Fine garden plan of the gardens at Belnagown Castle.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the castle and grounds were remodelled along fashionable Gothic lines by the then owner Sir Charles Lockhart Ross and his wife Lady Mary.

The present plan was drawn in the year of Sir Charles’s death and shows the proposed layout of the gardens with orangery, grape houses, pine shed, mushroom house, gardener’s lodge, melon ground, forcing pit, melon-pit, melon and cucumber frames, stock holes, hotwall to be covered with glass for peaches, hotwall from the finest French pears, sundial, etc.

John Hay (1758-1836) was a leading landscape designer in Scotland, who designed gardens for Castle Semple Park, Newhailes, Alnwick Castle, and Archerfield at Dirleton. Charles Mcintosh’s ‘The Practical Gardener, and Modern Horticulturalist’, 1839, refers to work by John Hay on the gardens of Lord Rosebery and the Earl of Camperdown. The General Wemyss mentioned in the title was an army friend of Sir Charles.

The castles is now owned by Mohamed Al Fayed.