Edzell Castle
| Edzell Castle | ||
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 Edzell Castle and the gardens |
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| Creation time : | between 1520 and 1610 | |
| Castle type : | Tower house with inner courtyard | |
| Conservation status: | ruin | |
| Construction: | Red sandstone | |
| Geographical location | 56 ° 48 '42.6 " N , 2 ° 40' 48.1" W | |
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Edzell Castle is a ruined castle from the 16th century and is located eight kilometers north of the village of Brechin in Angus , Scotland . Constructed from the Tower House with other buildings within a circular wall, the system was supplemented at the beginning of the 17th century by the Walled Garden , which is still preserved today .
history
Early attachment
The first castle dates back to the middle of the 12th century. A construction made of wood on a hill formed the motte and thus the center of the Edzell settlement. The castle was the seat of the "Abbott" (or "Abbe") family and guarded the entrance to an important route into the Highlands, the "Mouth of Glenesk".
Medieval castle
The Abbott family was followed by the Stirling of Glenesk family as Lords of Edzell. In 1358, with the marriage of Katherine, heiress of the Stirling family, and Alexander, the third son of David Lindsay of Crawford, the property passed to the Lindsay family. David, a son of that marriage, was named Earl of Crawford in 1398 .
Edzell was handed over to his son Walter around 1450 by David, 3rd Earl of Crawford, and thus the home of the younger line of the Lindsay family, known as "the light-hearted" ( "the light-hearted" ). In 1513 Walter's son David inherited the property and decided to build a new building around 1520. The old castle was demolished and a little further away, a residential tower with a circular wall and inner courtyard was built in a more protected location. However, the chosen position is overlooked by higher ground from the north, so that one can assume that defense was not the most important point in this choice of location.
His cousin, the 8th Earl of Crawford, had disinherited his own son Alexander, named Wicked Master . This made David the 9th Earl of Crawford in 1542. He then expanded the existing castle around 1550 to include the west wing with a new entrance gate and hall. Around the same time he built Invermark Castle as a hunting lodge about ten kilometers north . The title of Earl of Crawford was returned to the older line upon his death.
Sir David Lindsay, Lord Edzell
David Lindsay, son of the 9th Earl, was educated in Paris and Cambridge and then toured Europe. He was knighted in 1581, appointed "Lord of Session" in 1593 and a member of the Privy Council in 1598. He made various attempts to open up the soil, which also included afforestation. Miners from Nuremberg were invited to look for precious metals.
In August 1562 David Lindsay received Queen Maria at Edzell Castle. The Queen was on a tour with the aim of appeasing the rebellious George Gordon, 5th Earl of Huntly , and spent two nights at the castle. A Secret Council meeting was held during her stay. Her son King Jacob VI. visited the castle twice; in June 1580 and August 1589.
Towards the end of the 16th century, David began building the north wing and the associated round tower. As a further addition to the complex, a walled garden was planned, the design of which he began in 1604; also to pay tribute to the unification of the kingdoms the year before. The garden was planned both as a retreat from everyday life and as a place for important guests. Similar gardens were not uncommon in Renaissance Scotland , but this garden endured.
David Lindsay died in 1610, heavily indebted to his son by paying penalties, leaving both the north wing and the garden unfinished. The garden was hastily completed after his death.
Decay
Even if other possessions of the covenanters David Lindsay (son of the aforementioned Lord Edzell) were attacked, Edzell Castle was not affected by the actions of the loyal James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose between 1643 and 1645.
Oliver Cromwell's troops invaded Scotland during the English Civil War. The castle was captured by them in 1651 and held for about a month.
In the course of the Royalist Rebellion, John Lindsay was taken prisoner from his own house on December 10, 1653 , but was freed by English troops the next day.
In the time of the Presbyterian Settlements of 1689, John Lindsay, Lord of Edzell, switched to Episcopalism . When he and his followers were then refused to use the parish church, the masses were held in the hall of Edzell Castle.
The castle began to fall into disrepair around the time of the Jacobite Uprising in 1715 . The last Lord Lindsay of Edzell, also a David, supported the exiled James Stuart , the "Old Pretender". He sold the castle to the 4th Earl of Panmure, also a Jacobite, for £ 192,502 Scot- £, the equivalent of about £ 16,042 sterling. The Earl of Panmure was expropriated after the failed rebellion and Edzell Castel was sold by the Crown to the "York Buildings Company". This began with an "asset strip" butchering the castle complex.
The castle saw its last military action during the second Jacobite revolt in 1746, when it was occupied by government troops from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. This caused further damage to the buildings. Later in 1764 the York Buildings Company went bankrupt. The castle has now been systematically cleared to pay off the debt; the roofs were also removed. Beeches that formed an avenue between the castle and the village were felled; the remains of the estate were sold to William Maule, Earl Panmure of Forth. After his death in 1782, the property was passed on to his nephew George Ramsay, 8th Earl of Dalhousie.
