Walled Garden And Shell House, Dunnottar House

The site comprises a walled garden and shell house, constructed in 1809 as part of the landscape design for Dunnottar House (demolished 1959). The gardens consist of two rectangular enclosures, a larger garden to the north and a smaller nursery garden to the south, built into a sloping site. The high red brick walls feature droved ashlar long and short quoins, a battered rubble masonry base course and foundations, projecting stone coping to the north garden, and brick coping to the south garden. A circular projection is visible on the southeast corner of the south garden wall, and a piend-roofed sandstone potting house sits at the centre of the south garden.

The shell house is located outside the south garden, to the east. It is a domed, circular-plan structure built of red brick, with geometric patterns of shells set into the render of the internal walls.

The walled gardens are a significant landscape feature. The unusual combination of a battered masonry base course and high red brick walls creates a fortress-like appearance. The shell house, likely built at the same time, reflects a fashion for romantic landscape features popular in the late 18th century. It is a particularly fine example, and such shell houses are rare.

Dunnottar House was built around 1800 for Alexander Allardyce, who had amassed a fortune in Jamaica. Allardyce spent over £10,000 on the gardens, which were designed by John Paterson, architect, of Edinburgh, and laid out by John Innes, land surveyor, of Aberdeen, for Miss Allardyce. Andrew Smith served as the mason. An Ordnance Survey map from 1865 reveals the gardens were symmetrically laid out around wells. The present Dunnottar House is the former Parish Kirk Manse. The site is now owned by Forestry Commission Scotland.