page_title: Cragside
section_title: Grounds and estate
hierarchical_section_title: Cragside / Grounds and estate
caption_attribution_description: English: Courtyard of the visitor centre Cragside
context_page_description: Cragside is a Victorian country house near the town of Rothbury in Northumberland, England. It was the home of William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong, founder of the Armstrong Whitworth armaments firm. An industrial magnate, scientist, philanthropist and inventor of the hydraulic crane and the Armstrong gun, Armstrong also displayed his inventiveness in the domestic sphere, making Cragside the first house in the world to be lit using hydroelectric power. The estate was technologically advanced; the architect of the house, Richard Norman Shaw, wrote that it was equipped with "wonderful hydraulic machines that do all sorts of things". In the grounds, Armstrong built dams and lakes to power a sawmill, a water-powered laundry, early versions of a dishwasher and a dumb waiter, a hydraulic lift and a hydroelectric rotisserie. In 1887, Armstrong was raised to the peerage, the first engineer or scientist to be ennobled, and became Baron Armstrong of Cragside.
  The original building consisted of a small shooting lodge which Armstrong built between 1862 and 1864.
context_section_description: Cragside is named after Cragend Hill above the house, and is surrounded by an extensive rock garden, with a collection of rhododendrons, one of which is named after Lady Armstrong, who made a considerable contribution to the design and construction of the gardens, and  large plantings of mostly coniferous trees. Among these is the tallest Scots pine in Britain, at a height of 131ft (40m). Over one hundred years after their planting, Jill Franklin wrote that, "the great, dark trees form a protective barrier to (Armstrong's) home". Armstrong continued to buy land after the purchase of the original site and by the 1880s the gardens and grounds comprised some 1,700 acres, with the wider estate, including Armstrong's agricultural holdings, extending to 15,000 acres according to Henrietta Heald's 2012 biography of Armstrong, and to over 16,000 acres according to the historian David Cannadine. David Dougan records the traditional claim that Armstrong planted over seven million trees in the gardens and parkland. The estate is a sanctuary for some of the last remaining red squirrel colonies in England.
  The glen north-west of the house is spanned by an iron bridge, crossing the Debdon Burn, constructed to Armstrong's design at his Elswick Works in the 1870s. It is a Grade II* listed structure and was restored by the Trust, and reopened to the public in 2008–2009. The gardens themselves are listed Grade I, and some of the architectural and technological structures have their own historic listings. The Clock Tower, which regulated life on the estate, dates from the time of the construction of the shooting lodge, and might have been designed by the same architect; it is not by Shaw. It is possible that Armstrong himself designed the clock. Like the bridge, the Clock Tower has a Grade II* listing. The formal gardens, where Armstrong's great greenhouses stood and which were long separated from the main estate, have now been acquired by the Trust.
caption: Tumbleton Stables, Cragside
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