# Floors Castle

country house in Roxburghshire, south-east Scotland

Scottish Borders, United Kingdom

Palace · Fortification

## Story

• Floors Castle, on a terrace above the Tweed at Kelso, is the seat of the Duke of Roxburghe and an estate house rather than a fortress.
• William Adam (architect) built it for John Ker, 1st Duke of Roxburghe, between 1721 and 1726, possibly on an earlier tower.
• William Henry Playfair remodelled it for James Innes-Ker, 6th Duke of Roxburghe, and gave it the turreted silhouette in the 1830s and 1840s.
• Mary Goelet refurnished the rooms after 1903 with seventeenth-century tapestries and pictures by Walter Sickert and Henri Matisse.
• Guy Innes-Ker opened the house to the public in 1977, and it remains the home of the eleventh duke.

## Visiting

From 1 October until Easter 2027 the castle is closed on every day of the week, while the walled garden is open from 10.30am to 4pm and last entry is at 3.00pm. Christmas Eve opening hours are 10.30am to 3pm, and the garden is closed on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day. New Year's Eve opening hours are 10.30am to 3pm. The Terrace Café is open from 10.30am to 4pm in that winter season, with the same Christmas closures, and on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve it closes at 3pm.
The Apple Shed is open from 10.30am to 4pm from 1 October until 9 January, and it is closed on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day. An autumn and winter gardens ticket costs £3 a person. An annual admission pass costs £30. Free garden admission for cardholders is offered every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Child admission is free under the age of 16 when the child is accompanied by an adult. Dogs are not allowed inside the castle. Dogs on leads are allowed to enter the grounds and the gardens. In the open season the house is open from 10.30am to 5pm, with last admission at 4pm.
A castle, gardens and grounds ticket in the 2026 main season was £22 for an adult, a gardens and grounds ticket was £10, and that castle ticket was good for seven days. Wheelchair users and mobility scooters are not allowed to enter the castle while the lift is being replaced. Admission includes free parking during opening hours.

## History

Floors Castle stands on a terrace above the Tweed at Kelso and is the seat of the Duke of Roxburghe. It is an estate house rather than a fortress, though a tower may have stood on the site, and a residence called Floors was already in use when Robert Ker invited the king there in 1601. The ground had belonged to Kelso Abbey before it passed to the Kers of Cessford. Robert Ker, the first earl, died at Floors on 18 January 1650, and around that year the family left the stronghold of Cessford for this bank of the river.

John Ker, 1st Duke of Roxburghe, was created duke in 1707 for his part in the union of the parliaments. The first stone of a new house was laid in 1721, and William Adam (architect) built the plain block, with corner towers and side pavilions, between 1721 and 1726. One account has him carrying out a design by Sir John Vanbrugh, who knew the duke.

That attribution to Vanbrugh is also recorded as incorrect, and the building is treated as Adam’s own execution of a house perhaps inspired by Vanbrugh. Robert Adam was William’s son and the later classical architect. He did not design Floors.

Formal avenues and vistas toward Hume Castle and Smailholm Tower surrounded the new house, and by 1798 the paths had been softened into meandering walks. Part of Kelso’s upper market, and the buried burgh of Wester Kelso, was levelled into the park. The third duke died childless in 1804, a seven-year lawsuit followed, and in 1812 the dukedom passed to Sir James Innes.

The family has used the name Innes-Ker since that accession. His son, born in 1816, became James Innes-Ker, 6th Duke of Roxburghe, at the age of seven.

Around 1837, in a campaign also begun in 1836 and carried to 1845 or to 1847, William Henry Playfair raised the silhouette with turrets, curved links and a porte cochère. Queen Victoria visited in 1867, when the walled garden of 1857, its workforce of twelve and its long glass corridor were in their prime. The sixth duke’s death in 1879 is placed in Genoa on 23 April, with the funeral at Floors, and also in Geneva on the way home from Naples.

In 1903 the eighth duke married Mary Goelet, also called May, an American heiress. She refurnished the rooms, brought seventeenth-century Gobelins tapestries into the ballroom in the 1930s, and added pictures by Walter Sickert and Henri Matisse. Her campaign of 1927 to 1930 largely replaced the earlier interiors. The east gates by Reginald Fairlie were built in 1929.

Guy Innes-Ker, the tenth duke, opened the house to the public in 1977. Allan Warren photographed him outside the castle, and the film Greystoke was made here in 1984. He died at Floors on 29 August 2019, and his son Charles is the eleventh duke. Digging in 1983 to 1985 placed medieval Wester Kelso nearer the Tweed than the traditional market-cross site, and in 2011 an unpublished letter of Robert Burns, written at Ellisland on 13 May 1789, was found in an album of the sixth duke.

The house is listed in category A, the date given as 15 March 1971 and as 16 March 1971. The designed landscape of about 374 hectares was designated on 30 June 1987 and on 1 July 1987, and was amended on 29 June 2011. Lead on the porte cochère, lost in the 1970s, has been renewed in a repair that began in July 2024. On 19 July 2022 a temperature of 35.1 degrees Celsius in this area was the hottest recorded in Scotland.

## Photographs

- [Floors Castle, by Kelso in Roxburghshire — Hogweard](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Floors_Castle%2C_Roxburghshire.jpg)
- [Floors Castle — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Floors_Castle_Morris_edited.jpg)
- [Floors Castle, south front. Kelso, Scotland. — Richard Slessor](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Floors_Castle.jpg)
- [Panorama front view of the Floors Castle — Mihael Grmek](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Floors_Castle1.JPG)
- [Floors Castle and gardens — in the Scottish Borders. — Mihael Grmek](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Floors_Castle2.JPG)
- [Castles old and new. High on its earthworks on a narrow isthmus between the Tweed and Teviot rivers, Roxburgh Castle (foreground) had strong claims in medieval — Steve Kent](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Castles_old_and_new_-_geograph.org.uk_-_163364.jpg)
- [Floors Castle from the Grahamslaw Road. — Donald Curry](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Floors_Castle_from_the_Grahamslaw_Road_-_geograph.org.uk_-_217917.jpg)
- [Floors Castle Home of the Duke of Roxbrough — mike hancock](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Floors_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_291080.jpg)
- [Floors Castle — wfmillar](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Floors_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_515496.jpg)
- [Floors Castle A view of the castle over the River Tweed from the southwest end of the site of Roxburgh Castle. Floors Castle (1721-6) was designed by William — Walter Baxter](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Floors_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_590937.jpg)

