Gardyne Castle

Gardyne Castle, Angus Photo © William Muir, 23 May 2004

Gardyne Castle, Angus Photo © William Muir, 28 April 07

Built over the past 600 years by the Gardyne and Lyell families, Gardyne remains a family home.

Gardyne Law stands near Gardyne Castle and was the Moot hill of the old barony. An old man told Thomas Lyel, Esq., that he saw two Highlanders, taken with stolen cattle, judged, condemned, and hanged on the Law of Gardyne.

GARDYNE CASTLE, FORFARSHIRE.

This is an interesting and peculiar specimen of Scottish architecture. The house stands about one mile south from Guthrie Junction, on the top of the sloping bank of a stream which joins the Lunan Water. The building has undergone alterations, and is now a parallelogram on plan with a circular staircase turret projecting at the back or eastern side, and might as regards its plan be a modern mansion.

In the western wall there is a coat of arms with the date 1568, and the motto, "Speravi in te, Domine." The arms can now scarcely be distinguished, but according to Jervise they are the shield of Gardyne of Leys a boar's head erased. Over the present entrance doorway, which is in the centre of the west front, being part of the addition erected in 1740, there is the crest of Lyell of Dysart, and the motto "Tutela." The property is still in the hands of the Lyell family. The older part of the structure, including the circular staircase tower, may thus be regarded as of the date 1568. The tower has the shot-holes and corbelling of the period, the corbels which bring the upper part of the tower out to the square being of the peculiar form which occurs at Megginch and elsewhere, i.e. the corbels are all parallel to the front, and none of them parallel to the sides of the square, as in the more general arrangement, where the corbels run in both directions and mitre at the angle. But the most remarkable features about this house are the angle turrets of the south gable. In general form they resemble the ordinary angle turrets of Scottish houses, and, like many of the latter, they are provided with shot-holes in the flanks and through the corbels. But in details they are entirely different from any other examples with which we are acquainted. The turrets are short and dumpy in form, and are finished on top with an imitation of a battlemented parapet, ornamented at intervals with short mock gargoyles like guns. The roofs of the turrets are of stone, carefully built in regular courses, and crowned on top with another little battlemented circlet surmounted with a finial of unusual form. Small stone dormers project from the stone roofs, some with circular and some with pointed gablets, but the gablets are shams, and have no roof abutting upon them. The mouldings are all thoroughly Scottish, and there is no sign of any foreign element in the design.

The only mode of explaining these remarkable features which occurs to us is by assuming that they are a peculiar manifestation of that spirit of innovation which we find affected the designing of buildings as it did every other mental operation about this period. At Huntly Castle, Balbegno, and elsewhere, we have seen several peculiarities introduced, amongst others mock windows, with carved figures looking out of them; and probably the turrets at Gardyne are just another development of the playful fancy of the architect, stimulated by the desire for novelty, and no longer restrained by the necessity of designing for serious defensive operations.

THE CASTELLATED AND DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE OF SCOTLAND BY DAVID MACGIBBON AND THOMAS ROSS, 1889