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Field Visit
Date June 1971
Event ID 1191846
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1191846
This house was erected for Dugald MacDougall of Gallanach in 1814-l7 to a design of William Burn. Considerable alterations were carried out under the direction of Sir John J Burnet in about 1903 (information from Major J Williamson of Gallanach), the offices being remodelled and a substantial residential wing added to the rear of the main block. The original house is a symmetrically-planned block of two main storeys above a sunk basement. The masonry is of rubble with dressed sandstone margins, but nearly all the facework is now concealed by a cement cladding. The principal, or NW, elevation (Pl. 92A, c) is a conventional castellated design incorporating a square turreted centre-piece, circular angle-towers and battlemented parapet. In the original conception (Pl. 93A) the side-elevations were to have been treated in the same manner, but with bowed centre-pieces, but the omission of the entire rear portion of Burn's design converted the bows into terminal features and introduced an element of irregularity into the composition. The detail is very restrained. Most of the windows have four-centred archheads, those on the principal floor being surmounted by corbelled hood-moulds, a feature which is echoed in the entrance-doorway.
Burn's original plan (PI. 93A) incorporated an oval central saloon, two storeys in height, flanked by two spacious open-well staircases, of which that to the SW was primarily a service-stair. At the front of the house the principal floor was to comprise a dining-room and drawing-room, flanking the entrance-hall, while at the rear there were to be four smaller rooms, including a library. The upper floor allowed for eight sizeable bedrooms, most of which had their own dressing-rooms, while the half-sunk basement was to lie beneath the rear portion of the house. With the reduction of the plan inexecution, however, the entire rear portion of the design was omitted and the basement brought forward towards the front of the house. The two open-well staircases were eliminated and the saloon sacrificed to accommodate a single geometric cantilevered stair (Pl. 93c), which gains considerably in dramatic effect, if not in facility, from its restricted position. The stair retains its original cast iron balustrade and mahogany hand-rail, but the bottom newel-post has been renewed. The drawing room and dining-room were built as planned, although their functions are now reversed. Both rooms have shaped inner ends incorporating carved doors, and both retain their original marble chimney-pieces (Pl. 93B).
The addition of c. 1903 comprises a three-storeyed tower-block built out from the E corner of the original house. This incorporates a billiard-room on the ground floor with bedrooms above, and although the tower somewhat overwhelms the earlier house in scale, the detail is sympathetic. The lands of 'Gallanach were acquired in about the middle of the 17th century by John MacDougall, a member of the family of MacDougall of Rarey and Torsa, and the property has remained in the possession of his descendants until the present day (Burke’s Landed Gentry (1937 edn), 1462). A drawing of Gallanach (preserved at Gallanach), dated 1800, shows the dwelling-house of that period as a plain 'laird's box' flanked by thatch-roofed offices (Pl. 92B), and it was presumably this building that Dugald MacDougall decided to replace when he succeeded to the estate in 1809. Plans and estimates fora house in the Gothic style (PI. 94) were commissioned from James Gillespie Graham, architect, in 1812, but this scheme evidently fell through, for in April 1814 fresh designs were prepared by William Burn, who appears to have been a personal friend of the laird. The estimated cost of the house was £1260, but the actual sum expended by the contractor, Mr Spottiswoode, seems to have exceeded £1600, excluding the cost of marble (perhaps for chimney-pieces) supplied by the architect's father, Robert Burn, in 1815-16*. Plans for alterations and additions to the house were prepared by John Watherston & Son, the Edinburgh builders, in 1888 (copies in NMRS), but these were evidently superseded by Burnet's proposals of c. 1903.
RCAHMS 1975, visited June 1971
*MacDougall of Gallanach Papers, Gallanach, bundle 11, letter from James Gillespie to Dugald MacDougall, 19August 1812; bundle 29, letter from William Burn to Dugald MacDougall, 6 January 1818; small bound book of plans entitled 'Plans of Gallanach' (unsigned and undated, but probably by Gillespie Graham, 1812) (Pl. 94); plans of basement, principal and upper floors, William Burn, Edinburgh, 1814.
