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Designed landscape of Crathes Castle (NO79NW0005). The first garden of the castle was probably laid out in the early 17th century, The designed landscape had been planted by the mid 18th century in formal style and the parkland was created in the later 18th century. The main blocks of woodland were planted circa 1700 by the 3rd Baronet, Sir Thomas and are shown on General Roy's plan of circa 1750. Many of the southern woods, including Milton Wood, were planted when the informal park was laid out in the 1790s. In the late 19th century many conifers were planted around the castle. The double avenue of lime trees, originally part of the 18th century carriage drive, was probably first planted around 1702, it was replanted in 1985-6 in the form shown on the OS 1st edition map. Features within the estate include East and West Lodges, East Lodge Bridge (NO79NW0105), ice pond, lades and possible ice houses. In 1996 the ice pond and lade on the estate were cleaned and recorded. This was carried out in two stages, an evaluation followed by the cleaning of the entire system. The lade is 138 m long above and 40 m long below the pond. It was deliberately channelled from an existing stream, and the sides lined with stones. When completely emptied the pond measured 10 m north-south by 8 m west-east. In general the type of material found indicated that after the functional use of the pond ceased in the mid 19th century, the pond was used as a recreational site for the inhabitants of the castle. A complete ice manufacturing system (the upper dam, sluice, lade, pond, slide, lower dam and ice houses) is present at Crathes estate and the survival of this system in such an intact condition appears to be quite rare. A desk based assessment and walkover survey by AOC in 1997 of the designed landscape within the grounds of Crathes Castle recorded 57 features, of which 15 were field boundaries, six were related to the water mains of Aberdeen Waterworks, four were recorded from aerial photographs, three were extractive sites, two were mounds and the remaining 27 are almost exclusively related to the recent land-use within the estate. A walkover survey of the forested areas of the estate was carried out by Cameron Archaeology in January 2015. This recorded additional remains of stone walling, six small cairns probably representing clearance activity and further investigated a possible prehistoric cairn at NO7263496518 previously noted by NTS. See also East Lodge Bridge.
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Historic Environment Records (HER)