Standing Building Recording
Date 18 May 2015 - 20 May 2015
Event ID 1026984
Category Recording
Type Standing Building Recording
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1026984
NJ 5320 4074 A programme of standing building recording was carried out, 18–20 May 2015, on the suite of rooms above the three cellars to the E of the palace block while scaffold was being erected for remedial works, allowing access to a previously inaccessible part of the castle. A written, drawn and photographic record of the elevations was produced.
Immediately E of the palace block is a range consisting of three cellars entered from the castle courtyard with ruinous rooms above of unclear function. There is a suggestion that the central oblong space above the cellars may have served as the castle chapel, and one of the aims of the survey was to determine whether there was any architectural evidence for this interpretation.
The cellars appear to be significantly older than the suite of rooms above, dating to the mid-16th century. Although in the rooms above there was little diagnostic evidence to be found in the windows and their mouldings, in the W wall of the central room there was a moulding which may have been part of a doorway into the expanded E range.
The plain, raised moulding is indicative of a 17th-century date and is found exclusively in the buildings of the E range, which are considered to be the most recent buildings in the castle. The style of moulding is seen on edge quoins, windows and doorways.
No architectural evidence was found which could ascribe a specifically ecclesiastical function to the space but the arrangement (from W to E) of anteroom (entered from the hall or main stair of the palace), central rectangular (E to W aligned) space with three large S-facing windows, and E chamber with its own external access could be interpreted as anteroom/chapel/sacristy or vestry.
Archive: National Record of the Historic Environment (NRHE)
Funder: Historic Scotland
Paul Fox and Luke Aspland – Kirkdale Archaeology
(Source: DES, Volume 16)