## Sources

- [Floors Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floors_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [John Ker, 1st Duke of Roxburghe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ker,_1st_Duke_of_Roxburghe) — Wikipedia
- [James Innes-Ker, 6th Duke of Roxburghe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Innes-Ker,_6th_Duke_of_Roxburghe) — Wikipedia
- [William Adam (architect)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Adam_(architect)) — Wikipedia
- [William Henry Playfair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Playfair) — Wikipedia
- [Mary Goelet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Goelet) — Wikipedia
- [Robert Adam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adam) — Wikipedia
- [Henri Matisse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Matisse) — Wikipedia
- [Allan Warren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Warren) — Wikipedia
- [Walter Sickert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Sickert) — Wikipedia
- [Guy Innes-Ker, 10th Duke of Roxburghe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Innes-Ker,_10th_Duke_of_Roxburghe) — Wikipedia
- [Henry Innes-Ker, 8th Duke of Roxburghe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Innes-Ker,_8th_Duke_of_Roxburghe) — Wikipedia
- [James Innes-Ker, 5th Duke of Roxburghe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Innes-Ker,_5th_Duke_of_Roxburghe) — Wikipedia
- [Robert Ker, 1st Earl of Roxburghe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ker,_1st_Earl_of_Roxburghe) — Wikipedia
- [James II of Scotland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_II_of_Scotland) — Wikipedia
- [Roxburgh Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxburgh_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Kelso Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelso_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Gobelins Manufactory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobelins_Manufactory) — Wikipedia
- [Acts of Union 1707](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1707) — Wikipedia
- [Floors Castle listed building](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/apex/f?p=1505:300:::::VIEWTYPE,VIEWREF:designation,LB10480) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Floors Castle garden and designed landscape](https://www.trove.scot/designation/GDL00181) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Floors Castle listing on Trove](https://www.trove.scot/designation/LB10480) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Castle](https://www.floorscastle.com/visit/castle/) — Floors Castle
- [Family tree](https://www.floorscastle.com/visit/castle/family-tree/) — Floors Castle
- [Opening times](https://www.floorscastle.com/plan-your-trip/plan-your-day/opening-times/) — Floors Castle
- [Tickets](https://www.floorscastle.com/tickets/) — Floors Castle
- [Plan your day](https://www.floorscastle.com/plan-your-trip/plan-your-day/) — Floors Castle
- [Autumn and winter walled garden ticket](https://www.floorscastle.com/tickets/autumn-winter-walled-garden-only-ticket/) — Floors Castle
- [Roof restoration](https://www.floorscastle.com/blog/floors-castle-roof-project/) — Floors Castle
- [Under the scaffold](https://www.floorscastle.com/blog/under-the-scaffold/) — Floors Castle
- [Floors Castle](https://www.floorscastle.com/) — Floors Castle
- [Wester Kelso and Floors Castle, 1983–85](https://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/shair/article/view/405) — Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
- [Wester Kelso and Floors Castle excavation text](https://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/shair/article/download/405/403/402) — Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
- [Origins of the settlements at Kelso and Peebles](https://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/shair/article/view/403) — Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
- [Robert Burns letter found at Floors Castle](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-12265197) — BBC
- [Floors Castle afternoon tea itinerary](https://hiddenscotland.com/itineraries/floors-castle-and-afternoon-tea-in-the-terrace-cafe) — Hidden Scotland
- [Floors Castle 2-for-1 entry](https://www.gardenersworld.com/2-for-1-gardens/scotland/floors-castle-2-for-1-entry/) — BBC Gardeners World Magazine
- [Floors Castle with children](https://bonniedaysout.scot/location/floors-castle/) — Bonnie Days Out
- [Floors Castle, Roxburghshire.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle,_Roxburghshire.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floors Castle Morris edited.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle_Morris_edited.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floors Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floors Castle1.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle1.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floors Castle2.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle2.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castles old and new - geograph.org.uk - 163364.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castles_old_and_new_-_geograph.org.uk_-_163364.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floors Castle from the Grahamslaw Road - geograph.org.uk - 217917.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle_from_the_Grahamslaw_Road_-_geograph.org.uk_-_217917.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floors Castle - geograph.org.uk - 291080.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_291080.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floors Castle - geograph.org.uk - 515496.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_515496.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floors Castle - geograph.org.uk - 590937.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floors_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_590937.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Floors Castle stands on a natural gravel terrace above the River Tweed, immediately west of Kelso in the Scottish Borders, formerly Roxburghshire. It is the seat of the Duke of Roxburghe. Despite the name, it is an estate house rather than a fortress, and it has none of the defensive strength of a border stronghold. The house looks south across the river to the mound of Roxburgh Castle and, on a clear day, to the Cheviot Hills. Kelso Abbey and a more distant castellated folly punctuate the middle distance. From the town’s river crossing the cream sandstone front is visible even on a dull day.

The name has been explained in two ways. It may come from flowers, or from the French fleurs, or it may come from the floors, or terraces, on which the house is built. An older spelling is Fleurs. The Ker family, later earls and dukes of Roxburghe, have held lands in Roxburghshire since the twelfth century. Their origins are not certain. They were likely of Norman stock. A family account traces two brothers, Ralph and John, who passed from England into Scotland in the thirteenth century, Ralph’s line becoming the Kers who were later marquesses of Lothian, and John’s line the Kers of Cessford. A Henry Ker is recorded with a letter of protection for himself and twelve men from Edward III in 1363, and the name is associated in that period with the barony of Auldtounburn. In the early fifteenth century the Kers were associated with the Earls of Douglas, until that family’s fall in the middle of the century.

The ground had belonged to the monks of Kelso Abbey. The abbey was founded at Roxburgh in 1128 by Tironensian monks first brought to Scotland about 1113, in the reign of Alexander I, and settled near Selkirk before David I moved them. By 1143 the church could be dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint John. David’s son Henry, Earl of Northumbria, was buried there in 1152. The house stood in sight of Roxburgh Castle across the Tweed. John, abbot from 1160 to 1180, was the first abbot in Scotland to receive the mitre. The abbey’s income came from wide Border estates. English occupation of Roxburgh and Berwick repeatedly damaged it, and the monks repaired it. From 1460 life was more settled until the early sixteenth century. In the 1540s, during the Rough Wooing, forces acting for Henry VIII badly damaged Kelso together with Melrose, Dryburgh and Jedburgh. By the middle of that century the abbey had effectively ceased to function. What stands now is the west tower crossing and part of the infirmary, a heavy Romanesque mass of semi-military appearance. The site has not been fully excavated in modern times. Evidence suggests a major church with two crossings. In the twentieth century the Roxburghe Aisle, also spelled Ailse in a family account, was built on as the burial vault of the dukes.

Roxburgh Castle, whose ruins lie in the grounds of Floors, overlooks the meeting of the Tweed and the Teviot. Tradition gives its foundation to David I, and it is first recorded about 1128. In 1174 it was surrendered to England after William I was captured at Alnwick, and it was often in English hands afterwards. Edward I of England imprisoned Mary Bruce in a cage hung outside the castle from 1306 to 1310. On 19 February 1314 Sir James Douglas, the Black Douglas, retook it in a night attack. His men, clothed in black, were apparently mistaken for cattle, and they climbed the walls with rope and board ladders. Robert the Bruce ordered his brother Edward Bruce to demolish it, and the Lanercost Chronicle says the Scots pulled that beautiful castle to the ground so that the English should not rule the land by holding castles. Edward III’s forces took it in 1334. Alexander Ramsay recaptured it for the Scots on 30 March 1342 by a night escalade. The English had it again shortly after the Battle of Neville’s Cross in October 1346. A Scottish siege in 1417 forced repairs.

