Inveraray, Fern Point Hotel

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

This three-storeyed house, standing in its own grounds about 25m from the shore of Loch Fyne and 45m NNE of the courthouse, was the first to be erected in the New Town. A tack of the ground was granted to the merchant John Richardson in1748, and five years later the house was completed 'in a more expensive manner than at first proposed'. Richardson began another house on an adjacent site in Front Street (No. 201, H)in 1756 and thereafter leased his original house, which in 1767was acquired by Colin Campbell of Carwhin and subsequently passed jointly to his sons, one of whom became 4th Earl of Breadalbane. From about 1774 the house was occupied by Commissary Duncan Campbell (later 'of Ross') and his mother, and he appears to have purchased it in 1790, paying tax for 29 windows eight years later. A series of accounts extending from 1762 to 1789 records repairs, mostly of a minor nature, some of them by the masons John Brown (1762-3) and John Tavish (1789) (en1*).

The alignment of the house was determined by John Adam's provisional town-plan of 1750, before the axis of Main Street was established (en.2), and it measures 13.7m from N to S by 7.4m, with an almost completely circular stair-tower 3.4m in diameter at the centre of the W side-wall. The masonry is of local rubble, harled and whitewashed, with painted offset freestone quoins and dressings. The roof is hipped and slated, with an axially-set central chimneystack of diagonally-tooled schist ashlar, but the stacks at the end walls are modern (en.3*).

The entrance-doorway in the N side of the conical-roofed stair-tower has a projecting timber portico with Doric columns and a triangular pediment, which gives access to a stone newel-stair. The tower is flanked in the upper storeys by narrow windows and beyond those, at each level, by single sash-and-case windows. The seaward (E) front has three regularly-spaced windows, while the N end-wall has two openings at each of the upper levels, spaced to avoid the central chimney-flues, and the S wall, most of which is obscured by an annexe (infra), has single openings towards the E end.

On each floor the stair-landing opens into a lobby, divided by a short flue-bearing wall from a small E room, and opening into large rooms to N and S. The ground floor was entirely remodelled in the 20th century and the original kitchen-fireplace in the N gable is not preserved. At first floor level, some of the doors and all window-shutters are fielded and panelled. The lobby has a moulded cornice and the N room a panelled dado, swag-ornamented frieze and modillioned cornice, while the S room has a reconstructed foliated frieze and a pilastered timber chimneypiece with modillioned cornice. In both rooms, the doors to the lobby are linked by pilasters to shallow alcoves. The main rooms at second-floor level are subdivided, with 19th-centurycornices, and the S room preserves remnants of green patterned mid-19th-century wallpaper. The lobby has four panelled fielded doors, and at the SW angle a tongued-and grooved door, possibly original, opening into the dog-leg stair to the garret, which comprises a single V-plan room.

A 'shade' (shed) was 'built to the gavel (gable) of (the) house' in 1762-3, and maps of 1756 showed a parallel range a few metres W of the house and of equal length, presumably containing some or all of the cow house, cellar and stable which were in disrepair by 1789 (en.4). It is probable that the existing two-storeyed lean-to extension at the S gable-wall occupies the position of the 'shade', and the single-storeyed hip-roofed range 6.5m W of the house may incorporate remains of the stable-wing, but in their present forms both buildings are of 19th-century date, with extensive modern alterations in the latter and in a short connecting wing at the S boundary of the property.

RCAHMS 1992, visited January 1986