Italian Trip: July 2018

Saturday 28 July 2018

Dumfries House

after a great days baking we now have time to explore our Ayrshire surrounding, the days are still long enough to enjoy the sights.

So it off to Charlies new Scottish house to check out his gardens.

The estate was purchased as a whole after Charles, Prince of Wales heard of the campaign after the writer and campaign member James Knox made "an impassioned impromptu speech" at one of the Prince's bi-annual conservation conferences at Holyrood House in Edinburgh. On 27 June 2007, it was announced that a consortium headed by the Prince and including various heritage charities and the Scottish Government (contributing £5m) had raised £45 million to purchase the house and contents (along with its roughly 2,000-acre (8.1 km²) estate) and to endow a trust for maintaining it.

The trust is called "The Great Steward of Scotland's Dumfries House Trust", a reference to the title Great Steward of Scotland held by Charles in his role as Scottish heir apparent. A major element of the financial package was a £20m loan backed by The Prince's Charities Foundation. It was reported that the contents of the house had already been removed, and were being transported to London when the sale was agreed. The trust's intended model is to have the estate become a self-sufficient enterprise and to give back to the Scottish people as a working castle and estate and being held in a restorable state for future generations.

The new front garden all trimmed and loads of gravel.

Our afternoon walk around Dumfries House and garden was just fantastic, we were just so lucky as it was a stormy afternoon and the place was deserted so we had it all to ourselves.