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| The Gardens - The Fish Gate |
| Kinross House
is built on a slight rise overlooking Loch Leven, with the formal
gardens falling gently down to the 'Fish Gate' and Lochleven Castle
beyond. High park walls surround the garden on three sides, broken
twice (in the north and south walls) to provide vistas from the house.
The design of the Fish Gate is a typical example of the architect's
employment of novel features. His icicles and 'freezings' predate
any others in the north and clearly derive from De Bosse's Medicis
Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. It is thought that the
two Dutch stone-carvers, Peter Paul Boyse and Cornelius van Nerven,
were largely responsible for the stonework around the gate. Above
the opening to the Fish Gate, between a quite extraordinary pair of
cornucopias, is an upstanding basket of fish containing, it is said,
the seven varieties of fish that could be caught in the loch at that
time. They have been listed by the late Walter Montgomery as being
salmon, char, grey trout, speckled trout, blackhead, perch and pike.
The two lions, supporting the shield of Sir William Bruce and his
wife Mary Halket respectively, sit on either side of the gate about
a third of the way along the garden wall. |
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