier maps simply mark the structure as ‘Monument’). It is unsurprising then that in the second half of the nineteenth century it was used as a landmark for the hunt, with many reports of the hounds and their prey racing by. Robert Bryden (1865-1939) took this view in 1912, and by that date the monument was ‘in a rather dilapidated condition’, although no major issues can be seen in his fine etching.
In 1967 an officer from the National Monuments Record of Scotland visited the site. He wrote that the ‘small pylonic monument’ was ‘well executed’ and noted the maritime motifs which featured on the four faces. There was however ‘considerable decay of the stonework’, although some repointing was underway when he visited.
These motifs include a shell, dolphins, a stylised castellated building on a rock, a trident and an anchor. Mr Hay’s detailed investigation of the monument took longer than expected, with an added delay caused by his Land Rover getting stuck in a stony patch. Disgruntled and hungry, he finished his report with the note ‘No lunch’.
The tower continued to decay, and by the end of the twentieth century it was in a most precarious condition, having been damaged in a storm. The monument was restored in the early years of the current century under the auspices of the Three Towers Trust working with Ayr-based ARPL Architects. There was strong support from the landowner, Glencara Estates, and from the local community, as well as funding from Historic Environment Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund. The obelisk had to be taken down to enable the rebuilding of the square base, and the shaft was re-erected once that had been consolidated.
Macrae was buried in Monkton churchyard, but no stone marks the spot (although a modern headstone records that he is interred somewhere in the churchyard). The story is told locally that a group of Macrae’s friends, in high spirits after a two-day drinking spree, exhumed his body from the churchyard and re-interred it in the newly-completed monument. Human remains of four adults and two children were found in the monument during the restoration work, but were thought to be of a later date. Like much else about the monument, the identity of those whose remains were found remains a mystery.
In the jet-setting 1940s Macrae’s former estate became home to Prestwick Airport, with the mansion as its centrepiece – Orangefield is probably the only country house to end its days with an air traffic control tower plonked on its roof. The building is sadly no more.
The monument (upgraded to Category A in 1994), was once a distant landmark, but is now on the edge of a new housing estate and is easy to reach from the road named…
The Flâneuse thanks Susan Kellerman for sharing her research into the monument, undertaken at the time of its restoration. Thanks also to Peter Drummond, of Peter Drummond Architects. Peter was part of the ARLP team at the time of the restoration.
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