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Recording Your Heritage Online

Event ID 566462

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Recording Your Heritage Online

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/566462

Calder House, principally from 16th century

Seat of the Sandilands, later Lords Torphichen, since 1350. The 1590s drawing of it by Timothy Pont implies one of the great Renaissance houses of Scotland; an enormously long slab with a fanciful skyline of chimneys, towers and cupolas. A tower, with thicker walls, is embedded at the heel of the house behind the two-storey semicircular entrance. The east wing is typically mid-16th century in plan. In the early 17th century, the north wing was extended by a new stair-tower, with scale-and-platt stair up to the principal floors, a turnpike, corbelled out on its west side, up to a balustraded rooftop viewing platform. In the later 17th century, the north wing was extended again, in the style of Alexander McGill, immuring that balustraded platform at roof level, ending in a handsome four-storey quoined gable with round oculi. A comparable gable added to the south east. In c.1820, a circular two-storey Doric-porched entrance was added in the principal angle like the splayed entrance to Glamis and to Minto House. The former hall, now drawing room, retains its large Renaissance windows and fine panelling.

This was a demesne of grandeur: here John Knox may have celebrated his first Reformed Communion in Scotland in 1556; here Frédéric Chopin stayed. By stripping off its harl, flattening the roof and slicing off its dormer windows, history has conspired to diminish a great palace into a country mansion.

Many fine estate buildings; the splendid 1670 gateway, facing West Calder road; a sharply broken pediment with ball finials, scrolls and alternate courses heavily rusticated; rustic West Lodge, pavilion roof, framed by tall chimneystacks and three identically scaled round-headed openings (lacking limewash); 17th-century sundial; round-shouldered South Lodge (hungrily rubble-pointed without its harl) and pretty bargeboarded gate lodge in Bank Street.

Steading, 1808, single-storey, entered beneath three-storey pedimented doocot. Now houses.

Taken from "West Lothian: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Stuart Eydmann, Richard Jaques and Charles McKean, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk

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