Recording Your Heritage Online
Event ID 563575
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Recording Your Heritage Online
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/563575
Achnacarry House (Achadh na Caraidh - field of the Weir), James Gillespie Graham, 1802-5 Whinstone mansion built for Donald Cameron, 22 nd chief of Clan Cameron, in the late-Adam Regency gothic tradition of John Paterson and the Elliot brothers. Romantically sited beside a great sweep of the River Arkaig, it overlooks a park of 17th-century origin surrounded by wooded slopes and wilder rugged hills. This was Gillespie Graham's first country house, and the first in the Gothic Revival style in the West Highlands since Inveraray Castle, though essentially a classical design. It is strictly symmetrical, with Georgian sash windows (some dummy) and a three-bay bow overlooking the river on the north front, but dressed up with battlements and angle turrets, and with narrow gothic-glazed windows to an advanced centrepiece on the entrance front, flanked by parapets pierced with quatrefoils. Work was abandoned in 1805 and the building sat as a shell until 1837, when the engineer Joseph Mitchell visited and found that 'the plaster ornaments of the ceiling lay 'on the floor ready to be fixed, and the doors of the rooms, of beautiful Highland pine, grown brown with age, leaned against the wall ready to be screwed on'. In 1837 Achnacarry was completed for the 23 rd chief to the designs of William Burn under the supervision of the clerk of works, Peter Manuel. Burn altered the original plan: the proposed oval saloon on the river front (by now no longer fashionable) became the bow-ended room that is now the dining room. The present Jacobeanstyle timber staircase, rising beneath a large cupola from the central stairhall to the landing gallery, is his compromised version of Gillespie Graham's more graceful design, and the front doorpiece and main chimneypieces (from David Ness of Leith) were also his additions. The service wing, 1872, is the only built part of an abortive scheme by David Bryce to baronialise Achnacarry, the little known plans for which survive in the house. After a damaging fire caused by the Commandos, whose wartime base this was from 1942 , Achnacarry was restored by Ian Lindsay, 1947-52, and redecorated by Walter Schomberg Scott. Ancillary buildings include: stables, built after 1856 (a plainer substitute for David Rhind's unbuilt Tudor design of 1847) with a bellcoted archway in a sombre whinstone facade leading into a cobbled courtyard flanked by more relaxed weatherboarded ranges. Various estate cottages, 19th century, with frilly valancing along their eaves.
Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
