A town on the move
In 1746 an English colonel of dragoons stationed in Ayr summed up the town as "a poor miserable dog hole". Within a few decades it changed beyond recognition.
Common lands were enclosed and planted, the river was embanked, and the first New Bridge was built in 1786 to 1789, with new, wider streets. The Boat Vennel was no longer the main road to the harbour.
The better-off moved to the country or to handsome new houses, such as Wellington Square, built on what in 1775 was the town's washing green. Beside them, the old house in its crowded lane must have seemed very uncomfortable.
Sold to a fisherman
Dr Robert Muir, who had studied medicine in Edinburgh, London and France, was living in London in 1770 when he sold the house. It was already let to William Fleck, a shipmaster.
The buyer was no laird or merchant but Daniel Bruce, described as a fisher, and later as a boatman. He paid £61 1s. Twenty years later the average yearly rent of a house in Ayr was £10 to £20, so the old Hall's value had sunk very low.
A house divided
At about this time a tall staircase tower was built into the angle between the house and its wing, rising high above the rest and "quite spoiling its proportions". It suggests the house was already divided into separate homes.
The owners and tenants that followed read like characters from one of John Galt's novels: John Greenlees, innkeeper; Robert Bruce, stocking-maker, who sold it in 1796 to Adam Bowie, ship carpenter; and in 1809 Mary Hamilton, widow of a shipmaster, who left it to her children in 1820. It changed hands again in 1828 and in 1853.
History forgotten
The house is not marked on Armstrong's map of Ayr of 1775. It is not mentioned in the Statistical Account of 1791, the New Statistical Account of 1845, or the great survey of Scotland's castles and houses by MacGibbon and Ross.
Only the name clung on. In 1847 the historian James Paterson noted that "another old tenement still exists in the Boat Vennel, which bears the name of Loudoun House".
Its corner of the town, between the river and the Town Hall, was a favourite subject for artists in search of the picturesque.
Marked for demolition
In 1903 an outbreak of typhus at Loudoun Hall was reported to the Burgh Council. The building was found to be dilapidated, with a foul privy in the courtyard, and home to five families, two of them in badly lit rooms.
Nothing was done until 1936, when it was described as a three-storey lodging house of one two-roomed and six one-roomed homes, and included in the Boat Vennel Clearance Order. Loudoun Hall was going to be pulled down.
Sources: Fergusson 1950, Close 2025.