Robert Adam’s Culzean Castle is a dream home for all primates. By Lucinda Lambton
Culzean Castle in Ayrshire is the queen of architectural endeavour.
It gazes out to sea while hollering distinction of the highest order – from the enchanting Gothic duck house to the Monkey Pagoda. The magnificent house was built between 1777 and 1792 by the renowned architect Robert Adam.
Where else could you find a richer assembly of buildings?
The Oyster Pool was created by the 9th Earl of Cassilis, a famed English ‘connoisseur’, who lived for years at a time in Italy, from where he sent home crates of statuary, as well as works by such artists as Piranesi.
He was always on the go. In 1773, he planted his oyster bed below Culzean. To create this private affair, great flagstones were embedded into the rocks. They still survive, along with traces of the iron posts that had a metal mesh attached to them to prevent the matured oysters from being swept away by the tide.
When he died in 1775, the estate was inherited by his brother David, another pleasingly cultivated figure, who was to spend well and prodigiously on the place.
Robert Adam’s design for the Home Farm was of striking originality. Built in local sandstone of various hues, four crowstepped buildings, surmounted by stone crosses, stand at right angles to four arched and turreted ranges, which together form a hexagon enclosing a large central yard.
Adam’s plans survive – with buildings symmetrically shooting forth like a cartwheel. They show a long ‘Ox House’ and ‘Stables’ as well as a ‘Stable for Cattle’, flanked by the ‘Tool House’ and quarters for ‘Swine’. Even four buildings labelled ‘Privy’ were marked as essential and carefully drawn by Adam.
A local minister wrote charmingly of the cows’ contentment. They were fed with fine-cut red clover.
Cassilis then gave Adam the job of both classicising and castellating this medieval stronghold a few hundred yards north along the cliff top.
The 12th Earl of Cassilis, later the 1st Marquess of Ailsa – a handsome-as-hell American – took over the estate in 1794, aged 24, only two years after his father, New Yorker Captain Archibald Kennedy, had inherited the Earldom.
Both of them had to grapple with their forebears’ alarming debts, as well as doing battle with a rival Kennedy cousin claimant. As a result, the affairs of the estate became frozen.
So it was years before the 12th Earl was able to realise his schemes for the place. When he did, he did so with a vengeance – landscaping, building and beautifying on a grand scale, diverting public roads and levelling lands.
With the damming of the Hogston Burn, Culzean’s only natural stream, a 13-acre pond was formed. An island was created, planted with trees and given the added charm of an octagonal, Gothic duck house as a nesting place from which eggs could be collected. The pond could, and still can be, waded through with ease.
The Monkey House was built in the early-19th century to look like – of all things – a Chinese pagoda, with little roofs flicking up at the edges in ever- decreasing tiers, in the Chinese style. It was built in 1814, along with other sweeping additions – the pond, the duck house, an aviary and three Gothic lodges.
The 3rd Marquess of Ailsa hunted throughout the winter, yachted throughout the summer and drained Culzean’s coffers. By the 1930s, the Monkey Pagoda had become roofless.
When I photographed it in 1985, it appeared for all the world to be, of all things, a Gothic ruin. The accounts of it having been a Chinese pagoda for monkeys seemed too fantastical, or so I thought. In 1997, it was restored in full measure to its original idiosyncratic form. So it was that a tall tower with multiple eaves was revealed, where the Cassilis family would have taken their tea, while various creatures were given their quarters below.
At one time, it was an aviary. At others, it was lived in by swans – but its most exotic tenant by far was unquestionably a monkey. The new balustrades of the outer stairs were designed with monkey’s tails. The weathervane, too, is a monkey cavorting in the sky.
In 1945, Culzean was given to the National Trust of Scotland. In 1969, the grounds were declared Scotland’s first country park.
The Home Farm was rebuilt as the Park Centre. Salt-laced wind had eroded the stones and all the slates were in ruins. But with a 75-per-cent grant from the Countryside Commission and a good deal of skill, the buildings were saved and beautifully restored in 1973.
All in all, a considerable triumph.
