Ascog Hall Victorian Fernery

Ascog Hall, on the east coast of the Isle of Bute, was built in 1844 for the Rev James Stewart and remodelled in 1862 in Scottish Baronial style by the Glasgow architect John Honeyman. The fernery belongs to the next generation: according to Historic Environment Scotland it was commissioned between 1867 and 1879 by Alexander Bannatyne Stewart, a Glasgow merchant and convener of Bute. Its design is attributed to Edward La Trobe Bateman, an artist and garden designer who had spent much of his life in Australia before settling on the island in 1869, and who is credited with assembling the original fern collection. Sources differ on the exact date: around 1870 in the Scottish register, 1875 elsewhere.

On 25 October 1879 The Gardeners' Chronicle published an article on the house with a complete inventory of its ferns, a document that would prove decisive more than a century later. The estate declined during the twentieth century, and when new owners bought it in the mid-1980s the fernery was a ruin buried in undergrowth, rediscovered during clearance work in 1987. Listed at category B that year, it received a Historic Scotland grant in 1995 for a new roof, which was erected and glazed in 1996. The fernery reopened to the public in June 1997 and won a first prize from the Historic Gardens Foundation in 2001. The property changed hands in 2013 and the gardens have since been developed further.

This is a sunken glasshouse: a ravine cut into a natural bank, reached by going down a flight of steps as if into a grotto, with the roof sitting at ground level. The owners' site describes an L-shaped plan, while the Historic Environment Scotland listing calls it kidney-shaped; both stress the walls of local red sandstone rubble, laid in very large blocks, and the sandstone entrance on the east side.

Cast-iron girders carry a shallow-domed glazed roof; the 1879 article already spoke of a span-roofed house with rounded ends and praised its solid construction. Inside, a central rockery is threaded by an ornamental stream and a waterfall feeding a pool, the whole fed by natural springs. Rubble pockets set irregularly along the walls hold the ferns, and the floor is laid with cobbles. The fernery is unheated: its sunken position shelters it from cold, but summer heat means opening the vents and watering daily. The present roof, installed in 1996, replicates the original.

The star of the house is a king fern, Todea barbara, the only plant of the 1870s collection to have survived the years of neglect. Its rhizome is about a metre across and three metres high, and the 1879 article already described it as a thousand years old or more; it is often billed as the oldest exotic fern in the United Kingdom.

During the restoration the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh guided the replanting, using the inventory published in 1879: the present collection of pteridophytes, made up of many exotic and rare fern species, was arranged to evoke the Victorian planting rather than to copy it plant for plant. Around the glasshouse the three-acre garden is laid out in rooms: a wildflower and orchid meadow, a rose garden, a woodland garden, a Fern Alley lined with native ferns, a gravel garden on the old tennis court, specimen trees, rhododendrons, azaleas and a Chilean fire tree.

Ascog Hall stands in the hamlet of Ascog, a couple of miles south-east of Rothesay on the east coast of the Isle of Bute. The house remains a private home: only the fernery and the surrounding garden are open to visitors, during the season.

The fernery itself takes little time to explore, but it is best combined with a walk through the three acres of garden, including the plant hunters' trail and the features created in the ruins of the former stables and coach house. Parking for visitors with reduced mobility is provided near the house, and dogs are allowed. A visit pairs easily with Rothesay, the island's main town.