The ‘Great Plane’: the designed landscape at Loudoun Castle, East Ayrshire, Scotland, 1690 to the early 1900s

The designed landscape at Loudoun Castle, Ayrshire in southwest Scotland, is of the highest importance in the history of Scottish landscaping, It is a formal landscape of extending avenues aligned on distant focal points–a style now recognised as the Scottish Historical Landscape. This essay is a detailed account of Loudoun’s design and development based on primary sources which include archival documents and maps, and contemporary aerial and Lidar survey. The methods used include archival research, map digitisations, land survey, aerial and land photography, as well as the analyses of cultural, historical and symbolic content and a pertinent historiographical issue. The attribution of the design to the Earl of Mar was first made in the nineteenth century and this essay confirms this from an archival source. Mar’s collaborators are identified as Hugh Campbell, 3rd Earl of Loudoun (c.1677–1731), the executant architect on site was Alexander McGill (died 1734) and the architect, James Gibbs (1682–1754) contributed now lost garden buildings. Finally, the essay presents a stylistic analysis of the design and links Loudoun with other plans by the Earl of Mar, placing it within the Scottish and the wider European contexts of the period.