The Orangery, Dalkeith Palace

This fantastical structure was a late night find, driving down the aptly named Dark Walk, in a downpour, in the depths of Dalkeith Palace grounds.

Known as The Orangery, it is also referred to as The Conservatory. Built between 1832 and 1834, and designed by prestigious Edinburgh architects Burn and Bryce, renowned for their Scottish Baronial style which showcased fancy pants features like turrets, towers and crow stepped gable ends, assets all endeared by the wealthy gentry of The Lothians.

A fox foxed across the beam of my headlights, and the rain relentlessly obscured my windscreen as we tried to find somewhere to let the dogs out. Pulling up in the dark of the park, we piled out and were struck by this anomalous structure in the black.

Raised on a slight mound, this building appears at first glance like a bandstand.

Twelve Craigleith sandstone pillars, ornately cuffed in geometric diamonds, squares and swirls, hold the shape of this structure and would have been the support for enormous windows.

On stepping inside, standing underneath the tall supporting centre piece felt almost like sheltering under the fronds of a palm tree. In fact, this central pillar was a chimney. It was used to service the furnaces that lay disguised in the ground below and was used to heat the space to regulate the temperature for the growth of tropical fruit! It was said to have used over a ton of coal each day! Dates don't grow of their own accord in Dalkeith.

It felt spacious inside and would indeed have been like a slice of paradise for the 5th Duke of Buccleugh and his wife, the Duchess, Charlotte Anne, who liked the finer things in life and enjoyed landscaping, gardening and fraternising with her good friend Queen Victoria!

An orangery of this nature would indeed have squealed status and social standing.

Look at the ornate nature of this building.

It's quite commanding in its design, with elements borrowed and stolen from other works by the architects.

The crestings of the orangery finishing off the top are modelled on the aedicule windows of Herriot's Hospital in Edinburgh, also designed by Bryce.

You can see his sketches for the ornamentation above the hospital windows below from the RIBA Drawings Collection. The decorative scrolls are similar to those on top of the orangery...like the fine chocolate lattice decorations on fancy French desserts.

It was said to be unlike any other building of its nature in the country. In his Book of The Garden, head gardener Charles McIntosh described it as:

An original engraving from Charles McIntosh's Book Of The Garden of the Circular Conservatory, Dalkeith Palace. It was clearly a sight to behold!

This image from Dalkeith Country Park Facebook page shows The Orangery before restoration.

But whilst it was heralded with praise and prestige, its mammoth glass windows, underground water tanks, and highbrow heating system couldn't argue with science. When the soot from the chimney obstructed the light in the windows and soured the water supply, the fruit failed, leaving nothing but a vanity project which took the zest out of the orangery and left the Beuccleughs no alternative other than to transform it into a somewhat dampened down fernery.

This architectural anomaly fell out of favour and into disrepair until in 2015, the stable yard and surrounding buildings were given a new lease of life as part of the Restoration Yard project. These buildings were restored and repurposed to develop them into a hive of social and recreational activity.

You can, should you wish, now pop the question and get married in The Orangery.

It's had new life tastefully injected into the structure, and at night, under the darkness of an October sky, spangly stars and the hoot of tawny owls twit and too-whooing between one another, you could quite imagine two love birds tying the knot in such scenic surroundings. Not for us, though, in walking boots and wellies in the wet. After a quick exploration in the rain, we were seeing off the evening with a curry and a pint!