The Garden

The 'enchanted land' where Barrie learnt to dream.

The Moat Brae garden is the real Neverland. Here, in the 1870's, J.M. Barrie and his friends, Stuart and Hal Gordon, played pirates, hid out in holes, climbed trees and lived out excerpts from Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne (at the time Barrie’s favourite book).

The Moat Brae Trust is committed to restoring Barrie's 'enchanted land', creating a teaching garden full of botanic interest which will play an important role as a community space.

• Future Plans - Creating an 'Enchanted land'. How the Trust plans to use the garden, both as a beautiful outdoor space and as a 'Neverland' for young people to recreate their own Peter Pan story
• Garden history - How the garden was in Barrie's time
• Embroidery - In 1936, Mary Parker, then a young nurse at Moat Brae Nursing Home, made an embroidery picture of the garden as a retirement present for the matron. This is the remarkable story of how the embroidery came back to her 50 years on...