Floors Castle

On the north bank of the River Tweed, looking across the water to the few remaining stones of Roxburgh Castle, once one of the most important royal strongholds in medieval Scotland, stands the largest inhabited house in Scotland. Floors Castle is vast, preposterously so: a long Baronial silhouette of towers, turrets and crenellations that stretches above the river bank for what seems an unreasonable distance. It was built in stages across 120 years by two different architectural visions, resulting in a building that is simultaneously one of the finest Georgian houses in Scotland underneath and one of the most theatrical pieces of Victorian Baronialism on top. The 11th Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe still live here.

The title of Duke of Roxburghe was created in 1707, the year of the Act of Union between Scotland and England, a creation closely connected to the political negotiations that produced the Union. The 1st Duke commissioned William Adam, the patriarch of Scotland's most distinguished architectural dynasty and father of Robert Adam, to design a new house at Floors in 1721. Adam's original building was a plain Palladian mansion, elegant, symmetrical and thoroughly English in character, reflecting the Duke's political alignments at the time. It looked nothing like the castle that stands there today.

The transformation came under the 6th Duke, who commissioned William Henry Playfair, the Edinburgh architect responsible for much of the New Town's neoclassical streetscape, to remodel the house in the Scottish Baronial style between 1838 and 1845. Playfair added towers, turrets, conical roofs, castellated parapets and a general air of medieval romantic grandeur that bore no real relationship to the building underneath. The result is one of the most complete examples of Scottish Baronial architecture in existence, an architectural fantasy built over a Georgian core, the outside all Walter Scott romance, the inside still essentially 18th-century in its proportions and comfort.

The interior contains one of the finest private collections of tapestries in Scotland, with 17th-century Brussels and Gobelin tapestries hanging throughout the state rooms. The porcelain collection includes Meissen, Sèvres and Chinese export porcelain accumulated across six generations of the Roxburghe family. A significant portion of the current collection arrived through an American connection: the 8th Duke married Mary Goelet of New York in 1903, bringing the typical Gilded Age infusion of American wealth into a British title struggling with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century. The 1st Duke of Roxburghe also owned one of the greatest book collections in Britain, sold in 1812 in a sale that lasted 41 days and established new records for book auction prices that stood for decades.

The ruined Roxburgh Castle, visible from the Floors grounds across the Tweed, was one of the four great royal burghs of medieval Scotland, comparable in importance to Edinburgh, Berwick and Stirling. It was a meeting point for many transactions between the Scottish and English crowns, was taken and retaken repeatedly during the Wars of Independence, and was finally demolished by the Scots themselves in 1460 to prevent English reoccupation. The siege of 1460 is also where James II of Scotland was killed when one of his own cannons exploded, a peculiarly Scottish way for a king to die. The stones of Roxburgh are now barely visible, and Floors today commands the position the royal burgh once held over this stretch of the Tweed.

The 4-acre walled garden is considered a highlight of the visit by most who come to Floors: a Victorian kitchen garden with glasshouses, a formal Millennium Garden with French-style parterres, and the Queen's House summerhouse where Queen Victoria took tea in 1867. The garden has been redesigned over a 20-year plan beginning in the 2000s by Dan Pearson, a Chelsea Gold Medal-winning designer, layering contemporary planting onto the Victorian structure without erasing its historic character.