Floors Castle

Summary

An 18th-century estate house near Kelso in Roxburghshire, seat of the Duke of Roxburghe, designed by William Adam and remodelled by William Henry Playfair, set beside the River Tweed, used as the exterior and ballroom location for the fictional Greystoke family seat in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984).

About this location

Floors Castle stands on the southern bank of the River Tweed in Roxburghshire in the Scottish Borders, a short distance west of the market town of Kelso. The castle — named not from any fortress features but from the terraces or “floors” on which it is built — is the seat of the Duke of Roxburghe and the largest inhabited house in Scotland. It was built between 1721 and 1726 by the architect William Adam for John Ker, 1st Duke of Roxburghe, who had played a part in negotiating the Acts of Union of 1707 and was rewarded with a dukedom. Adam’s original design comprised a plain Georgian block with corner towers and symmetrical pavilion wings for stables and kitchens.

In the late 1830s, James Innes-Ker, 6th Duke of Roxburghe, commissioned the Edinburgh architect William Henry Playfair to transform the plain Georgian house into a more dramatic composition. Playfair added the turrets, battlements, pinnacles, and pepper-pot towers that give Floors its present picturesque silhouette — a design broadly comparable to his contemporary work at Donaldson’s College in Edinburgh. The result, viewed across the Tweed from the east with the Cheviot Hills in the background to the south, is one of the most theatrically composed house façades in Scotland.

The house contains a ballroom fitted in the 1930s with Gobelins tapestries brought from Long Island by Mary Goelet, who married the 8th Duke in 1903. The collection also includes works by Walter Sickert and Henri Matisse. The include walled gardens and parkland running to the Tweed.

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984, directed by Hugh Hudson, starring Christopher Lambert as Tarzan and Andie MacDowell as Jane) used Floors Castle for the exterior and ballroom sequences depicting the Scottish ancestral estate of the Greystoke family, the fictional earls from whom Tarzan is descended. The film’s second half — in which John Clayton, the wild man raised in Africa, is brought home to his family’s great house in Scotland — was set principally at Floors.