Things to do in the gardens at Cragside

The sandstone that makes the garden was mined from quarries on the grounds, along with the stone needed to build the House. The paths are lined with rhododendron and heathers, bringing a flourish of colour to the garden in the spring.

It was highly fashionable for rhododendron to be named after influential Victorians. Cragside’s historic records show that cultivars named after Richard Norman Shaw, the visionary architect and Lady Armstrong, William Armstrong’s wife, were planted. The originals of these varieties were never found during a rejuvination project in the 1990s, but the National Trust sourced these cultivars and replanted them in the garden.

It’s a garden of non-native coniferous trees. The Armstrongs collected on a big scale and their outdoor areas where no different. They trees hand-picked specially for their giant size once at maturity and planted as saplings over 160 years ago.

The House is Britian’s original smart home, filled with pioneering technologies for efficient modern living. Armstrong's passion for efficiency spills out into other parts of the grounds, including the Formal Garden.

Orchard House

The Orchard House is the last remaining part of a grand glasshouse suite, which before the trees grew, would have been seen for miles around, glistening in the sunshine. It had its very own coal-powered central heating system, which could be isolated to give specific plants the extra heat needed to grow. The large pots, were made from upcycled earthenware pipes that were designed to rotate, like a lazy-Susan, allowing every part of the fruit trees to get the much-needed sunshine and encourage even growing.

Clock Tower

The Clock Tower overlooks the Formal Garden. This decorative, Gothic Revival building was built to house the estate’s timepiece in 1864. What makes this clock special is its extra mechanism which allowed the clock to act as an elaborate ‘alarm clock’ for the estate workers. It sounded 20 times at 6am and then again at 6.30am, to ensure that the worker living locally had risen from their beds. It also chimed to mark the start and the end of the day and breaktimes.

If you imagine the Rock Garden as an enormous rockery and the Formal Garden as the main flower beds, the Gorge is the Armstrongs' impressive water feature.

This area has always been a natural waterway, carrying water from the Debdon Burn to the Coquet River, but Armstrong wanted to make this area even more impressive and blasted the Gorge to increase the flow of water. With an eye for detail, the boulders were carefully re-arranged to engineer the best looking cascades to add further drama to this extraordinary landscape.

Tumbleton Lake was created to store the much-needed water to power the hydraulic pump in the Pumphouse which drove water to main House. Armstrong adapted his dock-side crane technology for use on the grounds. In the House there is a second hydraulic pump in the ‘Jigger Room’ (in the basement from the Kitchen) which was used to operate a passenger lift. Tumbleton Lake may not be used to power hydraulics anymore but water from here is used to light the House.

The Archimedes Screw

In 2014, the Archimedes Screw was installed on the dam of lake – you can see this on the right as you drive towards the main car park on arrival. Water from the lake, turns the blades of a 17m galvanised steel tube. The motion of the rotating Screw is converted into electricity. This modern water-powered generator produces enough electricity to light the House.

This pair of lakes were part of Armstrong’s hydroelectric system. Water was fed into here via the Timber Flume from the surrounding moorside, and channelled to the Powerhouse at the bottom of the hillside where it was converted into hydroelectricity. Walter Mavin, the Caretaker of Electric Light, was in charge of caring for Armstrong’s experimental technology. The generators and dynamos didn’t produce enough electricity to light the whole House at once, so Andrew Crozier – the dedicated Butler – would ring the Powerhouse using the on-estate telephone system and request power to the rooms that the Armstrongs and their guests were using at the time.