Castles, Churches, Plantations and Monuments

The showpiece of the Crawford legacy stands as one of the longest family owned castles in the world. The castle keep was started in 1236. The castle has grown into a fine Scottish example of castles. It features 27 rooms with a grand dining room and the King Charles room. Stay for a while in the Queen Mary of Scots room. Bask in the sun overlooking the peat filled streams that feed the livestock and working ranch of the Ayrshire estate. The Crawford family has lived in the estates for over 800 years. 

The Laird and Lady of Craufurd – the Houison Craufurd's – have added a fine dining restaurant, “The Lairds Table” for those that want to be treated like royalty. The restaurant overlooks the estate fishery where many a generations of fishermen have come to try their luck and swap “Big Fish” stories. 

Take a walk on the estates in the quiet forests paths. Or, try your skills and courage at the TreeTop Trials. The estate features a challenging ropes course high up in the trees to test your courage and your strength. You don’t even have to be a Crawford to enjoy the course or the archery.

Perhaps the best-known monument in Mowbray Park is that dedicated to the Sunderland sailor, Jack Crawford. The monument was unveiled in 1890 and depicts Jack in his most famous act: nailing a flag to a ship’s mast. Strangely the monument was erected rather late as Jack died in 1831 and the heroic act for which he was famed took place in 1797.

Crawford was born in Sunderland’s ‘East End’, the port area of ‘Old Sunderland’ as it is known. He worked for a time as a keelman before he was enforced into the Royal Navy by a press gang in 1796.

On October 11, 1797 a British fleet under Admiral Duncan was engaged in the Battle of Camperdown off the coast of Holland against the Dutch fleet when the mast of the Admiral’s ship The Venerable was shot down along with his flag.

Lowering of the flag signified a surrender, so the brave (or perhaps inebriated) Jack, climbed what remained of the mast – he was probably ordered to so so – and nailed the flag in place. He performed this heroic act as the Dutch fired their bullets upon him, with one bullet piercing his cheek. Crawford’s actions are believed to have given rise to that well-known phrase “nailing your colours to the mast”.

The Colonel Crawford Burn Site Monument is a war monument in rural Wyandot County, Ohio, United States. Placed in the 1870s, it commemorates the death by burning of Colonel William Crawford during the concluding years of the American Revolution. The stone monument itself was long the subject of local interest, and it has been named a historic site.

As the end of the American Revolution approached, warfare continued in the backcountry of modern Ohio; British-allied Indians continued to harass the American settlers. In 1782, a regiment of Virginia soldiers was sent in reprisal to destroy Indian villages on the Sandusky River, under the command of William Crawford, a friend of victorious General George Washington. However, the Crawford expedition ended on June 4 after a skirmish south of modern-day Carey, and the Americans retreated. Colonel Crawford was captured by the Indians after the battle, and seven days later he was tortured and burned at the stake on the banks of Tymochtee Creek in present-day northeastern Wyandot County.

As the centenary of the burning approached, a movement arose to commemorate Crawford's death with a monument. The movement's proponents were aroused by a strong sense of the incident's importance: besides being the earliest major event in Wyandot County history, it was the county's most prominent event of all time in their opinion. One of the county's leading lawyers, Curtis Berry, originated the idea of marking the site. The marker is made of sandstone from Berea, Ohio, worked in the shape of a cannon and cut approximately 8.5 feet (2.6 m) tall. Local labor at B.L. Bauscher's firm in Upper Sandusky performed the stone cutting during the middle of 1877, and the monument was dedicated later in the year. The dedication ceremony saw thousands of people in attendance. For many years, the local Pioneer Association hosted an annual Pioneer Picnic at the monument, until the deaths of older residents and the apathy of younger residents saw the demise of the event in 1935. Interest returned in the 1970s: locals opposed the construction of a proposed electric transmission line by the site, and it became a popular location for school field trips.

Image by Mcclellan28 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19910163

 The substantial remains of the old castle and sixteenth century manor house of Kilbirnie lie west of the town of Kilbirnie in North Ayrshire, Scotland, on the lower slopes of the Glengarnock Hills, in the old Barony of Kilbirnie. The building is also variously known as the Place of Kilbirnie, The Place, or Kilbirnie House.

The site lies close to a stream and small but deep ravine that once provided a defensive function for the castle site. The castle and manor house themselves are not in the grounds of the Kilbirnie Place Golf Club, which was itself laid out in 1925 on the old landscaped 'pleasure grounds' once attached to the castle site.

The OS maps show that a much later estate and house called Place was located nearby, built by the Knox family but now mostly demolished