What is Scottish Baronial architecture?

Scottish Baronial describes a building that reads as a castle from a distance: a tall main block, round or square turrets carried on stone brackets at the corners, and a broken roofline of small windows and conical caps. The name covers two different things. One is the tower houses Scottish lairds actually built and defended between the 14th and 17th centuries. The other is the 19th-century style that copied their outline once defence was no longer the point.

Heritage bodies mostly use Scottish Baronial for the second group, the Victorian and Edwardian revival. The listing for Abbotsford House near Melrose, built in phases from 1816 to 1824 for the novelist Walter Scott, describes it as a pioneering Baronial Revival country house and the first attempt to recreate an authentic Scottish castle rather than a generic Gothic one. Abbotsford's architects were William Atkinson and Edward Blore, with later work by the builder John Smith of Darnick and the architect William Burn.

A small set of details recur on almost every Baronial building, genuine or revived. Corbelled turrets, small round or square towers carried on projecting stone brackets rather than rising from the ground, sit at the corners and break up an otherwise plain wall. Their conical roofs, along with the steep gables and dormers of the main roof, give the building its uneven skyline. The listings for Balmoral and for Sherbrooke Castle Hotel in Glasgow both use this vocabulary, describing bartizans, a cap-house and conical-roofed angle turrets.

Crow-stepped gables, where the edge of the gable rises in a stair-step of rectangular stone blocks rather than one continuous slope, are among the most recognisable features of Scottish building generally, according to the glossary compiled for the University of Glasgow's Mackintosh Architecture project. Harling, a rough lime-and-aggregate render thrown onto a wall rather than trowelled smooth, is the traditional Scottish weatherproofing and gives many Baronial buildings their pale, textured finish. Kincraig Castle Hotel near Invergordon is one example, described on its own site as a white-harled building with crow-step gables and turrets.

Machicolations, projecting stone galleries with openings in the floor once meant for dropping objects on attackers below, appear on some revival buildings purely as decoration long after anyone needed them for defence, as at Abbotsford. Bartizans, small turrets that project from a wall or parapet rather than sitting on the roofline, do a similar job: they give a building the outline of defence without the function.

Because Scottish Baronial spans four centuries, two buildings that look alike from the drive can have opposite histories. A 16th or 17th-century tower house was built to be defended, at least briefly, and its walls, stairs and windows usually show it: thick walls, a turnpike stair, and window openings that get larger the higher up the building you go, once the risk of attack falls away. A 19th-century Baronial mansion carries the same turrets and crow-steps, but was built for comfort and display from the start, with wide sash windows, a symmetrical front and rooms sized for entertaining rather than defence.

This is the distinction behind our Castle Authenticity Scale. Level 5, True Castle, is for buildings put up as a castle, tower house or fortified house between the medieval period and the 17th century, where guests sleep inside those historic walls. Level 4, Castle-Style Mansion, covers 18th-century or later buildings in castle style, Scottish Baronial included, with no defensive history, plus any early castle so heavily rebuilt that the fabric guests sleep in today is essentially later work. Without one, we leave the level blank rather than guess.

Carberry Tower shows how mixed a single building can get. Its core is a 16th-century tower, but a south range was added in the late 17th century, an east range by David Bryce around 1860, and Baronial detailing by the architect Thomas Ross in 1909 and 1913. Tulloch Castle at Dingwall is similarly layered: the square tower at its centre dates from the 16th century, with alterations from the 17th to the early 20th century, including work by A. Maitland and Sons in 1891 and by Sir Robert Lorimer between 1920 and 1922. Barony Castle near Peebles, also known as Black Barony, began as a Scots baronial building of 1536 on the site of an earlier peel tower, before a Jacobean facade was added between 1700 and 1715. In each case, guests sleep inside a genuine historic core with later additions, not a building put up only to look like a castle.