page_title: Architecture in early modern Scotland
section_title: Scots Baronial
hierarchical_section_title: Architecture in early modern Scotland / Scots Baronial
caption_attribution_description: Claypotts Castle, Dundee, UK
context_page_description: Architecture in early modern Scotland encompasses all building within the borders of the kingdom of Scotland, from the early sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. The time period roughly corresponds to the early modern era in Europe, beginning with the Renaissance and Reformation and ending with the start of the Enlightenment and Industrialisation.
  Vernacular architecture made use of local materials such as stone, turf and, where available, wood. Most of the population was housed in small hamlets and isolated dwellings. The most common form of dwelling throughout Scotland was the long house, shared by humans and animals. About ten per cent of the population lived in the burghs, in a mixture of half-timbered and stone houses.
  The impact of the Renaissance on Scottish architecture began in the reign of James III in the late fifteenth century with the rebuilding of royal palaces such as Linlithgow, and reached its peak under James V. The Reformation had a major impact on ecclesiastical architecture from the mid-sixteenth century onward, resulting in simple church buildings, devoid of ornamentation.
context_section_description: The unique style of great private houses in Scotland, later known as Scots Baronial, originated in the 1560s and may have been influenced by the French masons brought to Scotland to work on royal palaces. It kept many of the features of the high walled Medieval castles that had been largely made obsolete by gunpowder weapons and also drew on the tower houses and peel towers that had been built in their hundreds by local lords since the fourteenth century, particularly in the borders. These houses abandoned the defensible curtain walls of castles, being fortified refuges that were designed to outlast a raid, rather than a sustained siege. They were usually of three stories, typically crowned with a parapet, projecting on corbels, continuing into circular bartizans at each corner. The new houses built from the late sixteenth century by nobles and lairds were primarily designed for comfort, not for defence. They retained many of the external features that had become associated with nobility but with a larger ground plan, classically a "Z-plan" of a rectangular block with towers, as at Colliston Castle (1583) and Claypotts Castle (1569–88).
  William Wallace, the king's master mason from 1617 until his death in 1631, was particularly influential. He worked on the rebuilding of the collapsed North Range of Linlithgow from 1618, Winton House for George Seton, 3rd Earl of Winton, Moray House for the Countess of Home, and began work on Heriot's Hospital, Edinburgh. He adopted a distinctive style that applied elements of Scottish fortification and Flemish influences to a Renaissance plan similar to that used at Château d'Ancy-le-Franc. This style can be seen in lords' houses built at Caerlaverlock (1620), Moray House, Edinburgh (1628) and Drumlanrig Castle (1675–89), and was highly influential until the Baronial style gave way to the grander English forms associated with Inigo Jones in the later seventeenth century.
caption: The sixteenth-century Claypotts Castle, showing many of the features of the Baronial style
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