Inveraray, 1 Crombie's Land

Photographic survey of buildings and sites in Inveraray and surrounding area, Argyll, by the Scottish National Buildings Record in 1962.

This two-storeyed block stands close to the shore of Loch Fyne, about 40 m E of Relief Land and a few metres S of the SE angle of Church Square. It was built between 1822 and 1825 for Charles Morrison and is named after the first tenant, Alexander Crombie, plasterer. A modern tablet marks the birth there in 1863 of the writer Neil Munro, in a ground-floor room, but the building was extensively renovated to the designs of I G Lindsay in 1959, when the ground floor was converted to storage-space (en.1).

The building measures 16.8m from NE to SW by 6.3m overall, and the SE front comprises two three-bay units with central doorways. The gabled roof carries a chimneys tack set on a mid-wall a little SW of centre, and the considerable space between the windows at the centre was formerly relieved by a dummy window-recess at each level, but Lindsay did not retain these, and he also removed a porch and a two-storeyed bathroom-annexe from the same frontage, as well as the two gable chimneystacks. The ground-level at the rear is about 1m higher, and access to the two dwellings on the upper floor is by individual straight stone stairs, probably original. The interior of the NE division measures 7.6m from NE to SW by 5m, the other being about 0.8m shorter. At ground floor level each unit was divided into four rooms, all having fireplaces (two of which were set obliquely in the N angles of the mid-wall), and probably comprised pairs of two-roomed dwellings. The two dwellings on the upper floor appear to have been much altered even before Lindsay's restoration.

Fisher Row, a row of three single-storeyed cottages and a square pyramidal-roofed two-storeyed block at the NE end, extends SE a few metres from the SE end of Crombie's Land. It was designed by I G Lindsay in 1962 to replace an earlier range of outbuildings.

RCAHMS 1992, visited May 1989