Kellie Castle in Fifeshire, very near Balcaskie, is another house of the
finest type of old Scottish architecture. The basement is vaulted in
solid masonry, the ground-floor rooms have a height of fourteen feet;
the old hall, now the drawing-room, is nearly fifty feet long. A row of
handsome stone dormers to an upper floor, light a set of bedrooms,
which, as well as the main rooms below, have coved plaster ceilings of
great beauty.
There is no certain record of the date of the oldest part of the castle.
It is assigned to the fourteenth century, but may be older. The earliest
actual date found upon the building is 1573, and it is considered that
the mass of the castle, as we see it now, was completed by that date,
though another portion bears the date 1606. It belonged of old to the
Oliphants, a family that held it for two and a half centuries, when it
passed by sale to an Erskine, who, early in the seventeenth century,
became Earl of Kellie. In 1797, after the death of the seventh Earl, it
was abandoned by the family and soon showed signs of deterioration from
disuse. About thirty years later the Earldom of Kellie descended to the
Earl of Mar, and the family seat being elsewhere, Kellie was allowed to
go to ruin.
In 1878 the ruined place was taken, to its salvation, on a long lease by
Mr. James Lorimer, whose widow is the present occupier. It has undergone
the most careful and reverent reparation. The broken roofs have been
made whole, the walls are again hung with tapestries, and the rooms
furnished with what might have been the original appointments.
The castle stands at one corner of the old walled kitchen garden, a door
in the north front opening directly into it. The garden has no
architectural features. There are walks with high box edgings and
quantities of simple flowers. Everywhere is the delightful feeling that
there is about such a place when it is treated with such knowledge and
sympathy as have gone to the re-making of Kellie as a delightful human
habitation. For two sons of the house are artists of the finest
faculty--painter and architect--and they have done for this grand old
place what boundless wealth, in less able hands, could not have
accomplished.
Close to the house on its western side is a little glen, and in it a
rookery. When strong winds blow in early spring the nests in the swaying
tree-tops come almost within hand reach of the turret windows of the
north-west tower.
How the flowers grow in these northern gardens! Here they must needs
grow tall to be in scale with the high box edging. But Shirley Poppies,
when they are autumn sown, will rise to four feet, and the grand new
strains of tall Snapdragons will go five and even over six feet in
height.
As the picture shows, this is just the garden for the larger
plants--single Hollyhocks in big free groups, and double Hollyhocks too,
if one can be sure of getting a good strain. For this is just the
difficulty. The strains admired by the old-fashioned florist, with the
individual flowers tight and round, are certainly not the best in the
garden. The beautiful double garden Hollyhock has a wide outer frill
like the corolla of the single flowers in the picture. Then the middle
part, where the doubling comes, should not be too double. The waved and
crumpled inner petals should be loosely enough arranged for the light to
get in and play about, so that in some of them it is reflected, and in
some transmitted. It is only in such flowers that one can see how rich
and bright it can be in the reds and roses, or how subtle and tender in
the whites and sulphurs and pale pinks. Other flowers beautiful in such
gardens are the taller growing of the Columbines, the feathery
herbaceous Spiræas, such as _S. Aruncus_, that displays its handsome
leaves, and waves its creamy plumes, on the banks of Alpine torrents,
and its brethren the lovely pale pink _venusta_, the bright rosy
_palmata_ and the cream-white _Ulmaria_, the
[Illustration: KELLIE CASTLE