Streatlam Castle, County Durham - South Lodge
Photo © Hugh Mortimer, 13 July 2006
Streatlam Castle, County Durham
- South Lodge
Photo © Hugh Mortimer,
13 July 2006
Streatlam Castle was a Baroque stately home located near the town of Barnard Castle in County Durham, England. Owned by the Bowes-Lyon family, Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne, the house was one of the family's two principal seats, alongside Glamis Castle in Forfarshire, Scotland. Streatlam incorporated some 1,190 acres (4.8 km2) of land, along with an estate consisting of some twenty farms. The last occupant was Lord Glamis, heir to the earldom, although the estate was owned by the Earl of Strathmore, his father.
Streatlam Castle, County Durham
The House came to the Bowes family in the mid-Eighteenth century. For much of the Nineteenth century, it had been owned by John Bowes, illegitimate son of the 10th Earl of Strathmore, and only returned to the family in 1885. Unlike the fate of other properties which belonged to the Bowes-Lyon Family, such as Gibside (which had come to lay within a major coalfield, near Gateshead and so considered spoilt by the surrounding atmosphere of the Coal mines), Streatlam sat amidst the beautiful countryside of the Durham Dales.
Streatlam Castle, County Durham
Lord Glamis had no desire to leave the house, as he had been living there since at least 1915, but the Earl of Strathmore was determined to sell off the house and the land. The bulk of the estate was sold to private tenants and the remainder was auctioned, generating the grand sum of £100,000.
Lord Glamis having been forced to leave the property bought himself a substantial farm near East Grinstead, where he resided until he succeeded his father as Earl of Strathmore in 1944.
Some see it as little surprise that the Earl of Strathmore chose Glamis Castle, over Streatlam, as the house was considered architecturally "awkward and unsatisfactory" (as was claimed in Country Life Magazine in 1915). Also as the aristocratical titles of the last owner and occupant would suggest, unlike Glamis Castle, Streatlam did not have as close of an ancestral connection.
Even so there was no pressing financial need to sell at the time as the family earned a substantial income from its coal mining holdings.
In the end the house was just considered superfluous, as the family also owned Howick and Wemmergill in County Durham and St. Pauls Walden Bury in Hertfordshire, so it seems Lord Strathmore, like many of his contemporaries, had decided to rationalise his landholdings.
Lady Strathmore, though ill at the time, hurried down to Streatlam to rescue as many of the contents as was possible, many of which were taken to Glamis Castle. Whilst the armorial ceiling, John Bowes, had installed at Streatlam, were moved to the Bowes Museum, which John Bowes had established.
Finally in 1959 the house was gutted and its core blown up as a training exercise by the Territorial Army. Today only Streatlam Park remains.
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