In August 1436 James I of Scotland gathered a great army, with large guns and mortars manned by German crews under Johannes Paule, Highlanders and Islesmen and archers brought by Alexander of Islay, Earl of Ross, who brought 3,000 men, and Lowland men-at-arms of Archibald, Earl of Douglas, and William, Earl of Angus. The queen warned him of a plot. The Archbishop of York, the Bishop of Durham and the Earls of Northumberland were coming with a northern force. He left the field, the army dispersed, and the German equipment was left behind.

James II of Scotland was killed at that castle on 3 August 1460. He had been king since 1437, when he was six, after the assassination of his father. He was born at Holyrood on 16 October 1430, the younger of twin sons of James I and Joan Beaufort, and a red birthmark covered one side of his face. He defeated the Douglas family in 1455 and then used the Wars of the Roses to attack England. At the 1460 siege, metal fragments from the explosion of one of his bombards killed him. The Scots still stormed Roxburgh. His queen, Mary of Guelders, had the castle demolished, and the royal burgh of Roxburgh was destroyed with it. The infant James III was hastily crowned at Kelso Abbey. A single holly in the Floors park is said by tradition to mark the spot where James II was fatally injured in 1460. Judging from brief nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century descriptions, that tree may have been planted by the sixth duke in the earlier nineteenth century on the site of an older stump. In 1818 David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, brought a young Cedar of Lebanon from Dryburgh Abbey and presented it to the Marquis of Beaumont, who planted it near the same spot. The ruins today are a large mound with small fragments of stone wall, especially on the south side. In 1545, during the Rough Wooing, an English garrison under Ralph Bulmer built a rectangular fort on the site. It was destroyed in 1550 under the Treaty of Boulogne.

Until the early seventeenth century the Anglo-Scottish border, the Marches, was a lawless ground of reprisal, cattle rustling and murder carried on by gangs of reivers. Tower houses, or pele towers, were typical of that country. The present house has no defensive capability, and it was built when private fortresses had become obsolete in lowland Scotland, but there was possibly a tower house on the site. The lands of Floors were held by the monks until the Reformation, when they were handed to Robert Ker of Cessford by James VI. A family account places the benefit a generation earlier: Robert’s father, William Ker of Cessford, gained from the dissolution of the abbey estates in 1580.

Robert Ker, 1st Earl of Roxburghe, was born about 1570 and died in 1650. He was the eldest son of William Ker of Cessford, who died in 1605, and Janet Douglas. The family homes were Cessford Castle and Halliden in East Teviotdale. His grandfather Sir Walter Ker fought against Mary, Queen of Scots, at Carberry Hill and at Langside. A family account, drawing on a blunt portrait of the reiving years, calls Robert a fierce Border callant who acted as warden in his father’s place and was as practised a reiver as any on the frontier, ambitious, proud, bloody in revenge, poor, and easily framed to any purpose. That account places his first recorded raid at the age of fifteen, on Stirling, and two years later puts him with the Bold Buccleuch and Lord Johnstone at the head of 2,000 men against the Collingwoods. It says James VI forbade him to marry Mary, daughter of Maitland of Lethington, that he married her anyway and was jailed, and that the son of that marriage died in 1618. Another account names the first wife Margaret Maitland, the only daughter of William Maitland of Lethington and Mary Fleming, one of the Four Maries, and dates the marriage to 27 October 1587. That account names a son William Ker, styled Lord Ker and commendator of Kelso Abbey, who died in 1643, and daughters Jean, Isabel and Mary.

He was knighted on 17 May 1590 at the coronation of Anne of Denmark. In December 1590 he was involved in the assassination of William Kerr of Ancram, ambushed on the stairs of his lodging and shot with a pistol called a dag. A family account says he fled after the plot was revealed, that his possessions were forfeited, and that he was pardoned in 1591, with the feud continuing for sixteen years. By 1597 he was credited with sixteen killings, and he and Buccleuch were said to have cost the English Marches some £60,000. He was Deputy Keeper of Liddesdale and Warden of the Middle March in 1593. In August 1594 he rode in the tournament at the baptism of Prince Henry at Stirling as a Turkish knight. In 1598 he was sent to England and kept by Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, at Bishopsthorpe, then returned to Berwick and wrote his thanks from his house near Kelso, Friers, on 14 June 1598. A family account says Sir Robert Carey imprisoned him that year and later counted him a friend.

He was a privy councillor from 1599 and was created Lord Roxburghe in 1600. In April 1601 he invited James VI and Anne of Denmark to the marriage of his sister Elizabeth to Sir John Bellenden of Broughton, and he named Floors Castle as the place. The king refused, suspecting a plot involving the Master of Gray. So a residence called Floors was already in use in 1601, long before the Georgian house. In September 1602 he visited Elizabeth I. He accompanied James to London in 1603. He succeeded to his father’s estates in 1606 and in 1607 was a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. On 18 September 1616 he was created Lord Ker of Cessford and Caverton, and Earl of Roxburghe, with remainder to his heirs male. His second marriage, on 3 February 1613 or 1614, was to Jean or Jane Drummond. Their son Henry, Lord Ker, died in 1643 and left daughters only. After Jean’s death in 1643 he married Lady Isobel Douglas. He was Keeper of the Privy Seal of Scotland from 1637. He subscribed the King’s Covenant at Holyrood in 1638 and joined the king’s party in the civil war. When Charles I tried to arrest five members of the Commons in 1642, Ker kept the door of the chamber open. He supported the Engagement of 1648 and was deprived of the Privy Seal in 1649. He died at Floors, his residence near Kelso, on 18 January 1650. His will mentions a diamond and ruby chain with a picture case holding a miniature of Anne of Denmark, and a valentine set with diamonds with a crown and a picture of Charles I as Duke of York. Both sons had died without male heirs. By a special arrangement the titles passed to his grandson William Drummond, later Ker, youngest son of his daughter Jean and John Drummond, 2nd Earl of Perth. William became 2nd Earl, married his cousin Jean, daughter of Lord Ker, and lived from 1622 to 1675. Around 1650 the family left the cannon-battered stronghold of Cessford for Floors.

The 3rd Earl, Robert Ker, was a privy counsellor in 1680 and sheriff. In May 1682 he drowned when HMS Gloucester, a fifty-gun ship, struck a sand bar off Yarmouth in a gale. The Duke of York, later James II of England, and John Churchill were saved. Robert drowned with Sir John Hope of Hopetoun and 120 of the crew. His eldest son, also Robert, became 4th Earl as a child and died unmarried in 1696. A family account calls that boy the eldest son of the 3rd Duke, which conflicts with the earl’s numbering. The title then passed to his younger brother.

