Moat Brae – Scotland - Atlas Obscura

Moat Brae is a Georgian townhouse designed by the Architect Walter Newall in Dumfries, Scotland. Newall also oversaw conversion of an old windmill tower to form what is now the Dumfries Camera Obscura. The house  was built in 1823 in a style described as Greek revival. JM Barrie creator of the character and author of the Peter Pan play (and several books featuring Peter Pan) was a friend of Stewart Gordon,  whose father owned the house,and the young Barrie regularly played in the house and garden as a child from the age of 13 whilst at school at the, almost adjacent,  Dumfries Academy. Barrie claimed that it was the adventures he had in the house and garden that inspired his stories of the boy who did not grow up. Barrie was appointed  by the Gordon brothers as “The Keeper of the Logbook ” for the pirate ship shaped playhouse which they had in the garden.

Peter Pan, the boy who could fly, first appeared briefly as a character in Barrie’s book called “The Little White Bird” and  Barrie later returned to the character of Peter Pan, putting him at the centre of his play called “Peter Pan , or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”, The play was first performed, in London,  on 27 December 1904. 

Following the success of the 1904 play, Barrie’s publishers, extracted the chapters featuring  Peter Pan from his earlier book  and published them in 1906 under the title “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardensc, now adorned with wonderful illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Barrie later expanded the stage play’s storyline as a novel  (published in 1911)  called “Peter and Wendy”.

Barrie is said to have based  Peter Pan on his older brother, David, who died in a skating accident just before his 14th birthday becoming, in memory, a forever boy.

Moat Brae is a medium-scale (for the time)  house, two storeys high above a raised basement and five bays wide . It was one of the first houses to be built in what would became George Street, Dumfries, and it occupied a large plot of ground that sloped, quite steeply,  down to the River Nith. 

For many years, after the Gordon family  left, the house was used as a nursing home and after plans to turn it into a hotel fell through it was purchased by The Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust who converted it into a children’s literary centre, opening in 2019. Unfortunately  the Trust fell on financial  hard times and on 21st August 2024 it closed its doors to the public, permanently. The house can only be currently  seen from the exterior.

This historic building awaits a new use but it has protected status  and it is thus unlikely  to be demolished. Interestingly the protected  status is related to the architecture  rather than its association  with Peter Pan.

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