Lowther Castle

The Lowther estate has belonged to the Lowther family, latterly the Earls of Lonsdale, since the Middle Ages: the original settlement on the site was founded in 1120 by Dolfin de Lowther, a nobleman descended from Danelaw Viking conquerors. On 13 July 1568 Francis Knollys escorted Mary, Queen of Scots to Lowther Hall, as the house was then known, on her journey towards Wharton Hall and Bolton Castle.

A new house was completed on the site in 1685 for John Lowther, 1st Viscount Lonsdale, and its setting drew extravagant comparison. Visiting the Chinese emperor's summer retreat at Chengde in 1793, George Macartney could match what he saw only with Lowther Hall, which he thought a man of "sense, spirit, and taste" might render "the finest scene in the British dominions".

When Sir James Lowther died in 1802, the estates passed to his cousin William Lowther, by then a Member of Parliament of 22 years' standing. Between 1806 and 1814 he built the present house to designs by Robert Smirke, in the architect's first major commission: a sham castle with an embattled nine-bay central block, angle turrets and a great central tower, linked by low wings to angle pavilions, its windows a mixture of Gothic pointed arches and flat-topped Tudor.

Sir James left a debt his heir moved quickly to settle. He had owed money to the father of William Wordsworth and refused to repay it despite the family's repeated requests; on inheriting, William refunded the Wordsworths with interest, befriended the poet and supported him financially. Wordsworth stayed at Lowther often — many of his published letters were written there — and praised its "Cathedral pomp and grace in apt accord with the baronial castle's sterner mien". Robert Southey wrote verses in Countess Augusta's album, and J. M. W. Turner painted "Lowther Castle – Evening", which now hangs in the Bowes Museum. From 1842 the 2nd Earl added a collection of more than 100 pieces of Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and mostly Roman sculpture.

Hugh Cecil Lowther inherited the castle in 1882, aged 25, after his elder brother St George died at twenty-six following a short illness. A second son never educated to run an estate, he spent on an imperial scale: chestnut horses and carriages, yellow-liveried footmen, a master of music supervising the 24 musicians who travelled from house to house, the whole household moving by special train. In August 1895 the Kaiser came to Lowther for grouse shooting and the imperial flag flew over the house; the kings of Italy and Portugal later came to stay, and the Kaiser returned in 1902.

In the First World War Hugh raised his own pals battalion, the Lonsdale Battalion (11th Battalion, Border Regiment), which was almost wiped out on the Somme. The extravagance eventually told: Whitehaven Castle was sold in 1921 and Barleythorpe Hall in 1926, the same year the west Cumberland coal mines closed. In 1935 Hugh left Lowther Castle because he could no longer afford to live there — its last resident. He died in 1944.

In September 1942 the tenants of the Lowther estate were called to a meeting in Penrith and told their land was to be requisitioned for military use; in October a column of Matilda tanks arrived in the grounds. In a highly secret operation, tank regiments used the castle grounds to develop the Canal Defence Light.

Hugh's debts pursued his heirs. His brother Lancelot, the 6th Earl, was forced to sell many of the family's treasures at a large auction in 1947, and James Lowther, who succeeded in 1953, judged the empty, army-damaged castle a place of "gross imperial decadence during a period of abject poverty". He offered it as a gift to three local authorities; all refused. Facing £25 million in death duties, he removed the roof in 1957 and demolished much of the stonework, leaving only the façade and outer walls. The forecourt became pig pens, and the concrete the army had laid on the south lawns became the base of a broiler chicken factory.

After James's death in 2006 the chicken unit and the Sitka spruce plantation were cleared. The castle and 130 acres of grounds were transferred to the Lowther Castle and Gardens Trust in 2007, and after an initial £9 million consolidation the site opened to the public on 22 April 2011 — the first visits since 1938.