John Ker, 1st Duke of Roxburghe, was born on 30 April 1680 and died on 27 February 1741. A landscape account places his death in 1740. He was the second son of Robert Ker, 3rd Earl of Roxburghe, and Margaret Hay, daughter of John Hay, 1st Marquess of Tweeddale. He became 5th Earl in 1696. A family account calls him the best accomplished young man of quality in Europe. In 1704 he was a Secretary of State of Scotland. He helped to bring about the union with England and was created Duke of Roxburghe in 1707 for that service. It was the last creation in the Scottish peerage. His own words on the motives, preserved in the family account, were that trade would move most, Hanover some, ease and security others, together with a general aversion to civil discords, intolerable poverty, and the constant oppression of a bad ministry. On 28 May 1707 he was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was a Scottish representative peer in four parliaments, a privy councillor and Keeper of the Privy Seal under George I, and loyal to the king in the Jacobite rising of 1715. He was one of the regents of Great Britain before George I’s accession in 1714. He served as Secretary of State for Scotland from 1716 to 1725. He opposed the malt tax, and in 1725 Sir Robert Walpole procured his dismissal. He was a Knight of the Garter and Lord Lieutenant of Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire. In April 1727 he was one of the six pall-bearers of Sir Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey. He was one of the original governors of the Foundling Hospital, chartered on 17 October 1739. He was a friend of Henry Fielding and of Sir John Vanbrugh.

On 1 January 1707/8, also given as 1708, he married the widow Lady Mary Savile, born Finch. She was the only child of Daniel Finch. One account calls her father the 7th Earl of Winchilsea. A family account calls him the 2nd Earl of Winchelsea. Her mother was Lady Essex Rich. From her first marriage to William Savile, 2nd Marquess of Halifax, she had daughters who married the Earl of Thanet and the Earl of Burlington. Two paintings by Peter Tillemans in the entrance hall show Burley-on-the-Hill and Eastwell Park, seats of her family. The duchess died on 19 September 1718. Their only son was Robert Ker, about 1709 to 1755, created Earl Ker of Wakefield in 1722. John was buried first in the family vault under Bowden Kirk and later moved to the Roxburghe Aisle at Kelso Abbey.

Though Broxmouth Park, near Dunbar, seems to have been the main family residence, Floors took precedence after 1730. The first duke’s mother moved there permanently. The duke himself spent most of his time in the south of England, close to Parliament, and cherished his time in the country. He commissioned a new mansion to incorporate, or to replace, the earlier tower. The first stone was laid in 1721. The build is dated 1721 to 1726. It was a plain block with towers at each corner, and pavilions on either side for stables and kitchens, the common eighteenth-century layout of a main block with two symmetrical service wings. The architect was William Adam, born in 1689 and died on 24 June 1748, the father of Robert Adam.

William Adam (architect) was baptised on 24 October 1689 at Linktown of Abbotshall, now part of Kirkcaldy. He was the only surviving child of the mason John Adam, who died about 1710, and Helen Cranstoun. He learned masonry, was a member of the Kirkcaldy masons’ guild by 1717, and before 1720 travelled in France and the Low Countries. In 1714 he partnered William Robertson of Gladney in a brickworks and has been credited with introducing Dutch pantiles into Scotland. On 30 May 1716 he married Robertson’s daughter Mary. By 1721 he was engaged on Floors and on extensions at Hopetoun House. He became a Freemason that same year in the Lodge of Edinburgh, Mary’s Chapel, Number 1. He was a Presbyterian Whig, with patrons in John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stair, and Sir John Clerk of Penicuik. In 1728 he became Clerk and Storekeeper of the King’s Works in Scotland, and in 1730 principal Mason to the Board of Ordnance in North Britain. In 1731 he began the estate he named Blair Adam. His manner was Palladian with Baroque detail inspired by Vanbrugh. Hopetoun and Duff House are among his best-known works. In his own century he was called Scotland’s Universal Architect. Later critics have found the quality of his work varied to an extreme degree. He was also involved in coal, salt, quarries and mills.

The authorship of the first design is disputed and all three accounts belong in the story. One says that in 1721 William Adam executed a design by Vanbrugh. The attribution to Sir John Vanbrugh is also set down as incorrect. The house’s own account says the building was perhaps inspired by an original design from Vanbrugh, architect of Castle Howard and Blenheim and an acquaintance of the first duke, while the execution and the build were undoubtedly Adam’s. Building accounts and drawings for the castle and the ancillary buildings are held at Floors. The notice of the building was amended in January 2006. The house is described as William Adam, 1721 to 1726, possibly incorporating earlier fabric, and as transformed into a quasi-Caroline castle by the later remodelling.

Robert Adam, the designer’s second son, was born on 3 July 1728 at Gladney House and died on 3 March 1792. He is named because he was William’s son and the later leader of the classical revival, not because he designed Floors. From 1746 he was apprenticed to his father and assisted at Inveraray Castle and Hopetoun. William died in June 1748. Robert then worked with his brother John, spent nearly five years in Rome from 1754, and with his brother James developed the Adam style in London. He was Architect of the King’s Works from 1761 to 1769 and member of Parliament for Kinross-shire from 1768 to 1774. Much of his work was the remodelling of existing houses and the design of romantic pseudo-medieval country houses, a different generation from the plain Georgian block at Floors.

Daniel Defoe, publishing an account of his tours of Scotland in 1723 to 1726, mentioned the ongoing embellishment and predicted that a future visitor would hardly recognise land that had been open and wild once it was enclosed, cultivated and improved, the house surrounded with large grown vistas and well-planted avenues such as were never seen there before. William Wyeth’s estate plan of 1736 and Roy’s military survey of 1747 to 1755 show a large formal design: Adam’s symmetrical house, woodland plantations lining a central approach from the north, allées and rides, and vistas aimed at Hume Castle and Smailholm Tower. Plantations also followed the escarpment above the river. An engraving of 1804 shows the tall mansion from Kelso, framed by mature trees.

Work continued after the first duke’s death. His son, and after 1755 his grandson, inherited. The Tweed bank to the south was straightened. Wyeth’s plan shows the river flowing closer to the house, and islands at Faircross Anna that were later taken into the park by a bank which diverted the water. To the south-east, part of the town of Kelso was acquired in the middle and later eighteenth century. Buildings, roads and the old upper market were demolished, cleared and levelled for parkland, a new road and a walled garden. Further west, a metre-thick layer of soil and clay was dumped over the medieval burgh of Wester Kelso to even the new park. Closer to the house, the straight paths were replaced by perimeter woods and meandering walks. Matthew Stobie’s survey of 1798 shows that informal design.

Robert, 2nd Duke, inherited in 1741. Created Earl Ker of Wakefield in 1722, he had a seat in the House of Lords. In 1739 he married his half-cousin Essex Mostyn. Their son John was born in 1740 and succeeded in 1755. A daughter Essex died in infancy in 1742. Two further daughters, Essex and Mary, were bridesmaids at the marriage of George III to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761. Thomas Hudson’s portrait of the girls hangs in the ante room. A second son, Robert, born in 1747, reached the rank of lieutenant colonel in the 6th Dragoons. During the second duke’s time the roofline at Floors was made more elaborate.

