LIFE IN RUINS
How the heir to Lowther Castle has transformed a crumbling family seat into a burgeoning display of floral fecundity
A floral renaissance within the Gothic remains of a Cumbrian castle
Topped with a ruined Gothic castle and flanked by hills covered in pine-trees, the 800-year-old Lowther Estate presides over the rugged terrain of the Lake District, a symphony of wilderness, whimsy and storytelling. Inside the turreted castle walls that prickle with pinnacles, self-seeding wildflowers thrive and wisteria scrambles through the windows, while newly planted birches, witchhazels and magnolia-trees are fast heading skywards. Outside, contained by a woolly yew hedge, a painterly thicket is woven from feathery reed-grasses, a fine fringing of white wood asters and the fluffy flowerheads of great burnets, along with countless other tactile shrubs providing texture up to shoulder-height. This is the Tapestry Garden, an artistic tribute to the formal parterre that first lay here in the 1600s.
The gardens form a harmonious part of the landscape, blending in all the better thanks to the way their designer, the acclaimed Dan Pearson, eschews traditional planting rules, encouraging elderberry bushes, thistles and rosebay willowherb – shrubs usually deemed weeds – to grow alongside Welsh poppies, wine-red akebia vines and rust-hued switchgrass. It is almost impossible to believe that just a decade ago, the ground here was covered in tarmac, and industrial poultry pens stood where the flowering baneberries and reed-grasses now sway. Or that walking through spaces that, a century ago, housed ornate state reception-rooms, you will now find yourself wandering between towering elm-trees and yellow wax-bells.
‘When I first saw the site, it was at its lowest ebb,’ says Pearson. ‘I found the melancholy mood exciting – it felt like we were discovering a forgotten place for the first time.’ The gardens had been all but abandoned since being used for battle-tank practice during World War II, when the army requisitioned the castle and land, but even greater desecration was subsequently carried out by the 7th Earl of Lonsdale. In 1953, aged 31, he inherited the estate along with crippling death duties after the demise in rapid succession of his two predecessors and, in a desperate (if misguided) attempt to make the estate pay, the new Earl decided to turn his childhood home into an eye-catching relic. He demolished the roof and entire interior of the castle to leave only the turreted skeleton; then, he tarmacked over the ornamental gardens to install battery-chicken sheds and planted commercial conifer forests as a manifestation of his sociopolitical outlook. Despite his title and background, the Earl was a socialist, as his son Jim Lowther, who now runs the estate, explains. ‘He became thoroughly disenchanted by the lifestyle, money-wasting and morality of the English aristocracy. Especially in the aftermath of the war, they just seemed to be a symbol of decadence in an era of abject poverty.’
Lowther grew up in Askham Hall, the family’s other, smaller property nearby, which is now run as a hotel by his half-brother Charles. While he is sympathetic towards his father’s situation and had enjoyed playing among the ruins as a child, he found the estate a ‘truly depressing’ place when, in 1994, he put his career as a professional mountaineer on hold to focus on his derelict ancestral seat. Fortunately, circumstances soon started to take a turn for the better. Horrified at such destruction, Historic England placed the castle at the top of its newly created National Register of Buildings at Risk, offering financial and advisory support. The 7th Earl agreed to sell the ruins for £100 to his son, who then applied for Lottery funding and sold further assets to pay for safeguarding the rickety castle shell and to start revitalising its concrete surroundings.
The death of the Earl in 2006 enabled change to begin apace in the grounds. Lowther, together with his trusted head gardener-turned-general manager Martin Ogle, swiftly dismantled the poultry pens, and set to work researching the plot’s past. From 2,400 trunks’ worth of archive paperwork held at the Cumbria Records Office, details were uncovered of a 17th-century copper-beech avenue and Jacobean knot gardens, camomile lawns, fruitorchards, the Edwardian designer Thomas Mawson’s lily beds and several formal parterres, including a version from the 1910s, modelled on a scale that matched that of Versailles. In 2011, Pearson dreamt up and successfully pitched a plan for the garden inspired by these discoveries.
Nine years on, he describes working on the renaissance of the faded jewel – an ongoing project, with plans afoot to revive the Japanese plantation, rock garden and vegetable plot – as ‘a complete pleasure’. Martin Ogle is similarly smitten by the romance of the wildflowers that grow all over the ruins. ‘When the dogtooth violet and camassia – a type of wild hyacinth – start springing up from March onwards, it is especially magical in there,’ he tells me. He is also looking forward to the summer, when Pearson’s latest design, a vast rose garden, will bloom for the first time. Situated on the same site as the 19th-century original, it is inspired by Burne-jones’ 1880s painting series The Legend of Briar Rose, and is home to a spectacular 2,000 rose bushes.
Despite the extraordinary effort he has had to put in, Lowther holds no resentment against his father for deliberately destroying so much of his family’s legacy, and even credits him with ‘giving us more latitude to reinterpret it in a modern way’. ‘I actually think the castle is much cooler as a ruin than it ever was as a residence. Who would want to live in something this size? It’s more exciting as a public space than a private home,’ he says. ‘The building is part of the landscape now… It has a particularly special relationship with the sky – the feeling you get when you stand inside and look up is amazing. I don’t think that will ever get old.’ Indeed, as the memory of the chicken sheds starts to fade, this rough diamond of an estate enters a new era in which it will, with any luck, outshine its troubled history and finally be enjoyed by visitors, from near and far, for years to come. Lowther Castle (www.lowthercastle.org) is open all year, except Christmas Day.