page_title: Scottish baronial architecture
section_title: Original Scottish Baronial Style
hierarchical_section_title: Scottish baronial architecture / Original Scottish Baronial Style
caption_attribution_description: Claypotts Castle, Dundee, UK
context_page_description: Scottish Baronial is an architectural style that developed during the 16th and 17th century and was revived in the 19th century. The style of the first period, the original Scottish Baronial style, was limited to small castles and tower houses in Scotland and Ulster. It introduced Renaissance elements to buildings that preserved many of the features of the Scottish medieval castles and tower houses. The style of the second period, the Scottish Baronial Revival, was considered a British national idiom and was widely used for public buildings, country houses, residences and follies throughout the British Empire.
context_section_description: The original Scottish Baronial Style was part of the Scottish Renaissance. It developed in the 16th century and was abandoned by about 1660. The style kept many of the features of the high-rising medieval Gothic castles and introduced Renaissance features. The high and relatively thin-walled medieval fortifications had been made obsolete by gunpowder weapons but were associated with chivalry and landed nobility. High roofs, towers and turrets were kept for status reasons. Renaissance elements were introduced. This concerned mainly the windows that became bigger, had straight lintels or round bows and typically lacked mullions. The style drew on tower houses and peel towers, retaining many of their external features. French Renaissance also kept the steep roofs of medieval castles as can be seen for example at Azay-le-Rideau (1518), and the original Scottish Baronial style might have been influenced by French masons brought to Scotland to work on royal palaces.
  The style was quite limited in scope: a style for lesser Scottish landlords. The walls usually are rubble work and only quoins, window dressings and copings are in ashlar. Sculpted ornaments are sparsely used. In most cases the windows lack pediments. The style often uses corbelled turrets sometimes called tourelles, bartizans or pepperpot turrets. The corbels supporting the turret typically are roll-moulded. Their roofs were conical. Gables are often crow-stepped. Round towers supporting square garret chambers corbelled out over the cylinder of their main bodies are particular the Scottish Baronial style. They can be seen at Claypotts, Monea, Colliston, Thirlestane, Auchans, Balvenie, and  Fiddes.
  Such castles or tower houses are typically built on asymmetric plans. Often this is a Z-plan as at Claypotts Castle (1569–1588), or on an L-plan as at Colliston. Roof lines are uneven and irregular.
  The original Scottish Baronial Style coexisted even in Scotland with Northern Renaissance architecture, which was preferred by the wealthier clients. William Wallace's work at the North Range of Linlithgow Palace (1618–1622) and at Heriot's Hospital (1628–1633) are examples of a contemporaneous Scottish Renaissance architecture. Wallace worked for the Countess of Home at Moray House on Edinburgh's Canongate, an Anglo-Scottish client who employed the English master mason Nicholas Stone at her London house in Aldersgate.
  The Baronial style as well as the Scottish Renaissance style finally gave way to the grander English forms associated with Inigo Jones in the later part of the seventeenth century.
caption: Claypotts Castle consists of a rectangular central block with two round towers crowned by square garret chambers. The corners of these chambers or cap-houses are strongly corbelled out over the round form and have crow-stepped gables.
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