John, 3rd Duke, was born in Hanover Square in London in 1740 and took the title at fifteen. He was educated at Eton. Pompeo Batoni painted him on the Grand Tour in 1761, and that picture hangs in the entrance hall. In Italy that year he met Christina Sophia Albertina, eldest daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Her younger sister Charlotte married George III later in 1761. Court etiquette and the difference in rank kept Christina and John from marrying. A family account says they pledged themselves to celibacy, and also says that this seems unlikely. They certainly never married. He turned to books. He paid 100 guineas for a first edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Valdarfer edition, which many had said did not exist. Over forty years he gathered about 10,000 items, mostly books, with a particular hunger for Shakespeare, together with pamphlets and broadside ballads. He was a Lord of the Bedchamber from 1767 and Groom of the Stole from 1796, a Knight of the Thistle in 1768, a Knight of the Garter in 1801, and Lord Lieutenant of Roxburghshire from 1794 until his death in 1804. He died without children. The British peerages of Earl and Baron Ker of Wakefield became extinct. The Scottish titles and the estates passed to an elderly kinsman.

William Bellenden-Ker, 4th Duke, also William Drummond, 7th Lord Bellenden of Broughton, was born about 1728 and died in 1805. He was in his late seventies, childless, and a captain retired from the 25th Foot. He died aged 77, soon after inheriting. The male line from the 2nd Earl then failed, and the lordship of Bellenden became extinct. He had nominated his cousin’s son John Gawler, who took the name Ker and lived in the castle with the dowager duchess and the unmarried sisters of the 3rd Duke. Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Gawler’s father hangs in the ante room. The claim was contested for seven years, in the Court of Session and the House of Lords, at vast cost. The rivals included Lady Essex Ker as heir of line of the 2nd Earl, Major-General Walter Ker of Littledean as heir male of the 1st Earl, William Drummond of Logiealmond as heir male of the 2nd Earl, and Sir James Innes, descended from Margaret Ker, third daughter of Harry, Lord Ker. The decision of 11 May 1812 was for Sir James. The family account says the Lord Chancellor found for the 76-year-old Sir James Innes in 1812. He sold the third duke’s library at a famous auction in 1812, and that sale repaired the cost of the lawsuit.

James Innes-Ker, 5th Duke of Roxburghe, was born James Innes on 10 January 1736 and died on 19 July 1823. A family account places that death in Genoa, aged 87, with burial at Bowden Kirk. He had succeeded as 6th Baronet of Innes in 1762, served in the 88th and 58th Regiments of Foot, and married first, on 19 April 1769, Mary Wray, who died in 1807. On 28 July 1807 he married Harriet Charlewood of Windlesham, about forty-two years his junior. Their son James Henry Robert was born on 12 July 1816, when the duke was eighty. A landscape account says he acquired Floors at 76 and produced a son four years later, the boy becoming duke on his father’s death in 1823. He took the double name Innes-Ker. Since his accession in 1812 the family has used that name. He was known locally as the Good Duke James and endowed the Town House, Roxburgh School and the church hall in Kelso. He was a representative peer from 1818 to 1820. Henry Raeburn’s portraits of him and of his second duchess hang in the entrance hall. His widow remarried Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Frederick O’Reilly on 14 November 1827.

James Innes-Ker, 6th Duke of Roxburghe, inherited at seven. He was raised at Floors by his mother and, from 1827, by her second husband. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford. He had a reputation for kindness to his tenants and a love of music. In 1837 he was created Earl Innes, described as the first peerage created by the young Queen Victoria, which gave him a seat in the House of Lords. On 29 December 1836, in the last days of that year, he married Susanna Stephania Dalbiac, also spelled Susannah Stephanie, born in 1814 and died in 1895, the only child of Lieutenant-General Sir James Charles Dalbiac. In 1840 he was a Knight of the Thistle. He was Lieutenant General of the Royal Company of Archers, the ceremonial body that has acted as the sovereign’s bodyguard in Scotland since 1822 and the visit of George IV. He is called both a governor of the National Bank of Scotland and a governor of the Bank of England. He was Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire from 1873 until his death in 1879. One account says he died in Genoa on 23 April 1879, that the funeral was at Floors, and that he was interred in the aisle at Bowden. A family account says he died in Geneva in 1879 while returning from Naples. He was succeeded by his eldest son James. The children were Lady Susan Harriet, born in 1837, the seventh duke James, born in 1839, Lady Charlotte Isabella, born in 1841, and Lord Charles John, born in 1842. Their portraits are named in the billiard room. A Scottish School portrait of the sixth duke, of 1840, hangs in the duke’s dining room. Samuel Mackenzie’s portrait of the duchess hangs in the billiard room.

The duchess became, in Victoria’s words, a dear and valued friend. In 1865 the queen made her a Lady of the Bedchamber and gave her the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert. She was present at the attempt on the queen’s life in 1882 by Roderick Maclean. She was acting Mistress of the Robes from 1892 until her death in 1895, and she was one of the queen’s staff until then.

Around 1837, also given as circa 1837, the sixth duke commissioned William Henry Playfair to remodel the plain Georgian house. The listed dates of the remodelling are 1837 to 1845. A landscape account says the commission was in 1836, that the work ran through the next decade, and that the building dates are 1837 to 1845. The house’s own account says the campaign ran from 1836 to 1847, and a family account says 1837 to 1847. Playfair added height, curved links to the side pavilions, a crowded array of exterior flourishes in a Scottish Renaissance manner compared with George Heriot’s Hospital, and a coach port, or porte cochère, so that visitors could alight under cover. In 1838 he wrote that the duke and duchess were extremely cordial and much pleased with the alterations, and quite resolved to do all he recommended inside as well as outside. The present fairy-tale silhouette is his: theatrical parapets, fluted chimney stacks, ornate water spouts and pepper-pot angle turrets. The body is a central range of four storeys plus a basement, with square towers at each side, flanked by two lower side ranges, built of cream sandstone. The style has been compared with his buildings at Donaldson’s College in Edinburgh.

William Henry Playfair was born on 15 July 1790 in Russell Square, London, and died in Edinburgh on 19 March 1857. His father James was an architect. His uncles were the mathematician John Playfair and the economist William Playfair. After his father’s death he was educated in Edinburgh by his uncle John, graduated from the university in 1809, and was articled to William Stark. His project list puts the Floors renovations at about 1837, beside the National Monument, an unfinished Parthenon on Calton Hill designed with Charles Robert Cockerell in 1824, the National Gallery of Scotland, whose foundation stone Prince Albert laid on 30 August 1850 and which opened in 1859, and Donaldson’s College in 1851. He joined the Free Church after the Disruption of 1843. He was initiated in Lodge St David, Number 36, on 18 January 1815. He is buried in the Lord’s Row of Dean Cemetery, where he had designed monuments for others.

The sixth duke’s works did not stop at the house. Two lodges were built to the north. Eighteenth-century buildings at Floors Home Farm were renovated and joined by further farm structures, including Palladian kennels, a keeper’s house, stables, dairy cottages and a symmetrical Palladian steward’s house. A small ice house with a barrel-vaulted roof stands a short distance west. A new walled garden with an extensive suite of glasshouses was built west of the house in 1857. The transfer was overseen by Hector Rose in the late 1850s. There was a boiler, bothies and sheds, a workforce of twelve, and room for vegetables, fruit and flowers. At the north-eastern corner, where the queen took tea, an eighty-metre glass tropical corridor, lined with rare plants, connected seven further hot-houses. Queen Victoria visited in 1867. The Queen’s House, a crenellated summerhouse at the east end of the garden, is said to have been built as a vantage point for that visit, and it is named for her. By then Floors had the appearance of a large country estate in its prime, managed by a large workforce. A castellated folly some 2.4 kilometres south-west of Kelso may have been built so that the queen could view the castle in its wider landscape.

