In September 1842 the 2nd Marquis of Breadalbane and his family welcomed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Taymouth Castle. They were greeted, with great ceremony, by pipers and by crowds of well-wishers in full highland costume, and a gun salute was fired. The Queen was charmed. During their brief stay Albert went hunting and shooting, returning with a bumper bag each evening, whilst the young monarch spent the days walking and riding in the park.

One day the royal party walked to the Dairy. Queen Victoria wasn’t sure quite how to describe the building, but settled for ‘a sort of Swiss Cottage, built of quartz’. As well as its practical purpose, the Dairy was also a belvedere, with the upper room and balcony giving a magnificent view of the River Tay flowing into Loch Tay, the pretty village of Kenmore, and up the loch to the hills and distant mountains.

Catherine Sinclair, visiting a couple of years earlier, had a more fanciful description: ‘nothing enchanted me more than the fancy dairy, built some years ago of transparent spar, like rough blocks of ice […] It looks as if an ice-berg had been stranded here and excavated for the occasion’.

The Queen’s own journal entry about the visit to the dairy is short, but by ‘her Majesty’s command’ Sir Thomas Dick Lauder wrote a detailed account of her visit to Scotland, published as Memorial of the Royal Progress in Scotland in 1843. He describes how the Queen walked in by the kitchen door, much to the surprise of the ‘damsels of the Dairy’ who were ‘astonished to see so fine a lady, though they could hardly have guessed that it was the fair Sovereign of these mighty kingdoms’. (This seems highly unlikely, as the workers on the estate had been preparing for the royal visit for weeks, but we must allow Sir Thomas his hyperbole.)

The dairymaids escorted the Queen around the Dairy, where she tried her hand at making butter before asking to try oaten cake. This caught her hosts unawares: they had nothing so rustic, but instead only a plate of ‘delicate’ cakes sent from the castle. The Queen did however enjoy a glass of ‘fine cold milk’ before continuing her walk. She was so impressed with the building that she revisited with Prince Albert on her final morning at Taymouth; the weather was clear and bright and she took her consort up onto the balcony to admire the view, where the Prince ‘entered fully into her Majesty’s admiration of it’.

Her visit was also celebrated in a poem by Samuel Fergusson. Be prepared – it’s very much of it’s time…

And then with steps of love descends
To learn some dairy lore;
And churning with her snow-white hands
Looks lovlier than before.

Tommore (or Tom-more), the hill on which the Dairy stands, was formerly home to a little 18th century pavilion, the Temple of Venus, which like its replacement had been so placed to take in the marvellous view of the lake and mountains.

The Temple of Venus was maintained until 1814, but demolished only a few years later to make way for the Dairy. Erected in 1830-31 to the design of William Atkinson (c.1774-1839), a pupil of James Wyatt, the ‘elegant and costly dairy’ rapidly became a highlight of a tour of the ‘celebrated pleasure grounds at Taymouth’. Its builder, John Campbell, created Marquis of Breadlabane in 1831, died in 1834, and it was his son the 2nd Marquis, who welcomed his sovereign to Taymouth Castle in 1842.

Sadly, as the photographs here show, the grade A listed Dairy is surrounded by scaffolding which has been in place now for a decade, and the structure lingers on the Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland. Trees now surround the building, and the famed views can no longer be appreciated. Taymouth Castle became a hotel, and its grounds a golf course, in the 1920s, but after various uses the mansion has sat empty since the 1980s. It is currently being renovated as a hotel, and hopefully the Dairy too will be brought back to life in the not too distant future.

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A building that needs little, if any, introduction: the ne plus ultra of follies. But one that continues to perplex, as no architect has ever been identified for this the most ornate and glorious of garden buildings, erected in 1761 for Lord Dunmore. Very few early accounts can be found, but in 1768 a visitor wrote of emerging from woodland to find a pleasure house of which the ‘top part is built exactly in the form of a pineapple’.

The flanking walls supported glasshouses, and were heated to enable the growing of fruit – including pineapples, presumably. Adjacent to the ‘beautiful Pine-apple Summer house’ were four lodging rooms for the gardeners. A visitor in 1783 described the ‘Pine-apple Cupola’ as ‘highly gilded’, so it must have been a breathtaking and unique experience to see it in that period.

