Estate Landscapes
An Estate in Slow Motion
A fifty-year masterplan for parkland, woodland and meadow across a private Scottish estate.
- Scope
- Master planning, ecological strategy
- Area
- 180 hectares
- Horizon
- Fifty years
The story
Highland Perthshire · 2023
An estate is not a garden. Its unit of time is the generation, not the season.
The brief was to set a direction that the family could hold for half a century: where woodland would thicken, where the meadow would be allowed to advance, which views would be opened and which deliberately closed.
We drew the landscape as it should appear in 2035, 2050 and 2075, and worked backwards to the first spade.
Design process
How the work was made.
01
Landscape appraisal
Historic map regression, tree survey, hydrology and habitat mapping.
02
Framework plan
A structure of woodland, meadow and access that can absorb change without losing coherence.
03
Phasing
Twelve phases, each independently fundable and each complete in its own right.
04
Stewardship
An annual management calendar written for the people who will actually cut, plant and fell.
Outcome
A landscape with a direction of travel, legible to whoever inherits it.