Culzean country park – how an iconic Scottish landscape used designation to secure a sustainable future

ABSTRACT

When in 1969 Culzean, Ayrshire, was designated as Scotland’s first country park, it utilised legislative provisions intended to provide countryside recreation space for motorists. This paper offers a critical review of the designation process, revealing how this was used by the National Trust for Scotland as a mechanism to manage their prime property, and particularly to achieve a financially sustainable future. It shows how creative financing, bending rules, manipulating expectations, and flexibility were applied through partnerships with public authorities that were beneficial to all parties, while not quite adhering to the intent of the legislation. Culzean achieved acclaim, offered an exemplar to be followed by its counterparts, and informed perceptions and definitions of the British country park. A review of this experience is critical in that austerity is now threatening the existing funding model and new funding models are needed. An understanding of historic processes may help inform present solutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Country parks
• countryside recreation
• Culzean
• designated landscapes
• visitor management
• visitor attractions
• heritage conservation

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on a PhD thesis by Dr Phil Back, entitled ‘”If you build it, they will come”: The origins of Scotland’s Country Parks’ (2018), written at the Department of History, The University of Sheffield. Funding in support of this thesis was provided by the University of Sheffield Department of History and the Mackichan Trust.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no interest to declare, other than that one is an ordinary member of the National Trust for Scotland.

Geolocation

55.3543−4.789116

Notes

1. Figures from before 1970 do not distinguish between visitors to the castle and those visiting the areas which later became the country park, and thus overstate the latter; after 1970, the data are reported separately in NTS Annual Reports.

2. Foster is being more than a little disingenuous; by this time CCS had received many expressions of interest, many of which proved easy to turn down.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Catherine Mackichan Trust.

Notes on contributors

Jan Woudstra

Jan Woudstra is a landscape architect and historian, who was a private landscape consultant prior to an academic career at the Department of Landscape at the University of Sheffield, where he is a Reader in Landscape History and Theory. His research interests include the relationship between buildings and their surroundings, the use of vegetation and planting, and modernism in landscape design. He has published widely on topics from the 16th to the 21st century, and his publications include Landscape Modernism Renounced: The Career of Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) (London and New York, Routledge; in association with the Landscape Design Trust, 2009), written with David Jacques. He is currently working on a book on ‘Robert Marnock (1800-1889), The “most successful landscape gardener” of the nineteenth century’.

Phil Back

Phil Back worked for many years as a professional local government researcher, before studying for a PhD at The University of Sheffield exploring the origins and evolution of Scotland’s country parks. He is currently working in the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, exploring local authority approaches to green infrastructure, while also researching a paper exploring the work of the landscape architect Elisabeth Beazley in Scotland. His research interests lie in the landscape histories of 20th-century Britain, with a focus on pre-devolution Scotland.