Craigtoun Park

 

Craigtoun House

When I was a young lad in the 1960s, my brother and I would sometimes be treated to a trip to Craigtoun Park, just a mile south of St Andrews in Fife. It wasn't a theme park exactly but had lots of things to keep energetic youngsters occupied for a few hours. You had to pay an entrance fee back then which was probably why the visits were something of a rarity. We'd all pile into my dad's Riley 4/72 and make the half hour journey on a sunny summer's day, spending an afternoon running around and climbing various things or spinning round on a piece of apparatus where our heads were closer to the ground than our feet.

Fast forward half a century and I'm now living just a couple of minutes by car from the park and visit it quite regularly. It's popular with young mums out with their kids and people walking their dogs. I use it as a local stomping ground when I either can't think of anything to photograph, need a decent walk and fresh air or want to go back to basics with just a 35mm SLR and a 50mm lens.

It's only since moving to St Andrews that I've made the effort to find out about the park's history and knowing a bit about it helps to put the various park elements into some perspective. Here's a brief history from the Friends of Craigtoun website:

The Mount Melville Estate, originally called Craigtoun, was one of the many Melville family estates, first established in 1698 for General George Melville of Strathkinness. In the late 18th Century, General Robert Melville undertook much of the landscaping in the park; an account from 1790 mentions the purchase and planting of 230 trees. The house and grounds continued in Melville ownership until the beginning of the 20th Century. In 1901 the new owner, Dr James Younger of the Younger brewing family, commissioned Paul W. Waterhouse to design a new mansion house and landscape the park. He designed much of the fabric of the park which can be seen today including formal gardens, a walled garden, Cypress avenue, rose garden, Italian garden and temple. In 1920 Waterhouse was commissioned to carry out further work on the gardens including the addition of the two connected lakes and the picturesque island village which became known as the Dutch Village. Like many country/mansion houses at the time, the lakes were likely added to comply with insurance company requirements for a ready supply of water in case of fire.

In 1947 the house and grounds were sold by the Younger family to the then Fife County Council. Its name was changed back to Craigtoun and the grounds established as Craigtoun Country Park. The Mansion became a maternity hospital until its closure in 1992. The country park facilities were added to over the following two decades and by the mid 1960s the park was at its peak as a tourist and day-tripper attraction with facilities including bowling green, stage for regular Sunday concerts and acts, spectacular glasshouses, miniature railway, putting green/crazy golf, rowing and motor boats and the famous ‘Puffin’ Billy’ tractor drawn train. The end of each season was also marked in September with the Craigtoun Illuminations – a spectacular fireworks display.

Since the 1960s, the park's role has changed. There are no longer as many attractions, there's no entrance fee and it's become something of a more traditional park, maintained by an army of selfless volunteers. That's all fine with me. Craigtoun House, which sits outwith the fenced off boundary of the park itself, is now the subject of a planning application for flats and houses in the grounds which would, basically, kill off my interest in it forever but such is "progress". All of the houses my ancestors once lived in, the hospital I was born in, my primary school, secondary school and the golf course where I spent most of my teenage years - the happiest of my life - have all been obliterated from history so I'm getting used to it. Plus ça change, etc.

I'm drawn equally to the house and the park. If you know what you're looking at, you can see what was once a walk extending roughly southwards from the mansion through a couple of arches and two rows of trees to a stone feature. At some point in the past, it would have been a lovely spot to stroll along but now the section between the house and the park boundary is overgrown and unkempt, a tangle of rough grass, weeds and brambles topped off by a curtain of ivy falling, as in the last night of a theatre play, from what's left of one of the arches.

I'm often reminded, at times like these, that it's not always a bad thing for some individuals to have a lot of wealth no matter how much our sense of envy might tell us otherwise. We're hard-wired through DNA and thousands of years of evolution to collect as many resources as possible and it's inevitable that some will have a greater talent for that fight than others. Such accumulated wealth, whether we like it or not, is what made possible practically everything built by man that's worth looking at - from Versailles to The Colosseum to the Taj Mahal. On a much lesser scale, considerable local wealth created the likes of Craigtoun House.

The house, if you're sensitive to these things, gives off quite an atmosphere. It's particularly heavy in the mist. I can't say that the house itself breaks any new architectural ground but it's the way little reminders of the past emerge from the overgrown garden that gets me. 

Heading southwards from the house you come across the aforementioned ivy-covered stone arch, now crumbling around the edges. Through that, and once you've found a way past the boundary fence, you're into the park. Facing you is a curved stone wall with another arch, the gateway to the Cyprus Walk - two rows of tall trees leading down to a stone structure with an iron obelisk on top.

Beyond this point, the park reverts to a fairly unremarkable leisure facility although it does have a little "village" built on a pond and some old greenhouses which don't seem to be made much use of these days. The pics below will give you an idea of some of the other areas of the park.

The funny thing with Craigtoun Park is that, no matter how often I go back, I usually find something different to photograph.  I don't think I've ever pointed the camera at the Italianate village as it's not really my thing now - hence the Wikipedia pic - but I might try to squeeze and image or two out of it when I next pop along.

Wikipedia image