The Pineapple was presented to the National Trust for Scotland by the Countess of Perth in 1974. As the NTS’s year book for 1976 recorded, acceptance of the ‘bizarre structure in shape of pineapple’ was only made possible by the ‘co-operation of the Landmark Trust’. The Landmark Trust planned to make the elaborate centrepiece ‘habitable once again so that people may stay in this outstanding vegetable’.

The restored Pineapple quickly became a very popular Landmark Trust property. The grounds and walled garden remain in the care of the National Trust for Scotland, and are in need of a little love and attention when funds are available.

A brief post this week as the Folly Flâneuse is taking a week off to catch up after a Scottish sojourn (so expect more delights from that trip) and will then be heading off once again in pursuit of pavilions and on the trail of towers. Thank you for reading.

For stays in the Pineapple see https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/pineapple-10726/#Overview

To visit https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/the-pineapple

High above the wonderfully scenic A712 from New Galloway to Newton Stewart, in the Scottish Lowlands, stands this granite monument. After a stiff climb up the hillside the views are breathtaking in both senses: the ascent will leave you short of breath, but you will gasp in awe at the views.

The monument commemorates Alexander Murray (1775-1813), the son of a local shepherd, who ‘by his genius and industry […] raised himself to unrivalled eminence’. From childhood he was fascinated by languages, and without teacher or tutor soon mastered the classics and modern European tongues. He was ordained a priest, but philology (the study of the history of language) remained his greatest love, and apparently following the advice of that darling of Dumfriesshire, Robert Burns, he won a scholarship to attend the University of Edinburgh. His ‘intimate knowledge of the Abyssinian language’ brought him to the attention of the king in 1811, when he translated a letter to the monarch from the prime minister of Ethiopia. He was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Edinburgh in 1812, but sadly his health failed, and he died the following year.

Looking along the valley towards the spot where Murray was born.
His first memorial was in verse, when the poet William Nicholson composed ‘On the death of the Rev. Dr Murray’, celebrating his achievements:

… Twas his the depths of language to unlock,
What every tongue in every clime hath spoke.

But curiously, for one who was so lauded, it took over 20 years for a more substantial monument to his memory to be erected. In 1833 a committee was formed in Edinburgh, and an appeal for subscribers to a monument was published in the papers. A prospectus was issued with an account of Murray’s life and a lithograph of the proposed design signed ‘J. Henderson, Archt’. This was probably John Henderson (1804-1862), a protege of Lord Panmure, then in the early stages of his career.

The prospectus made it clear that the design might be ‘modified or altered’ if the requisite funds were not found. The simplified design of the obelisk, as eventually constructed in 1835, suggests that there was indeed a shortfall. The monument was erected on land owned by the Stewarts of Cairnsmore, and the inscription records James Stewart’s ‘exertions and skill’ in getting the monument built. Presumably his exertions were not as strenuous as those of the builders who carted the materials up the steep hillside.

Murray had been buried in Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh, but the grave was not marked and an 1867 guide to the memorials in the graveyard noted that Murray had ‘no monument’.  In 1876 a ‘committee of gentlemen’ launched a second appeal to raise funds to erect a memorial over his burial place in Edinburgh. A smaller granite obelisk now commemorates the ‘Shepherd Boy who rose to be the most Eminent Linguist and Oriental Scholar of his day’.

The appeal also raised funds and to add an inscription to the earlier hilltop obelisk:

ALEXANDER MURRAY, D.D.
MINISTER OF URR 1806 TO 1813
PROFESSOR OF LANGUAGES
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 1812-1813
BORN AT DUNKITTERICK 22ND OCTOBER 1775
DIED AT EDINBURGH 15TH APRIL 1813
REARED A SHEPHERD BOY ON THESE HILLSIDES
ERECTED BY HIS COUNTRYMEN IN 1835
MAINLY THROUGH THE EXERTIONS AND SKILL OF
JAMES STEWART ESQ. OF CAIRNSMORE
ON WHOSE PROPERTY IT STANDS

The obelisk near Newton Stewart was damaged in a gale in November 1929, and once again a subscription was raised to enable its restoration. This was completed in 1931 when a crowd of 600-700 people gathered to mark the occasion. The obelisk is now owned by the Forestry Commission and there is a small car park at the foot of the hill. It’s well worth the climb.