There had been two earlier walled gardens. The first was made in the irregular ground at the south-east corner after the third duke acquired the Town Head of Kelso in 1783 to 1784. Excavation in the 1980s showed that earlier structures had been demolished and levelled for a garden of four quadrants divided by gravel paths. It was still present in 1857 and had gone by 1898. A second, short-lived garden lay south-west of the castle in the first half of the nineteenth century and had been grassed over by the first Ordnance Survey. An account of 1858 complained that the garden marred the view from the castle and said new gardens were already in process on rising ground to the north-west, hidden by a wood. An account of 1874 said the garden had formerly stood at the bottom of the bank, a quarter of a mile west of the castle, and was a great disfigurement to the park. Aerial photographs later showed a rectangular outline divided into quadrants in that place.

Playfair also planned an intricate flower garden on the terrace just west of the house, with a glass conservatory and geometric beds. The conservatory and the stone steps remain. The beds were removed in the early twentieth century, and the area is now occupied by a swimming pool. A high boundary wall, mostly of the mid-nineteenth century, runs round the east and north. The north and west lodges are of the 1840s.

The seventh duke, James Henry Robert Innes-Ker, was born on 5 September 1839 at Floors and died in 1892. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, where he took a Master of Arts. He was Liberal member of Parliament for Roxburghshire from 1870 to 1874, Lord Lieutenant of Roxburghshire from 1884 until his death, and a member of the Royal Company of Archers. On 11 June 1874 he married Anne Emily Spencer-Churchill, daughter of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. She was Mistress of the Robes to Queen Victoria from 1883 to 1885. They had seven children. He is buried at Kelso Abbey.

Henry Innes-Ker, 8th Duke of Roxburghe, was born on 25 July 1876 and died on 29 September 1932. He succeeded on 23 October 1892, at sixteen, to a long string of titles: duke, Marquess of Bowmont and Cessford, earl of Roxburghe, earl of Kelso, Earl Innes, Viscount of Broxmouth, the Innes baronetcy, and the lordships of Roxburghe and of Ker of Cessford and Cavertoun. He was at Eton and at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, a lieutenant in the Royal Horse Guards, and in 1895 a second lieutenant in the 4th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. In 1900 he served with a Household Cavalry composite regiment in South Africa. A family account says he turned back under fire and hauled a wounded trooper onto his own horse. In March 1901 he was aide-de-camp to the Duke of Cornwall and York on the colonial tour. He was appointed to the Royal Victorian Order in February 1901, carried Queen Alexandra’s crown at the coronation the next year, and was invested as a Knight of the Thistle by Edward VII at Buckingham Palace on 8 August 1902. He was Chancellor of the Order of the Thistle from 1926, and a family account says from 1928, until his death. He was Lord Lieutenant of Roxburghshire from 1918 and a lieutenant of the Royal Company of Archers from 1930. In October 1914 he was in the action at Roulers, the first German action on Belgian soil in that account, and was severely wounded. He was lame for the rest of his life. His first cousin was Winston Churchill. He is buried in the Roxburghe sepulchre in the cloister of Kelso Abbey.

On 10 November 1903 he married Mary Goelet at St Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in New York. Mary Goelet, also called May, was born on 6 October 1878 and died in London on 26 April 1937. She was the daughter of Ogden Goelet and Mary Wilson, and a niece of Grace Vanderbilt. After her father’s death in 1897 she inherited 500,000 dollars outright on her twenty-first birthday and a trust of 10,000,000 dollars, with a further reversion of half of a 30,000,000-dollar residuary estate. In 1929, after her mother’s death, she inherited 3,000,000 dollars and the Goelet collection, and half of that residuary estate passed to her. At her marriage she was described as the wealthiest American heiress, her dowry in excess of 500,000 dollars and exceeded only by that of Consuelo Vanderbilt. Rumours had linked her in 1897 to the 9th Duke of Manchester and in late 1898 to Viscount Crichton. She and the duke lived at Floors. One account puts the estate then at 60,500 acres. The present estate account puts the wider holding at about 52,000 acres, or 21,000 hectares, from the Cheviots to the Lammermuirs and the Tweed valley. After ten years without children she gave birth on 7 September 1913 to George, later 9th Duke. One account says his sponsor was King George and that one godparent was Queen Alexandra. A family account calls him a godson of George V and Queen Mary.

Mary decorated the house with her own collection, including a series of seventeenth-century tapestries from the Gobelins Manufactory, brought from her Long Island home and incorporated into the ballroom in the 1930s. She added modern pictures by Walter Sickert and Henri Matisse, among others. Between 1927 and 1930 her refurbishment largely replaced Playfair’s interior. The rooms shown to visitors still stand as the result of that change. The Gobelins works began as a dyeing business of the Gobelin family on the Bièvre in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel in the middle of the fifteenth century. Henry IV rented space there in 1602 to the Flemish weavers Marc de Comans and François de la Planche. In 1662 Jean-Baptiste Colbert bought the works for Louis XIV, and Charles Le Brun directed them from 1663 to 1690. The factory closed in 1694, reopened in 1697, and was suspended at the Revolution. It remains a state manufactory.

Henri Matisse was born at Le Cateau-Cambrésis on 31 December 1869 and died on 3 November 1954. He came to painting in 1889 during convalescence, studied under Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau, and changed his palette after John Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to Van Gogh on Belle-Île in 1896. The intense colour of 1900 to 1905 made him one of the Fauves. From 1917 he worked near Nice. When illness stopped him painting, he turned to cut paper. The Floors account does not name which of his pictures entered the house. It records only that the duchess added modern pictures by him.

Walter Sickert was born in Munich on 31 May 1860 and died on 22 January 1942. The family settled in England in 1868. He acted in small parts before studying at the Slade in 1881 and then leaving to assist Whistler. In 1883 he met Degas in Paris. His early exhibited work included London music-hall scenes. Katie Lawrence at Gatti’s, shown in 1888, was denounced as ugly and vulgar. He worked in Dieppe and Venice, joined the New English Art Club, and from 1905 kept a studio in Camden Town. The murder of Emily Dimmock on 11 September 1907 became a subject for him. Again, the house account names him as one of the modern painters whose pictures the duchess added, and does not list the titles.

Reginald Fairlie’s east gates and lodges were built in 1929, the same years as the interior campaign. Square ashlar piers topped with urns carry an iron overthrow with the Roxburghe arms, wrought-iron gates, and two square lodges. A rockery was made on the north lawn in the early twentieth century. It later fell into disuse and is now overgrown. The glasshouse range was eventually demolished. The site of the tropical corridor is now the terrace of the Millennium parterre.