The castle today
Edzell Castle remained in the possession of the Earls of Dalhousie, who hired an administrator for the property from 1870. The house used today as a visitor center was built for this in 1901. In 1932 the Walled Garden was taken over by the state, and the remainder of the property followed in 1935.
Like Edzell Castle, Motte Castle Hillock is protected as a Scheduled Monument . The garden was added to the Inventory of Historic Gardens and Designed Landscapes list; the caretaker's house is under protection as a category B monument. The associated pigeon house, on the other hand, is protected as a monument of the highest category A.
The castle and gardens are managed by Historic Scotland .
architecture
Early attachment
The motte (called Castle Hillock ) is the only remnant of the first Edzell Castle. The low and largely natural hill is to be found southwest of today's castle, about 300 meters away. It lies in a loop of the West Water creek and measures around 16 × 36 meters at a height of around 4 meters. A castle courtyard with a diameter of about 100 × 60 meters surrounded the castle and was bordered by a moat about 10 meters wide.
Medieval castle
The castle consists of the tower house built around 1520 , the somewhat younger western wing and the north wing, built at the end of the 16th century. Only the foundations of other buildings in the south or east have survived; stables and a bakery are believed to be there. The tower house is also called the Stirling Tower after the first gentlemen in Edzell , although it is not old enough for this family to build.
Tower house
The four-story tower measures 13 × 10 meters at the foundation and is 16 meters high. The walls on the ground floor are over 2 meters thick, the thickness is reduced to 1.5 meters from the first floor. The red sandstone was originally plastered.
You enter the tower through a gate in the north side, in the frame of which various maker's marks are attached. This gate is key-holes called embrasures secured and could be locked to a bar with an additional wooden outer door, an inner door, as well as iron bars from the inside.
On the ground floor you stand in the entrance floor, which consists of two vaulted cellars and is only lit by loopholes. A supply staircase leads from the left basement to the first floor, and after a short corridor on the right, the main staircase of the building begins. Under these stairs is a small chamber, possibly once used as a toilet or prison.
Lying above the vaulted cellars, the hall occupies the first floor. Traces on the walls show the position where the Spielmannsgalerie used to be; as well as the place of a wooden screen that concealed an area for the servants and the nearby cellar stairs. The wide main staircase continues as a spiral staircase to the two floors above. These are divided into smaller private rooms, with a latrine on each floor. The staircase ends under the roof in a small room from which you can enter the battlement. This protrudes over the wall on corbels arranged like a checkerboard, the only decorative element on the otherwise simple building.
Western wing
The two-storey building wing adjoining the residential tower in the west accommodated the main entrance to the complex. A passage decorated with arches gave access to the inner courtyard. There are niches above the portal in which coats of arms were once attached. The lower floor housed vaulted cellars as storage rooms and a kitchen, while the upper floor housed another hall and smaller private rooms. In contrast to the residential tower, the rooms on the upper floor had large barred windows. Loopholes were made below the windows for defensive purposes.
Northern wing
The north wing of the complex was only completed in the western part. Planned as a three-storey building, together with the round tower erected on the northwest corner, it helped the entire western front with the entrance area to create an imposing and at the same time balanced appearance. There were also storage rooms and another kitchen on the lowest floor. Noteworthy here is an almost seven meter wide fireplace, which was also combined with an outside oven. Above that there was another large hall on the first floor, nothing is known about other rooms on this floor or the floor above. Windows were only available towards the inner courtyard, access to these rooms was via a round stair tower with an elaborately decorated door frame, also from the inner courtyard.
The Walled Garden
The garden is located within a surrounding wall and measures around 52 m in north-south and 43.5 m in east-west direction, the wall itself is 3.6 m high and around 60 cm thick. The northern part is part of the curtain wall that surrounds the inner courtyard, while the other three sides are lavishly decorated.
The walls were divided into equally large, approximately three-meter-wide fields with half-columns that are no longer present. Above each field in the east and south walls there was a niche that might have a statue. Below the niches there were other decorations in the form of the national symbols thistle, lily, shamrock and rose; the coat of arms of the Lindsay family and the stone tablets described below. In between, the walls are decorated with chessboard-like stones and patterns of three seven-pointed stars (the coat of arms of the Stirling of Glenesk family). Individual holes in an irregular arrangement served as nesting opportunities for birds. The west wall is kept simple and has no niches, a sign of the hasty completion of the garden after the death of the completely indebted builder in 1610.
building
To complete the garden, both a bathing house and a summer house were built at the corners of the wall furthest away from the main house. All that remains of the bath house are ruins that were uncovered in 1855. It consisted of three rooms and a fountain, which was also used to water the garden.
