Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
While carrying out fieldwork in the Annan area on behalf of the Scottish Development Department my attention was attracted by a remarkable series of Renaissance buckle quoins at Hayknowes farm — at first sight puzzling, since the architectural style of Hayknowes otherwise indicates a building date of somewhere around 1800. These quoins are built in to each of the front angles of the house, and rise to a height of about five feet. And nearby, at Newbie, on the spot identified by the Ordnance Survey map as the site of ‘Newbie Castle’, a single similar quoin exists, built in to one angle of a nineteenth-century cottage.
A clue to the puzzle was provided by the coincidental re-cataloguing of part of the Annandale family archive by the National Register of Archives (Scotland) [NRA(S)], whose secretary drew attention to the existence of a body of material relating to the construction in the later 1650s of a house at Newbie for the Earl of Hartfell. One surviving receipt in this group, for having produced a sundial, is from John Mylne, King’s Master Mason, and dated 1655. This document is of particular interest since, by linking Mylne’s name with Newbie at the same time that a new house, or an addition to a house, was being built there, it indicates the possibility of Mylne having also been involved with the design of the building at Newbie.
Abbreviations
1 Scottish Record Office SRO NRA(S)2170; the relevant material begins at bundle 154.
2 SRO RHP 37801.
3 Colvin, p. 781.
4 There can be no certainty that the Ordnance Survey is correct; the present Newbie House, for example, is clearly shown on Udny’s map, though interpretation of the fabric is difficult now that it is harled. What is evident is that a fairly significant structure — whether an entire building or simply a wing — has been dismantled and its ornamented stones used elsewhere. Equally, there can be no certainty that these quoins did not originate in an undocumnted wing or structure of the 1620s or 1630s.
5 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples are particularly prominent in Edinburgh where a Scottish Renaissance style was popular, for example, in the buildings at or for Heriot’s, David Cousin’s buildings overlooking The Mound and George Smith’s Johnston Terrace Normal School [see Edinburgh].
6 I have discussed this with John Newman of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Peter Leach of English Heritage, neither of whom could recall seeing any examples elsewhere in the United Kingdom; Rosalys Coope has not seen the detail in French Renaissance architecture and Dirk J. de Vries of the Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg in the Netherlands knows of no parallels in that country. Howard Colvin has pointed to similar quoins in Germany but I have seen nothing there which is identical.
7 See for example, W. Dietterlin, Architectura (1598) especially plates 40, 60, 99, and 104. The impression given by these quoins is of a binding on the corners of a box or similar object. They also bear a striking resemblance to the scalloped roof flashings favoured in Scotland by James Smith later in the century, though popular in France by the sixteenth century (see for example du Cerceau’s published patterns). Compare also the clasp detail at the foot of the columns on Thomas Bannatyne’s monument of c. 1636 in Greyfriars Kirkyard and on the pilasters of john Mylne’s Tron Kirk, Edinburgh (1636).
8 Kreft, & Soenke, , Die Weserrenaissance (1964), p. 289.Google Scholar
9 Presuming the steeple to be original — see appendix. The conical stone roofs of the large and small bartizans on the St Mary’s Wardlaw steeple are paralleled at Kilmuir Easter (dated 1616) and Ballone Castle MacGibbon, and Ross, II, 248; they also existed at Forres’ seventeenth-century Tolbooth which was rebuilt in facsimile, after 1838, by William Robertson of Elgin (E. Beaton, William Robertson (1984), plates 11 and 12) and again at Tain Tolbooth which was rebuilt after storm damage in 1703 (Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, III, 453) but incorporating a 1631 datestone and possibly re-using or replicating seventeenth-century bartizans.
10 Stirlingshire Inventory, 231, quoting ms accounts.
11 Edinburgh Inventory, 29; Edinburgh, pp. 121–23. One of the clearest views is that by Elphinstone, in Hugo Arnot, History of Edinburgh (1788), p. 293.
12 Accounts 1616–49, II (1982) p. lxx.
13 Lyon, D. M., History of the Lodge of Edinburgh [Mary’s Chapel] No. 1 (1873), p. 87.Google Scholar
14 Ibid., p. 84 ff.
15 See plans and views in MacGibbon and Ross, IV, 67 and II, 537. Also pediments at Baberton, over the Pitreavie entrance door and the (1636) pediment from Murray’s (d. 1634) Parliament house, now re-set in the Loggia at Parliament Square, Edinburgh, all contain in their tympana paired garlands suspended from rings, implying a common link between these four buildings.
16 Colvin, p. 567.
