Scotney Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Scotney Castle lies at the bottom of a valley near Lamberhurst, in Kent, where an old loop of the River Bewl feeds a moat. The estate combines two buildings: the old castle, built around 1378–1380 for Roger Ashburnham, and a new house built on the neighbouring hillside in the nineteenth century for the Hussey family. Of the medieval fortress there survive chiefly a round tower with machicolations, sections of curtain wall and the base of the gatehouse, spread across islands surrounded by water. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Darrells, who remained Catholic, converted it into a stone and timber-framed manor house, then enlarged it around 1635 with an early classical wing. Around 1840 Edward Hussey III had these buildings partly dismantled to create a picturesque ruin visible from his new house. The Tudor-style house designed by Anthony Salvin now overlooks a first-rank picturesque garden, with a quarry garden, terraces, an octagonal kitchen garden and a sculpture by Henry Moore. Bequeathed to the National Trust by Christopher Hussey, who died in 1970, the whole site is open to the public: the gardens since 1971 and the house since 2007, within an estate of more than 300 hectares of parkland and woodland.