FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF
Miss Bompas
Italian in feeling, and yet happily wedding with the Scottish mansion of two and a half centuries ago, and forming, with the house and park-land, one of the most perfect examples of a country gentleman’s place. All of it is pleasant and beautiful, home-like and humanly sympathetic; the size is moderate—there is nothing oppressively grand.
More than once already in these pages attention has been drawn to the danger of letting good stone-work become overgrown with rank creepers. At Balcaskie this is evidently carefully regulated. The wall-spaces between the great buttresses, and the buttresses themselves, are sufficiently clothed but never smothered with the wall-loving and climbing plants. The right relation of masonry and vegetation is carefully observed; each graces and dignifies the other; the balance is perfect.
The lowest level is given to the kitchen garden. It is not put out of the way, but forms part of the whole scheme. It is reached by a single flight of handsome balustraded stone steps.
Balcaskie occurs as a place-name early in the thirteenth century. From 1350 to 1615 it was owned by a family named Strang, afterwards by the Moncrieffs, till 1665. It is not known whether any portion of the present house and garden belonged to these earlier dates, but it is probable that the designer of both was Sir William Bruce, one of the best architects of the time of Charles II., and an owner of Balcaskie for twenty years.
CRATHES CASTLE
Crathes Castle in Kincardineshire presents one of the finest examples of Scottish architecture of the sixteenth century. It is the seat of Sir Robert Burnett of Leys, the eleventh baronet and descendant of the founder.
Profoundly impressive are these great northern buildings, rising straight and tall out of the very earth. As to their lower walls, they are grim, forbidding, almost fiercely repellent. There is an aspect of something like ruthless cruelty in the very way they come out of the ground, without base or plinth or any such amenity—built in the old barbarous days of frequent raiding and fighting, and constant need of protection from marauders; when a man’s house must needs be a strong place of defence.