Standing Building Recording

Date February 2005 - June 2006

Event ID 550557

Category Recording

Type Standing Building Recording

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/550557

NT 333660, NT 336665 A conservation plan for Newbattle Abbey and its designed landscape was commissioned by Newbattle Abbey College as part of an assessment of further development on the site. Work was undertaken between February 2005 and June 2006. The mansion house at Newbattle Abbey is an exceptionally complicated building, incorporating as it does the remains of a 12th-century Cistercian Abbey, with major post-Reformation remodelling by each successive Earl or Marquis of Lothian, members of the Kerr family. The designed landscape was developed from the 12th century onwards, and contains a number of important structures, including the medieval Maiden Bridge.

A more thorough documentary analysis in the Lothian papers and elsewhere than has hitherto been undertaken allowed the compilation of detailed phase plans of the plan of the building. We identified 12 major building phases for the main house, and several phases in the development of the designed landscape. A notable historical find detailed a specification of 1650 for a substantial classical gatehouse that seems to have been similar to the centrepiece of Rosehall House, Lanarkshire (published in William Adam's Vitruvius Scoticus). Another significant find was the attribution of the late 17th-century archway to the ice-house to the architect James Smith. It is possible that this feature formed an original entrance to the main house, perhaps part of a major building scheme of the 1690s, and closely related to similar designs by Smith at Drumlanrig. The importance of the mid 18th-century ruined orangery was highlighted as one of only three of its date in the country. A small arch on the lawn made up of medieval masonry fragments was assessed as being part of 18th-century romanticising of the landscape.

Conservation plan to be deposited in NMRS.

Sponsor: Halcrow Group Ltd.

C McFarlane, J Sanders, T Addyman and J Austin 2006