George, 9th Duke, was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, served in the Blues, and saw action in the Middle East in the Second World War. He married first Lady Mary Evelyn Hungerford Crewe-Milnes in 1935 at Westminster Abbey. They divorced in 1953. On 5 January 1954 he married Margaret Elisabeth McConnell, also spelled McConnel. He was convenor of the county council, a deputy lieutenant and a justice of the peace. He died on 26 September 1974, aged 61, and is buried at Kelso Abbey.

Guy Innes-Ker, 10th Duke of Roxburghe, was born on 18 November 1954 and died on 29 August 2019. He was the eldest son of the ninth duke by that second wife. He was educated at Eton, at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he studied land economy, and at Sandhurst, where he was awarded the Sword of Honour in 1974 and became a lieutenant in the Blues and Royals. A family account says he deferred Cambridge, inherited at nineteen in 1974 while serving in Cyprus, and completed his army career in 1977 after service in Northern Ireland. His own life also places him in 1982 as troop leader of 3 Troop, B Squadron, commanding twelve soldiers in the Falklands, with Scorpion and Scimitar light tanks and a Samson recovery vehicle, landing at San Carlos Water with 40 Commando. Both statements stand. He succeeded as premier baronet of Scotland and 30th feudal baron of Innes. He opened Floors to the public in 1977. The house’s account calls it the largest inhabited house in Scotland, a family home first and a visitor attraction as well. Visitor numbers rose after Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes was filmed there in 1984. An episode of An American Aristocrat’s Guide to Great Estates, shown on the Smithsonian Channel and on Amazon Prime Video, first aired in 2020.

He married Lady Jane Meriel Grosvenor on 10 September 1977. They had Lady Rosanagh, born in 1979, Charles, born on 18 February 1981, now 11th Duke, and Lord Edward, born in 1984. They divorced in 1990. On 3 September 1992 he married Virginia Mary Wynn-Williams. Their children are Lady Isabella, born in 1994, and Lord George, born in 1996. He lived at Floors. He was a liveryman of the Fishmongers and a freeman of the City of London, a flat-racing breeder described as the most successful Scottish thoroughbred breeder of modern times, chairman of the National Stud in 2017, and a racing administrator. In December 2009 he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. A family account says he beat the disease and that it returned in 2019, and that he and Henry Wyndham raised more than 1.3 million pounds for the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital and a cancer project at Brunel University. He died at Floors Castle on 29 August 2019 after a lengthy illness. Charles is the 11th Duke. The welcome to the house is given in that duke’s name.

Allan Warren, born Michael Allan Warren on 26 October 1948, photographed Guy, 10th Duke of Roxburghe, outside Floors Castle. Warren began as a child actor, appeared with John Gielgud in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On in 1968, and started professional photography when he covered the wedding of Mickey Deans and Judy Garland in 1969. In the early 1980s he set out to photograph all thirty British dukes. His book The Dukes of Britain appeared in 1986. The portrait outside this house belongs to that work.

The designed landscape covers about 374 hectares, or 924 acres, an extent reached by the mid-nineteenth century after a northward expansion from the old boundary at the home farm. It is separated from the arable land and from the western edge of Kelso by the high wall. Uses include a stud, pheasants, and grazing in the southern parks. The southern grass sweeps up from the Tweed to the terrace. Clumps of beech, oak and copper beech frame views to the castle and to the Cheviots. Woodland along the escarpment encloses the park except where the turrets stand against the sky. A line of mature oaks still marks an eighteenth-century riverside path west from Kelso. At Bleaklands, to the north-east, later planting included copper beech and Wellingtonia. The early plantations now mix oak, beech and sycamore. A row of veteran Spanish chestnuts west of the castle, south of the Star Plantation, survives from the first duke’s formal layout. The Tweed along the southern boundary is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation. A late-prehistoric fort crowns Brox Law, whose wooded flank rises steeply from the river west of the house. An enclosure lies on the lower ground near the Tweed.

The Star Plantation, north-west of the castle, lost many older trees in a storm in 1993 and was restored and replanted. Paths now radiate from a central mature lime inside a wrought-iron seat. For the millennium the duke and duchess commissioned a formal parterre just west of that plantation, in a French manner, of gravel and box on lawn, setting out their intertwined initials, an R for Roxburghe, an M for the year 2000, and a coronet picked out with spindle. On the raised terrace more than fifty young apples of the old cultivars Bloody Ploughman, Galloway Pippin and Scottish Dumpling are trained as goblets, dwarf pyramids and full pyramids. The main phases of the landscape are the 1720s, the 1760s to 1804, 1830 to 1870, 1927 to 1929, and 1999 to 2000. Sir Walter Scott admired the picturesque combination of park, castle and woods. He called Floors a kingdom fit for Oberon and Titania to dwell in.

The walled garden of 1857, of brick and stone, still has a single-storey range of bothies on the north wall, a two-storey crenellated gardener’s house, and the Queen’s House. Since the late 1970s it has been kept as part of the visit. A children’s play area and a garden centre occupy the southern and central parts, and part of the old potting range has held a shop and a café. The original paths remain. The head gardener Mr Crozier, in post from 1957 to 2006, left the apple collection, the fruit and vegetables, and the herbaceous borders. The present garden is described as four acres. The hot-houses are gone. The principal drive still enters at Fairlie’s 1929 gates, curves up through the woodland on the escarpment, and approaches the house from the north, a route largely set in the later eighteenth century. A north-west drive through Simonton’s Hill Plantation is partly of that same informal period. Its northern section is no longer used and is growing over with rhododendron.

In 2008 the estates installed a renewable scheme meant to supply the castle, the nursery and the garden centre. The tenth duke was among the early owners of historic houses to heat with a biomass boiler using the estate’s own wood chips. In 2001 he began to explore wind farming. Fallago Rig, built in 2013 with North British Wind Power, feeds 80,000 homes. The in-hand farm runs sheep and cattle, with Cheviot lamb, and grows wheat, oilseed rape, malting barley, potatoes and vegetables, beside forestry, conservation, property and sporting ground.

Archaeology on the estate is not a single find. A project of the 1980s, the Border Burghs Archaeology Project, with the permission of the duke, set out to locate the medieval burgh of Wester Kelso. Tradition put the burgh and its market cross just inside the gates, at the north-west end of Roxburgh Street. A measured survey and a resistivity survey were followed by three trenches directed by Piers Dixon, with Ian Barnes supervising the second and Paul Sharman and Jane Clark the third. A hollow way runs west from the gates toward the Tweed for about 75 metres, probably the Little Loan or Little Barras, or an old drive. A former bend of the river divides the gate terrace from a second gravel terrace 100 metres west. A milestone in the low ground marks the old road to Edinburgh, the Broad Loan or Great Barras, from the ferry called the Coble Hole Put, an old stone jetty. The subsoil is well-drained gravel, too acid for good bone survival, with little scope for environmental work.

The first trench, 10 metres by 10, on the south side of the hollow way, found only a dump of cobbles under the turf and a V-shaped ditch a metre wide in the south-west corner, with two pieces of clay pipe in the fill. It was read as a post-medieval boundary, out of use when the park was made, and the hollow way as a driveway after the late-eighteenth-century emparkment, not a built-up street.

