The benches of Mount Stuart House...

Benchmarking Scottish beauty spots...

The grounds of Mount Stuart House in Rothesay are, as you would expect of such a fine house, delightful, with formal gardens and natural paths leading down to the shorefront. 

A Scottish palm tree!

Richard appears to be proposing to Francoise here but he was actually showing the results of his foraging. 

On the way up to the house we stopped at the 'village' of Kerrycroy.

Mount Stuart House...an overindulgance?

Our visit over to Rothesay was to take in a visit to Mount Stuart House a late 19th-century mansion with private chapel built for the 3rd Marquess of Bute by Robert Anderson. 

The 'house' has the external appearance of a Venetian palace but in red sandstone and no expense was spared in fitting it out with the finest Italian marble and other extravagant embellishments. For the time the cost was astronomical, the equivalent of over £50 million today. 

The guided tour by a lady who had worked in the house alongside the butler was very informative but it was difficult,for me anyway, to see beyond the overindulgence of the place when at the time the money was being spent there would have been a lot of poverty in the country.