Stirling, Clifford Road, Westerlands House

The late Dr Thomas Ross, in his paper on the tempura panels discovered in 1866 in the house of Wester Livilands, Stirling (Ross 1899), and now preserved in the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, notes that the joists in the oratory and the bedroom that were divided by the screen bearing the panels were ‘painted with conventional patterns, but these were very much destroyed, the ceilings at a later date having been lathe and plastered’ (Ibid, 395). A fragment of one of these ceilings has been reset above a small landing on the principal stair at Westerlands, a modern house which has replaced Wester Livilands; it may be dated, like the panels, to about 1629. It measures 11 ft by 9 ft 2 in, and both joists and ceiling-boards are painted red, green, blue, black and white. The strips of boarding that appear between the joists are divided into oblong panels, bearing alternately formal floral designs and bunches of figs and grapes, very stiffly composed. The joists themselves are decorated with arabesques and stars.

RCAHMS 1963, visited 8 October 1954.