The second trench, opened in January 1984 at the traditional market-cross site and extended, found two house platforms on the north side of an east-west cobbled road about 5 metres wide, with wheel ruts. Building A had a platform at least 8 metres east to west and more than 10 metres north to south, and a stone-lined cellar about 6 by 5.5 metres, from 1 metre to 1.7 metres deep, with seven steps. A fireplace recess held a plastered face and a hearth of thirteen flat stones of green sandstone. Medieval pottery lay in a dark patch on the subsoil. The demolition fill included a fragment of a spiral stair, so the house was probably of two storeys. Building B had a hearth, postholes and pits, and post-medieval pottery. The buildings were probably demolished in the late eighteenth century. Over them lay the cross-paths of the ducal walled garden, gravel about 2.5 metres wide, with nineteenth-century pottery and residual medieval sherds in garden soil used as manure. No trace of the market cross was found at the crossing. The cross had stood further east in 1821 and was only placed at those paths in the first half of the nineteenth century. A park was laid over the garden in the second half of the nineteenth century. This occupation belongs to the post-medieval growth of Easter Kelso north along Roxburgh Street, not to the medieval burgh of Wester Kelso. Easter Kelso was created a burgh in 1614 by James VI. The road was probably part of the Old Nowt, or upper market, a cattle market at the edge of the town. The name Nowt points to cattle. The buildings need not date before the seventeenth century, though ten residual medieval sherds were found.

The medieval burgh lay nearer the Tweed, on a low ridge about 100 metres west, high enough to escape floods and sound enough for the abutment of the medieval bridge to Roxburgh. That bridge was ruinous by 1400 and was still spoken of as a visible ruin in the middle of the sixteenth century. A tree fall in a gale early in 1984 exposed a rough stone feature and medieval pottery, and the third trench was opened there. A ditch about 0.45 metres deep, with a flat bottom about 1.25 metres wide, ran along the terrace edge for about 14 metres of excavated length, with a stone revetment and medieval pottery. A stone-lined well sat in a pit 4 metres wide and at least 1.7 metres deep, of roughly dressed sandstone bonded with clay. Its primary fill held only medieval material, including sherds that joined others from the site. The upper fill, disturbed when the ground was truncated, held a fragment of pantile and a shard of post-medieval bottle glass. The pottery is almost exclusively White Gritty Ware, with a few imported sherds, none of which need be later than the fourteenth century. A later stone-lined pit, at least 2 metres long, 1.8 metres wide and 0.85 metres deep, was a slurry pit whose pollen showed little human occupation nearby. It belongs somewhere between the fourteenth century and the seventeenth. A dry-stone wall up to 1.1 metres wide, with a sherd of creamware giving a date probably after 1770, and a V-shaped ditch 1.5 metres wide, belong to an eighteenth-century steading. A dump about a metre thick, of the late eighteenth century, sealed the site when it was taken into the park. The discussion concludes that Wester Kelso was abandoned in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, about the time the royal burgh of Roxburgh was deserted, probably because of the English occupation of Roxburgh Castle, while Easter Kelso, by the abbey, survived and spread north.

The purchases that cleared the town head are documented. In 1717 to 1718 the then duke bought land near the castle from the feuars of Kelso, about the time Adam’s house was built. Further purchases at the town head fell around 1750 to 1760. In 1783 to 1784 the duke bought the town head and the Over Cross to make room for the new garden. A map of 1821 marks a new road opened in 1783. Comparison of plans of 1736 and of the late eighteenth century shows the western end of the old burgh replaced by a cottage between those dates. The formal garden at the east lodge was still there in 1857 and had disappeared by 1898. The present east lodge dates from 1929.

On 24 January 2011 it was reported that an unpublished letter of Robert Burns, written more than 220 years earlier, had been found at Floors. The visitor services manager noticed it in a nineteenth-century autograph album owned by the sixth duke. The letter is addressed to James Gregory, then professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh and head of the medical school. Burns sent it from Ellisland, his farm in lower Nithsdale north of Dumfries, on 13 May 1789. With it is an early version of the poem On Seeing a Wounded Hare. Burns thanks Gregory for his support and asks for comments on the poem. The duke called the discovery a delightful surprise and said the family did not know how the sixth duke came by the letter, though a Dickens autograph is in the same book, and that it would go on display when the castle opened in the spring. David Purdie, who verified it, called unpublished letters of Burns extremely rare, and noted that the sheet shows the poem still changing and brings together a literary and a scientific figure of the Enlightenment.

The house is a category A listed building. One designation record adds it on 16 March 1971. Another adds it on 15 March 1971. The grounds are in the inventory of gardens and designed landscapes. One record designates the garden on 1 July 1987. Another adds it on 30 June 1987 and last amends it on 29 June 2011. The east gate is also category A.

The present roof campaign is the largest conservation work of the house’s modern history. Mobilisation began in May 2024 and work in July 2024. The porte cochère, first built on the front in the 1840s, was the first phase, with completion of that phase estimated for March 2025. The original lead of the porch roof had been removed in the 1970s and replaced first with bitumen felt and then with a fibreglass covering, and both had failed. New milled lead, not cast lead, now covers the porch roof and the corner pepper-pot turrets, on a new timber structure largely to Playfair’s design, with extra rainwater outlets and ventilation against condensation under the lead. The two turrets nearest the house needed more repair because they see less sun and dry more slowly. Original Playfair lead survives in four coronets, about 180 years old, built of cast and dressed sheet, hot-iron soldered, and in the lead-roll end tabs. Playfair’s decorative stone was quarried at Stodrig, west of the house, from the Ballagan formation, a soft sandstone easy to carve and easy to weather. Replacement stone is Swinton sandstone from Hutton’s quarry near Swinton in Berwickshire, less than twenty miles away, chosen as a geological match so that a harder stone would not force the original to erode faster. Concrete patches elsewhere on the castle have already done that harm. Pointing has been selective because Playfair’s mortar is extremely hard. Analysis found lead carbonate added to keep it bright white, and the masons believe an oil may have been added as well. Iron cramps, originally run with molten lead, have been replaced with stainless steel where they could be removed, and painted and recorded where they could not. Drawings survive for much of the detail, but not for the stretched mouldings under the armorial panels or for the stars, which the masons have pieced back from the surviving evidence. A crush deck protected visitors entering below the scaffold while the house was open. A later note of the main block counts nineteen people on the roof, eleven of them stonemasons, four lead workers, two joiners and two labourers. The wider project, privately financed by the estate, continues across the lead roofs and the high stonework. The work is planned across several years, begun in earnest in July 2024, using local craft and local material where possible.

On 19 July 2022 a temperature of 35.1 degrees Celsius was measured in this area, the hottest temperature recorded in Scotland.

The house remains occupied. Guides in the open season point out the tapestries, which a current visit note calls newly restored, the paintings, the porcelain and the eighteenth-century French furniture. Parts of a family home may be shut on a given day. The estate business now covers farming, forestry, green energy, conservation, property, sport, bloodstock and tourism. That is the latest chapter of a family that the house itself describes as moving from Border reivers to a part in the making of modern Scotland, and from royal agents to stewards of the land.

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