26 FEBRUARY 1977, Page 25

Arts

Man-made Scotland

Colin McWilliam

Travelling for pleasure in Scotland suggests fine landscape with a generous dash of history. Buildings tend to come a poor third —mere accessories in the shape of Highland cottages and battered baronial castles, mentioned by the brochures in terms hardly less vague than those used by Sir Walter Scott. In some ways this is just. Scotland lacks, for example, the rich variety of English Parish churches and the cosy charm of English country towns. In fact, Scotland has Plenty of good things, but they are different, and there is a dearth of published information about them; a state of affairs that may not worry the motivated explorer, but is not SO good for the route-planning visitor, and disastrous for the politics of conservation. Officials, even more than tourists, like to

have printed evidence of merit before they move.

What is special about Scottish buildings? First, the abundance and variety of the universal material, stone, whose use was restricted to the most important buildings till about four hundred years ago. Even after ti became wide-spread, stone building long retained the stamp of economy. Unworked stones were the usual material for walling, and this was covered with a weatherproofing blanket of rough rendering called harling, so that the disciplined forms have the quality of abstract, functional sculpture. Secondly Scotland's architects, from Sir William Bruce onwards and from Robert Adam d°wnwards, were masters of synthesis. Their combination of function and fashion is inte.11igent and satisfying. Finally, Scotland's nineteenth-century architects built up a strong academic tradition whose worth was

appreciated by their clients—barons, ban kers and industrialists alike. Only from such a

high Peak of academic achievement could a freethinker like Mackintosh have sprung.

been Hill House at Helensburgh has recently °Peen acquired by the Royal Incorporation

0.f Architects in Scotland, and is open to visitors.

In conservation the achievement has been uneven. Scotland was twenty years ahead of

E.

,ngland in the listing of Victorian buildings, twenty years behind in starting a Bath-style !own Scheme for grants (in Edinburgh, with us somewhat later and very, much larger

Georg development). Two weak points are the national habit of bad maintenance, assuming that stone buildings will last for ever and demolishing them when they don't, and the peculiar concept of preservation as something essentially pious and useless. ISacred cows, or in this context haggis "tidings except that they are in no way nutritious, are the result.

The achievement of the independent

National Trust for Scotland (hereafter NTS) has been phenomenal, most notably in the Little Houses restoration scheme that has saved the environmental quality of so many villages on the Fife peninsula. But in this, and even more in the field of country houses, their work is a small shining light that serves to reveal the size of the whole unsolved problem and its steadily disappearing opportunities. In a wider sort of intervention the Scottish Georgian Society and the Scottish Civic Trust (the former more catholic in its sympathies than the name implies, the latter guiding and supporting local grass-roots opinion) offer their careful comments on every single application for consent to the alteration or demolition of a listed building in Scotland. Most of the new . District authorities, advised by keen conservationists on their new staffs, take notice of what they say.

What kinds of buildings are involved ? The great national type, symbolising the pattern of land ownership from the county or sheriffdom to the small estate, is the castle and the laird's house. The typical form is the tower, from the mediaeval simplicity of Drum in Aberdeenshire (NTS) and Lennoxlove to the amazing Jacobean outburst of turrets and gables at the head of the plain stalk of a castle like Craigievar (NTS). These and hundreds more castles are inhabited. Of those that have been sacked or abandoned, the most important are hygienically preserved (and often picturesquely, though that is not the main intention) as Ancient Monuments, and the left-overs are now in strong demand for conversion into modern houses —compact, well-insulated and often very luxurious.

The change to classicism was late and dramatic, taking place at the end of the seventeenth century. Only a few years separate the Duke of Buccleuch's renaissance castle at Drumlanrig (surely the rarest and richest experience among Scotland's stately homes) and the highly sophisticated classical house which Sir William Bruce built for himself at Kinross. At Hopetoun, which today commands a remarkable cross-view of the two Forth Bridges, Bruce was succeeded by the elder Adam and he in turn by his sons. This and the great Hanoverian fortification at Fort George were among Robert Adam's first preoccupations. One of his last was the development of a new style with

Scotland very much in mind. A score of Roman Castellated mansions are the result, and Culzean (NTS) with its drum tower beetling over the Ayrshire cliffs, is the most spectacular. It also excels in its provision for the civilised reception of a very large number of visitors. And so, with an interlude of chaste neo-classicism whose finest example is William Burn's Camperdown (well maintained but abominably decorated by the town of Dundee) we are back to the Scotsman's love-affair with the castle. Alistair Rowan's exhibition of the work of David Bryce (to be seen at the RIBA in August) represents a long overdue acknowledgment of Scottish Victorian in general and the Scottish baronial revival in particular.

And since country houses are what we first think of when people talk of architectural heritage, what are their future prospects? The pitiful, abandonment of Cullen is not typical, because most owners want to keep their houses up, against all the odds. Yet even of these, a sinister dole-queue is building up and is about to receive (as the NTS has just discovered) a peremptory brush-off from the Devolution Bill. Money from the National Land Fund will continue to be available to the Secretary of State in repayment for the purchase of historic buildings. Yes, ah, but the Secretary of State is to have no historic buildings functions—they will belong to the new Assembly. So the money will not, in practice, be available after all. Very neat and very silly. How many other Parthian shots would be aimed by Whitehall at a partly--independent Scotland ? This is a petty wrangle, but it has big implications, and perhaps the real need is the same all over Britain: to drop political dogma and work out a simple sum. Does the community benefit more from good houses and estates maintained by their owners, or from the same maintained under licence with state aid ? If the latter, the state will have to pick up a very large bill.

Then the towns—old burghs cleverly sited in the middle ages and still doing well, new towns founded by Scotland's Georgian improvers, industrial settlements carelessly dumped by Victorian magnates whose names are carved on the fronts of welfare halls; even this last type may be worth exploring, like the red-brick mining village of Newtongrange just south of Edinburgh which I only discovered a few weeks ago in the course of preparing the Lothian volume of Buildings of Scotland. One reason why Scottish towns in general are not easy to look at is their tendency to develop along main roads—not only in the present century but right from the start. The long ribbon of Linlithgow, recently somewhat relieved by the motorway, is an obvious example. So the visitor in search of character had better drive off the main routes to places like Montrose in Angus with its tall Gothic Revival spire and wide High Street planned for markets, or the almost impossibly isolated fishing village of Crovie in Banffshire.

The quality of almost every Scottish town is now at risk through various sorts of rationalisation. Churches and banks are amalgamating, and many tolbooths and town halls became redundant in the local government changes of 1974. These are the main architectural personalities in a town, and it is a pity that so many of them are becoming useless at a time when there is little money for the intelligent adaptation they will need if they are to survive. The recent acquisition of a distinguished Georgian church in Newington, Edinburgh, as a hall for the Scottish Philharmonic Society, is the happy outcome of one such crisis— unfortunately it is a very rare one. The only town that has really tackled its problems of use and redundancy, and managed to contain them, is Haddington in East Lothian.

Housing is the blackest part of the picture. What hope is there for a Glasgow family in any part of that huge, decaying spread, or what comfort in belonging to what is still the noblest Victorian city in Britain ? Here as elsewhere, the best work has not been done by the local authority (who wants to live in Castelmilk, or the skyscrapers of Red Road ?) but by intelligent work at both ends of the scale: the small commando-forces of semi-voluntary organisations like Assist, and the highly organised Scottish Special Housing Association, the government agency appointed to tackle some of this appalling backlog.

Devolved or not, the government in Scotland will have to think more seriously about conservation. The re-use of good church buildings and the improvement of the housing stock are two out of many parts of the same job, which is to make the best of what we have.