Wray Castle - 01539433250

Wray Castle is a Victorian neo-gothic building at Claife in the English county of Cumbria. The house and grounds have belonged to the National Trust since 1929, but the house has only recently opened to the public on a regular basis. The grounds, which include part of the shoreline of Windermere, are open all year round and are renowned for their selection of specimen trees - Wellingtonia, redwood, Ginkgo biloba, weeping lime and varieties of beech.BackgroundThe house was built in 1840 for a retired Liverpudlian surgeon, James Dawson, who built it along with the neighbouring Wray Church using his wife's fortune. After Dawson's death in 1875 the estate was inherited by his fifteen year old nephew, Edward Preston Rawnsley. In 1877 Edward's cousin, Hardwicke Rawnsley, took up the appointment of vicar of Wray Church. To protect the countryside from damaging development, Hardwicke Rawnsley, building on an idea propounded by Ruskin, conceived of a National Trust that could buy and preserve places of natural beauty and historic interest for the nation.The house has an association with another key player in the National Trust, Beatrix Potter, who spent a summer holiday there when she was 16 in 1882. She bought a small farm in the Claife area, Hill Top, in 1905 with royalties from her first book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She went on to buy considerable tracts of land nearby, though she never owned the castle itself. In 1929 Wray Castle and 64acre of land were given to the National Trust by Sir Noton and Lady Barclay.

Tags: Landmark & Historical Place