More information : Wray Cottage is a cottage villa dating from c1820. The earliest known occupant is a Mrs Julia Bird, present by 1824-5. In 1836 the house and estate were purchased by James Dawson, Liverpool surgeon, who subsequently built a much larger castellated villa, Wray Castle, nearby, retaining Wray Cottage as a secondary residence on the estate (1).
'James Dawson created the kitchen garden for Wray Cottage during the short period of his occupation, before Wray Castle was built. This garden , not shown on the 1836 estate map, is the sub-rectangular enclosure shown on the 1847-8 map some distance due north of the cottage, its interior depicted under some form of cultivation It is sited on the summit of a ridge which falls away from Wray Cottage and was reached by a path shown on the map running between it and the cottage, which entered the surrounding wall of the garden in the centre of its south side. The garden was extensively altered when a summerhouse was built within it in 1931 and a new garden created to complement it (see below), but the original stone rubble boundary wall survives along the whole of its east and north sides, along about half of its west side, but barely along the south side. It is built of roughly coursed slate rubble, some 0.50m thick, and where it survives unaltered along the north side of the garden, and at the northern end of the east side, it is 2.40m high with a coping of slate slabs. Due to a rise in the land, the equivalent wall along the surviving north end of the west side is just 1.60m high, and here it has a later coping of tall, vertically-set, slightly inclined slates. The walls on the east and north sides have a course of through-stones about halfway up, the walls above combining rounded cobbles with slate rubble. The position of the original entrance gateway in the south wall is indicated by the monolithic stone slate gate post which stands on the west side of the former opening. It is rough-hewn, has two flat faces and acutely-angled edges, and is 1.94m high, 50cm wide and 14cm thick. It supports two iron hinge pivots some 96cm apart, on which the hinges of the gate swung. The pivots are set in lead and have upright guide arms which rise from flat circular bases. A short length of the original boundary wall survives next to it, between it and the summerhouse erected in 1931.
The kitchen garden is shown on the 1888 map with a path around its inner perimeter and a central one extending from the site of the entrance gate in the centre of the south side. By the time of the 1911 map the interior is shown entirely blank, and the garden had ceased to be used as such. The 1898 and 1920 Sale Particulars both refer to the 'walled-in kitchen garden' associated with Wray Cottage, but in those of 1928 it can be identified as the 'garden let to the managers of High Wray School', which was sold as part of Lot 3, Low Wray Farm. The Farm was bought by W C Halliday in 1928, and in 1931 the garden was transformed by the construction of a summerhouse and associated garden for G W Halliday'. (Extract from A Menuge and I Goodall 'Wray Castle, Claife, Cumbria: A Report for the National Trust' (2006), pp49-50)
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