Edzell Castle and Garden

Edzell Castle stands in the glens of Angus, long a seat of the Lindsay Earls of Crawford. David Lindsay, 9th Earl of Crawford, raised its red sandstone tower house and courtyard from around 1520, having inherited the estate in 1513; a west range carrying a new entrance gate and hall followed by mid-century, and his son later added a north range with rounded corner towers. The castle’s renown, however, rests on its garden. In 1604 Sir David Lindsay, Lord Edzell — schooled in Paris and Cambridge and widely travelled on the Continent — laid out a walled pleasance beside the castle, its high enclosing walls set with carved panels representing the Seven Planetary Deities, the Seven Liberal Arts and the Seven Cardinal Virtues, a scheme found nowhere else in Scotland. Mary, Queen of Scots stayed here in 1562, and James VI visited more than once in the 1580s. Cromwell’s troops occupied the castle in 1651, and government soldiers did further damage in 1746. Decline followed: sold to the Earl of Panmure in 1715, the property passed after the Jacobite forfeitures to the York Buildings Company, which stripped its assets and sold off the roofs. The garden entered state care in 1932 and the castle in 1935; both are now looked after by Historic Environment Scotland.