A Day Trip to Dumfries House
Review of Dumfries House
I have just returned from a rather long but fulfilling day. Despite the one hour and fifty-minute car journey each way, the scenery and actually the peace, following the Easter holidays with the children was a welcome break.
Dumfries House is located just outside Cumnock in Ayrshire and is the headquarters of The King’s Foundation. As you come out of Cumnock you can start to see the impact that the foundation has had just in terms of the landscape and nature. There are a lot of very old trees around, which makes sense given the age of the house and estate, and actually later in the day as we walked around the grounds, we noticed how different the shrubbery is. It is almost like a British rainforest which is very different from that type of habitat that we have here.
We arrived in time to grab a quick bite to eat in the café and then headed straight to the house for our 1.30 pm tour. We opted for The Grand Tour which meant that a few of the bedrooms were included in the one and half hour tour.
On arrival, our wonderful guides Rhona and Anne were so welcoming and kind. They gave a short introductory talk that gave you the lay of the land and explained the wider estate purpose and how the house fits into this. They also pointed out that there is no photography allowed in the house, hence my lack of interior photos. The tour itself is fascinating, and the ladies are so knowledgeable. You are taken through some of the more formal rooms (The Tapestry room, the absolutely breathtaking Pewter Corridor, The Blue Drawing Room, The Entrance Hall, and The Pink Dining Room), to Lord Dumfries’ private study, the family parlour, and the family bedroom and then finally upstairs to see some of the bedrooms, which are still in use today.
What I hadn’t appreciated was that it is still a working house. It hosts a huge number of functions and residential stays each year so there is a huge team that run the house and the grounds. All of it is immaculate, but it must be very hard work.
The house also holds a huge number of Chippendale pieces of furniture, including some extremely rare ones. These were beautiful and obviously a highlight in the tour. There are separate tours focusing on the incredible artwork and the extraordinarily large number of clocks that can be found around the house. It would be worth retuning to go on these too.
Once the tour had finished and we’d walked round to the front of the house to admire the impressive exterior, we headed over to The Arboretum and The Queen Elizabeth II Walled Garden. The gardens were beautiful and very different to The Walled Garden at Preston Hall. The style was very different, and I suppose a lot simpler in design. It is in fact one of the biggest walled gardens in Scotland and is home to the Royal Horticultural Society training Centre. We found the William Pye designed fountain in the centre, very calming and an attractive centrepiece.
However, the very dark clouds loomed so we didn’t get to spend as much time there as we hoped and after a quick ‘pick me up’ cup of tea, I got back on the road full of ideas having had my cultural fix.
One of the terms that I think they really encompass, is ‘heritage-led regeneration’. I really feel like they live and breath it. The whole estate has such a buzz of life with so many different crafts and skills going on at the same time. You could never be bored there if you took advantage of all the possibilities that this estate offers its local community as well as those visiting.
It was worth the long car journey.