SCOTTISH GAEDENS 



in 1360 to Sir Walter Oliphant of Gask, who 

 married Elizabeth, natural daughter of Robert the 

 Bruce. The fifth Lord Oliphant, succeeding to the 

 great estates in 1593, so squandered his means by 

 extravagant living that his cousin Patrick, succeed- 

 ing about 1613, sold the property to Erskine 

 Viscount Fenton, who became Earl of Kellie in 

 1619. He and his descendants greatly impoverished 

 themselves by their enthusiasm for the Stuart 

 cause, Alexander, the sixth Earl, being among the 

 very few persons of position who went "out" in 

 the '45. An old tree in the garden of Kellie is 

 shown as his temporary hiding place at that time. 

 He paid the penalty of three years' imprisonment, 

 and finally received a free pardon. His son, the 

 seventh Earl, who earned by his musical gifts the 

 sobriquet of "Fiddler Tarn," sold his whole estate, 

 except the castle, and two or three hundred acres 

 adjoining, to Sir John Anstruther. In 1875 the 

 fourteenth Earl of Kellie was declared heir to the 

 earldom of Mar in the creation of 1565, and the two 

 earldoms are now united in the person of the 

 twelfth Earl of Mar and fifteenth Earl of Kellie, who 

 rightly sets great store by the beautiful old house 

 which he has inherited, bereft though it be of all but a 

 fragment of the broad lands which once supported it. 

 By a stroke of rare good fortune, both for the 

 proprietor and all others interested in ancient 

 dwellings, the late Professor James Lorimer took a 

 fancy to the place in 1878. Roofless, floorless, 



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