Sunset at Carberry House
Watercolour and crayon
©2017 Charlene Brown
We planned to stay in a ‘Scottish Baronial pile’ near Edinburgh for our last night in Scotland, and selected the splendid Carberry Tower Mansion House and Estate from the various piles available. Fortunately it occurred to one of the girls that Carberry was much too splendid to spend a night which would end at 4 am when we had to leave for the Edinburgh airport for our flight to Toronto, so we scheduled our second last night in Scotland there instead.
The place has quite a history, being first mentioned in the 11th century when King David I of Scotland granted Carberry to the monks of Dunfermline Abbey. The original building was a simple square tower house, ‘built more for strength than ornament’ according to Wikipedia. It changed hands many time over the years, and was gradually improved piece by piece, with no apparent plan, except that the extension seemed to proceed in ‘an anti-clockwise direction.’ It turned out surprisingly well. Eventually it was owned by the 16th Lord Elphinstone, who was married to Lady Mary Bowes-Lyon, whose sister Elizabeth visited and helped at the Red Cross bazaar held at Carberry Tower in 1915. Apparently, Elizabeth liked the place so much that, years later she and her husband brought their two daughters there for summer holidays. That was in the early 1930s before anyone knew that the elder daughter would become Queen Elizabeth II.
