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Publication Account
Date 1995
Event ID 1016716
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016716
Entering through stone gate piers crowned by urns, you see the house across the lawn, a mansion in the classical manner with no concessions to vernacular tradition. It is built in a warm red sandstone that from a distance looks like brick, with soft yellow sandstone for the basement, the door and window surrounds and other dressings. The double pile centre block is linked to pavilions each side by passages hidden by screen walls with columns and arches. On the other side of the house these walls have niches with classical statues representing Cato and Scipio, Odenatus and Zenobia, the last two a king and queen of Palmyra in Syria, an odd choice.The front door between two columns has a broad round-headed arch above; on entering, the shape is repeated in the screen at the far end of the hall with painted columns and Venetian arch. Behind is a coved passage and the four principal rooms: breakfast room, library, drawing room and dining room, the latter two still in use for their original purposes. The kitchen was in the south pavilion, set apart to avoid cooking smells in an age when hot food was not an important consideration. The basements contain a series of vaulted storerooms, stone under the main house, brick under the wings.
The interior decoration of this house is in a restrained, neo-classical, Adamesque manner. The drawing room has plaster decoration on walls and ceiling; on the walls are roundels depicting classical scenes depending from swags, while between the windows are delicate vertical motifs incorporating urns and sphinxes. The dining room has similar plasterwork on the walls and a handsome recess for the sideboard flanked by Corinthian columns; both rooms have carved white marble fireplaces. Details such as original fireplaces, window shutters, doors and simple plaster friezes are found throughout the house. This is a splended example of a late 18thcentury house complete in all details and surviving almost unaltered. As a hotel, there is public access to the outside and to the principal tooms.
Outside the gates are the contemporary stables, now ruined but to be restored as housing, and a dovecot (no. 30), and an icehouse further along the road at NH 724464.
The present house was built for Arthur Forbes of Culloden around 1780. He had succeeded his father John at the age of 12, and when he married an English heiress, Sarah Stratton, in 1779 they used part of her large fortune to build the new mansion. One or two illustrations survive of the old house which stood at the time of the battle of Culloden. It was then the home of Arthur Forbes, Lord President of the Court of Session and Government supporter, having been in the Forbes family since they acquired it from the Mackintoshes in 1625. The Jacobite army captured old Culloden House, and Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed there the night before his defeat on Culloden Muir.
The architect of Culloden House is unknown, though various names have been suggested, including John Adam, one of the family working on Fort George in the 1750s and 1760s. However, he virtually gave up designing houses around 1769. There is a tradition current in the Forbes family that John Forbes and one of the Adam brothers were friends, and dined alternately at Culloden and Fort George. One day John Forbes said how much he wanted a new house, and Adam seized a linen table napkin from the table and drew on it the plan and facade of a house. As John then had no money, this was carefully put away. Years later when his son Arthur married, the new bride burst into tears on seeing old Culloden House (it is not clear if this was because it was not a castle, or because it was an old and inconvenient house), so they got out the cherished napkin and the Adam plan was built. While there is at present no documentation to support this story, it fits many of the known facts and would in particular make sense of the problem that the design of Culloden is rather old-fashioned for 1780, whereas its plasterwork is right up to date for that time.
The exterior of Culloden House is so similar to Cromarty House (see no. 3) that they are considered to be by the same architect. Cromarty was built in 1772, but there are reasons why it also may well have been designed in the 1760s.
Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: The Highlands’, (1995).