The summer house has been preserved. In the garden room on the ground floor there is a central table that is surrounded by a stone bench. The ceiling of the room is shaped as a cross vault , a spiral staircase leads to the chamber above. In this upper room , all of the carved oak wall paneling that once adorned the castle's rooms was installed. The summer house is attributed to Thomas Leiper, a master stonemason from Aberdeenshire , based on the ornate arrow slits .
planting
Records from the 17th century suggest the cultivation of fruits. However, not even plans of the original appearance of the Renaissance garden have been preserved, but archaeological studies have shown a hint of the former structure. The entire planting was redesigned around 1930. Some of the low box hedges have been (and are) trimmed in the shape of the Scottish thistle , English rose , Irish shamrock and French lily . Further plantings take the form of words: The two mottos of the Lindsay family: Dum Spiro Spero (free: “as long as I breathe, I have hope”) and Endure Forte (free: “stand firm”).
Stone tablets
Three sets of seven stone plaques each are attached to the walls of the Walled Garden. They represent the virtues, the liberal arts and the planetary deities known since Roman antiquity. Each panel is about 60 to 75 cm wide and about one meter high. The virtues are shown in a framing rectangle, the liberal arts under an arch and the planetary deities in an almond-shaped frame. Comparisons with other work produced at the same time suggest a production in Aberdeenshire; the qualitatively different processing of financial problems towards the end of production.
Art historical studies have shown that the representations of the panels are based on engravings, the images of which can be found in contemporary sample books. The engravings themselves come from the workshop of Crispijn de Passe and were widespread in Scotland. The templates for the planetary deities come from Georg Pencz ; his initials IB can be found on the representation of Mars. Virtues and liberal arts are also based on drawings by the Flemish painter Marten de Vos .
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Planetary deities
On the eastern wall are the representations of the seven celestial bodies, already known in Roman antiquity, which were worshiped as deities: |
Liberal arts
On the south wall figures represent the liberal arts . They represent both the trivium and the quadrivium :
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Virtues
In the western wall there are personifications of the four cardinal virtues and the three Christian virtues . |
literature
- Miles Glendinning, Ranald MacInnes, Aonghus MacKechnie: A History of Scottish Architecture . University Press, Edinburgh 1996, ISBN 0-7486-0741-2 .
- Maurice Lindsay: The Castles of Scotland . Constable, London 1986, ISBN 0-09-473430-5 .
- David MacGibbon, Thomas Ross: The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland . Vol. I. Douglas, Edinburgh 1887, ISBN 0-901824-18-6 .
- Charles McKean: The Scottish Chateau . Sutton Publishing, Stroud 2004, ISBN 0-7509-3527-8 .
- W. Douglas Simpson, Chris Tabraham: Edzell Castle and Garden . Historic Scotland, Edinburgh 1994, ISBN 1-904966-34-9 (2007 reprinted).
- W. Douglas Simpson: Edzell Castle . Vol. LXV. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1930 ( archaeologydataservice.ac.uk [PDF; 7.1 MB ; accessed on September 21, 2014]).
Web links
- Edzell Castle. Historic Scotland , accessed September 21, 2014 .
- Entry on Edzell Castle in Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland database
Individual evidence
- ^ Simpson, 1930 , p. 117
- ↑ a b Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 4f
- ↑ a b c Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 7
- ↑ a b Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 6
- ↑ a b McKean, 2004 , p. 77f.
- ↑ Simpson, 1930 , pp. 135-140
- ↑ Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 11
- ^ Simpson, 1930 , p. 118
- ↑ Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 11
- ^ Simpson, 1930 , p. 119
- ↑ Scheduled Monument - Entry . In: Historic Scotland .
- ↑ Scheduled Monument - Entry . In: Historic Scotland .
- ↑ Garden and Designed Landscape - entry . In: Historic Scotland .
- ↑ Listed Building - Entry . In: Historic Scotland .
- ↑ Listed Building - Entry . In: Historic Scotland .
- ↑ Entry on Edzell Castle in Canmore, the database of Historic Environment Scotland (English)
- ↑ a b c Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 17
- ↑ MacGibbon / Ross , pp. 359-366
- ^ Simpson, 1930 , p. 122
- ↑ a b Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 18
- ↑ MacGibbon / Ross, 1887 , pp. 359-366
- ↑ Simpson, 1930 , pp. 135-140
- ↑ Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 20
- ↑ Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 23
- ^ McKean, 2004 , p. 147
- ↑ Simpson / Tabraham, 1994 , p. 35
- ↑ Simpson, 1930 , pp. 152f.
- ↑ Simpson, 1930 , pp. 154ff.
- ↑ Simpson, 1930 , pp. 162ff.