Western Gazebo, Walled Garden, Preston Hall

Western Gazebo, Walled Garden, Preston Hall

Designed by Robert Mitchell and completed in 1795, this is a near-square walled garden of considerable architectural ambition, forming part of a group with the Stables, Temple, Preston Hall, and the Lion's Gates. The garden was laid out during general improvements to the Preston Hall estate at the end of the 18th century. It comprises a main walled garden with an additional canted north wall, an integral single-storey Dutch-gabled Gardener's House, a pair of three-storey octagonal gazebos, glasshouses adjoining the internal garden wall, associated back sheds to the north, and further glasshouses to the south. Construction is brick throughout, with polished ashlar dressings, buttresses, and long and short quoins. The original formal quadrant layout of the main garden survives, with a sundial at the centre.

The Walled Garden and Gardener's House

The garden wall is brick, with some sections lime-washed and rendered where glasshouses have formerly stood, and flat ashlar coping along the top. The north and west external walls are plain brick. The rear of the Gardener's House sits at the centre of the north wall, flanked by a pair of small outhouses to the left and a further outhouse to the right. The west wall has a doorway to the left.

The Gardener's House itself is a harled single-storey, three-bay building with sandstone ashlar dressings. It has a central door with windows to either side, raised Dutch-gabled ends, an east window (extended to the west), and gablehead stacks. To the rear, there are three regularly placed bays, with a bipartite window to the third bay, and an extension to the right — incorporating a former store — with a door to the left and windows to the right. Windows are glazed with 8, 9, and 15-pane timber sash and case units. The roofs are pitched grey slate with harled low stacks, ashlar neck copes, and later chimney cans.

The south wall was remodelled in 1888. It features a formal stylised-arch entrance with decorative wrought-iron gates. A large central round-headed plaque, inscribed "JC" with carved swags, fruit, and a bird, breaks through the wallhead and is held by decorative stone supports; a carved date stone within a shield sits below. The plaque is also decorated on the interior face. Flanking the entrance are stepped ashlar buttresses surmounted by lion statues: the left lion holds a shield bearing three billets arranged two over one, and the right lion holds a shield with a clasped Dexter hand. These buttresses terminate in low wing walls holding rounded Italianate planters. The remainder of the south elevation is plain brick with regularly placed ashlar and brick buttresses, alternately headed with large carved rose or thistle finials. The interior face of the wall is plain, with a carved foliate panel above the arched entrance.

The east wall is plain brick with low doors to the left and right, each doorway framed by ashlar long and short quoins with an ashlar lintel. An undated armorial panel is inset above the now-damaged timber-panelled right door. The left doorway appears plain from the outside, but the interior reveals a reused roll-moulded surround with a lintel carved "16 C [heart shape] IB 90", with a cornice above; the door itself is now missing.

The Internal Wall, Sheds, Gazebos, and Glasshouses

The south elevation of the internal wall is brick with thin ashlar copings and stands higher than the boundary wall, curving down to meet it. There is a large rectangular arch at the far right where the east wall joins, and the remains of formerly full-length lean-to timber glasshouses along the rest of the elevation. A pair of doors at the centre leads through to the interior of the gazebos.

The north elevation carries single-storey ashlar lean-to sheds to the left and right, irregularly fenestrated but still identifiable as potting shed, stores, fruit room, and boiler room. At the centre is a one-and-a-half-storey, five-bay store — possibly a former garden office — with the three-storey hexagonal gazebos rising at the outer bays. The central section has a door with a bipartite wallhead dormer breaking the eaves, and single windows to the flanks.

The gazebos are approached by steps leading to a two-leaf timber panelled door. The first floor is ashlar, with a window. Main access to the brick second floor is through a semi-glazed entrance door on the south elevation — facing south-west on the left gazebo and south-east on the right — with a rectangular fanlight above featuring spider's web glazing. The remaining bays have alternate plain and aediculed windows. Each gazebo has a pyramidal roof behind a low solid parapet, surmounted by a wrought-iron weather vane comprising crossed rods indicating compass points with a directional arrow. The two gazebos were formerly linked at first-floor level by a catwalk with a stone balustrade — now collapsed — which had a carved stone eagle to each flank and an architraved armorial plaque at the centre. There is also a door to the ground floor of each gazebo on the south elevation.

Glazing throughout the gazebos and back sheds is 12-pane in timber sash and case windows. The garden office has paired 4-pane timber windows and partially glazed timber doors with fanlights above. Roofs to the gazebos are pyramidal, piended, and covered in grey slate with lead ridging. The glasshouses and conservatories have timber and multi-pane glazing. All rainwater goods are painted cast iron.

The Interior

The east gazebo has a stone-flagged floor with timber tongue-and-groove panelling to an uncertain height on the ground floor, and a hexagonal stone staircase with plain iron balusters and a mahogany handrail rising through the open-plan interior. The west gazebo contains rooms but was not accessible for inspection in 2001. Both gazebos formerly had weather vanes projecting down into their interiors; the grilles through which they passed still survive.

The Sundial

At the convergence of the garden paths stands a sundial on a carved classical base, supporting a large brass armillary sphere.

Historical Context

The idea of building ornamental turrets from which to view the garden was fashionable at the end of the 18th century. These gazebos are considered good examples of the type — usually built in pairs flanking or terminating a terrace, here with glasshouses attached to the adjoining catwalk. At the time of construction they were regarded as exceptionally forward-looking. One gazebo was intended to serve as "a fruit room, tea-room, library or small horticultural museum." The rooftop weather vanes were also practical: they projected down through the ceiling so that occupants could read wind direction from inside without going outdoors.

Not everyone admired them. The garden writer J. C. Loudon recorded his disapproval, complaining that "The Modern Method of Carrying summerhouses above hothouse as at Preston Hall has a very bad effect on scenery, besides their incongruity, when considered as overlooking the kitchen garden which certainly, like the kitchen itself, is not an object intended for beauty." Opinion shifted, however: by 1842 The Gardener's Magazine described it as "an excellent and superiorly designed kitchen garden" in which over 40 different varieties of fig were cultivated.

The original quadrant layout of the kitchen garden survives intact, with the sundial on its ornate stone plinth at the centre. The section near the Gardener's House retains its forcing greenhouses. The exterior of the south wall, with its buttresses topped by lions and roses and its distinctively shaped entrance dated 1888, gives the garden a formal character. A formal rose garden with a classical marble statue is sited here, and a slip garden surrounds the whole complex.

The walled garden was latterly operated as a chrysanthemum nursery until 1972, after which it was used for growing vegetables. It is currently disused.

A watercolour by J. White dating from 1794, held in the National Monuments Record of Scotland, shows the walled garden before the gazebos were added. A plan of the estate surveyed by John Lauder in April 1806 shows the new layout after the improvements. The garden also appears on Thomas Carfrae's 1842 lithographed estate plan.