Lowther Castle

In the Eden Valley on the eastern edge of the Lake District, on a dramatic escarpment above the River Lowther with views across to the Pennine hills, stand the walls of a castle that has been a ruin since 1957. Lowther Castle is not an ancient ruin — it is a 19th-century Gothic Revival building, completed in 1814, deliberately stripped of its roof and left to decay by a cash-strapped earl who could no longer afford to maintain it. The decision to unroof the castle rather than demolish it entirely was taken for tax reasons; it turned out to be an act of considerable aesthetic consequence. The resulting ruin, roofless walls, intact towers, open doorways giving onto sky, is one of the most romantic architectural experiences in the north of England, and the 130-acre restored gardens that surround it are among the finest created in Britain in the past two decades.

The Lowther family has held land in Cumbria since the medieval period, and their history is dominated by the figure of Hugh Lowther, the 5th Earl of Lonsdale (1857–1944), known as the Yellow Earl for his tendency to dress everything, from his livery to his carriages, in chrome yellow, still today the colour of the Automobile Association, which he helped found. The Yellow Earl was one of the richest men in England, a legendary sportsman, a friend of the Kaiser, the man who donated the Lonsdale Belt to boxing, and a spender of such spectacular recklessness that he managed to run through most of the family fortune within his own lifetime. He entertained the Kaiser at Lowther in 1895; the house had enough rooms, by some accounts, to visit a different one each day of the year. His successor, the 6th Earl, faced with the cost of maintaining this vast pile and with no money to do so, stripped the roof in 1957 rather than continue an unwinnable financial battle.

The castle was designed by Sir Robert Smirke, who was just 24 years old when he received the commission, his first major work. Smirke would go on to design the British Museum, the General Post Office, and several other large public buildings, but Lowther was where he first established his reputation. The design is Gothic Revival in its exterior treatment, towers, battlements and a general air of medieval romance, but the interior was planned according to modern Regency principles of comfort and circulation. The building was large by any standard: roughly 80 rooms, a reputed 365 windows, and a front elevation that extended across the hillside for a considerable distance.

The exhibition inside the ruins, The Story of Lowther, tracks 850 years of Lowther history, from the Viking settlement of the Eden Valley through the medieval period, the turbulent career of the Yellow Earl, the deliberate unroofing of the castle, and the extraordinary 20-year restoration of the gardens that began in 2012. The exhibition is well designed: large-format historical photographs, personal objects, and contextual material that explains the specific economic and social history that produced a building of this size in this place, and then left it standing open to the sky.

The restoration of the Lowther gardens, begun in 2012 to the design of Dan Pearson, a Chelsea Gold Medal-winning garden designer and one of the most respected in Britain, is the project that transformed Lowther from a curiosity into a genuine destination. Pearson's 20-year plan has introduced contemporary planting into the Victorian structure of the grounds: a Great Yew Avenue, restored rose gardens, the Tapestry Garden, and a series of new plantings that reference the wider Lake District landscape beyond the estate boundary. The result is one of the most accomplished large-scale garden restorations undertaken anywhere in England in recent decades.

The Lost Castle, a large adventure playground hidden in the surrounding woodland, is aimed primarily at children but has been praised by adult visitors for its quality of design: zip wires, swings and climbing structures integrated into the woodland without disrupting the landscape's character. It consistently ranks among the most highly reviewed elements of the visit for families, a useful counterweight to the more contemplative experience of the ruins and gardens themselves.