Interior view of Skibo Castle showing "Sitz Bath" in bathroom next to Montrose Room on first floor, west corridor.
SC 772673
Description Interior view of Skibo Castle showing "Sitz Bath" in bathroom next to Montrose Room on first floor, west corridor.
Date 1982
Catalogue Number SC 772673
Category On-line Digital Images
Copy of SU 810
Scope and Content 'Sitz' bath and toilet pan, Skibo Castle, Highland This shows a 'sitz' bath (left) and toilet pan in a first-floor bathroom. The room has a mosaic floor with marble insets underneath the baths and the decorative pan, which has a wooden seat. The large pipe behind the pan leads to a high-level cistern and there is a wooden toilet paper holder on the wall. The 'sitz' bath or hipbath was used for medicinal purposes and was named after the German verb 'sitzon' which means to sit. The bath was filled with cold water into which the bather (who would have remained fully clothed from the waist up) sat for 10 to 30 seconds. The sitz bath shown here has cold taps on the left and a plunger on the right which, once pulled up, exposes a drain into which the water flows. The showerhead and slot in the centre of the bath would have sprayed water onto the back of the sitter. Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was born in Scotland and made a fortune in the steel industry in the United States of America. Once his daughter was born he decided that she should have a Scottish home, and at the end of the 19th century he bought a large Baronial house at Skibo built in 1880 by Clarke & Bell. In addition to the £85,000 purchase price, he spent a further £2 million in the creation of an even larger mansion, constructed between 1899 and 1903 to the designs of Ross & Macbeth. In 1981 his daughter Margaret decided to sell the estate, and the castle lay empty until 1990 when Peter de Savary paid £10 million for the castle and the 2,832-hectare estate. Some £30 million was then invested in its transformation into the Carnegie Club, a private residential golf and sporting club. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.
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File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap
Attribution: © RCAHMS
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