It has been said that Carolside garden is “a garden one can only dream of” in the height of summer it has a rare beauty, it's garden of ancient roses is exquisite, their scent and the strong perfume of the sweet peas and honeysuckle fill the air before you enter the walled garden.
Carolside in 1834, in the new statistical account of Scotland was described as “a sweet and secure asylum from the toils and troubles of this world”. This remains even more true today. This 18th century mansion set in a former deer park is protected as a designed landscape in an area of natural beauty and is best known for housing a collection of ancient roses, many of them rare.
The Georgian house was built in 1740 and thought to have been built on a design for Chesterfield House, Mayfair, London by Sir Issac Ware.
The oval walled garden has been cultivated for over 200 years. A well-known rose garden from the Edwardian era has been restored to its former glory but this time inside the protected walls with a
“rose collection, herbaceous borders and delphinium beds that on a summers day are staggeringly beautiful”.
Lovers Walk
Lovers Walk has been restored through the Rose Gates where Lady Sarah Lennox, one of the five daughters of Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond, used to walk with her cousin and lover, Lord William Gordon, son of the 3rd Duke of Gordon. Sarah, having left her husband, Sir Charles Bunbury, fled to Carolside in 1769 and “there exists beside the river Leader, the lovers walk named by them.”
In the book “The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox “ written by the Countess of Ilchester, and Lord Stavordale, published in 1901, they write – “Sarah Lennox was the heroine of so much that is romantic.” Born in 1745, she was perhaps the most famous of the daughters and a new rose arbour has been created and planted in white wisteria and roses in her memory.