Edzell Castle & Garden

This is a remarkable and very beautiful complex, with a late-medieval tower house incorporated in to a 16th century courtyard mansion, and a walled garden with a bathhouse and summer house laid out in 1604.

The Garden was built for Sir David Lindsay, Lord Edzell, about 1604 and was recreated in the 1930s. The carved decoration of the garden walls is unique in Britain. The carvings depict the Planetary Deities, Liberal Arts and Cardinal Virtues.

Visitors enter through the summer house to discover nesting holes and flower boxes set into walls, and decorative hedges shaped and trimmed into the Fleur de Lys, Scottish thistle and English rose and the family mottoes of the Lindsay family: "dum spiro spero" (while I breathe I hope) and "endure forte" (endure firmly). Sir David intended his garden to stimulate both mind and senses, and it does.

This property is managed by Historic Scotland.