History
Falkland Estate provides an excellent example of a Victorian country estate
with many interesting monuments, sculptures and natural features, such as
waterfalls.
The Estate is best known for its period as the Royal Hunting Park of the
Stuart Kings from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. James II
enclosed Falkland Wood with a high palisade fence in 1458. A section of the
mounding associated with the pale is still in tact and the large ridges
known as the Trenches by Chancefield are also thought to be associated
with deer management.
The Palace and the wood suffered over the centuries following the Union of
the Crowns, and the keepership of the Palace faded away until Professor John
Bruce, who had amassed a fortune in the British East India Company,
assembled the estate lands in 1821-26, and began a series of improvements to
the Palace, the farms and the grounds of Nuthill House which preceded House
of Falkland.
His niece, Margaret, inherited the Estate and together with her husband,
Onesiphorus Tyndall Bruce, commissioned William Burn to build the
Tudor-style House of Falkland (now a grade A listed building). They carried
out improvements to the Palace and the grounds, extending the designed
landscape to include the terraces and parterres around the House, the former
Nuthill Park, cascades and policies, the former North Parks and drives and
an ornamental South Park. They also created a new walk with bridges through
the earlier Tunnel, up the rugged Maspie Den to the extraordinary undercut
Yad waterfall and beyond to the extensive new forests and walks on Green
Hill and Black Hill. A Temple of Decision was built on the hillside and on
Onesiphorus's death local people added a monument to him on Black Hill.
Landscape designers included Alexander Roos, Donald Beeton and William
Sawtry Gilpin.
In 1887 the Estate and the Keepership of the Palace were bought by John
Patrick Crichton Stuart, the 3rd Marquess of Bute, the creator and restorer
of Mount Stuart on Bute and Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch in South Wales.
He set about the studious restoration of the Palace, together with his
Architect, John Kinross. He was a key figure in the development of
architectural restoration, and keenly interested in, and a patron to the
Arts and Crafts movement. Robert Weir Schultz was employed to carry out
embellishments to the estate including the Fish Pond. Schultz's most
important work was the re-modelling of the House interior.
Percy Cane designed the present gardens in the Palace in the 1950s for
Michael Crichton Stuart (grandson of the 3rd Marquess of Bute) and his wife
Barbara. They made their home in the palace, before handed it over to the
care of the National Trust for Scotland. Their son, Ninian, remains the
Steward of Falkland Estate and a founding trustee of Falkland Heritage Trust
and Falkland Centre for Stewardship.
