Ford House

Ford House.

Less than a quarter of a mile west of Pathhead, on the old road to Edinburgh, is a small but well-preserved house (Fig. 50 [SC 1234103]) dating from the last quarter of the 17th century. On plan the structure is L-shaped, with the main block running east and west and the wing north and south. Within the re-entrant angle is a semi-octagonal tower containing a wheel-staircase and roofed with a slated timber roof of ogival shape. The building is covered with roughcast, but the back-set window margins are exposed; the gables are crow-stepped. The roof of the main block has apparently been renewed, but that of the wing has probably been only re-covered; towards the courtyard the latter contains a dormer window of old form. The window in the north gable of the wing is dated on the lintel 1680.

The building is two storeys and an attic in height, and no part is vaulted. In the dining room and also in the attic chamber above it the walls are covered with contemporary wooden panelling, probably of Memel pine. The dining-room fireplace is of stone and has moulded jambs; its hearth is paved with marble quarries, alternately white and black.

Ford as an independent estate ‘originally belonged to a branch of the Frasers of Lovat, who built Ford House in 1680’ - Cranston, a Parish History, by Rev. John Dickson, p. 26.

RCAHMS 1929, visited 23 June 1914.

Photographic survey by the Scottish National Buildings Record in 1956.

Photographs by the Ministry of Works 'pre 1956'.