Victorian Dower House
Shaun Castle 23 April 2007
Panelled Principal Hall with late 19th century cast iron enamelled stove in decorative fireplace surround
Park House is a fine example of mid-Victorian domestic architecture in the villa manner, popularised through the early work of John James Burnet (1814-1901).
Tradition has it that the property was built as a Dower House for the mother-in-law of the 6th Earl of Selkirk, Lord Daer, Dumbar James Douglas, of St Mary’s Isle, Kirkcudbright, heir of the illustrious Fifth Earl, Thomas Douglas, who founded the Red River Settlement in Canada, and Lady Selkirk, Jean Wedderburn, who effectively ran the north American operations of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1815 -1819). Prominent in the intellectual life of the time, friends of the Selkirk’s included Scott and Burns, both frequent visitors to St Mary’s Isle. Lord Daer had no heir, and the estate passed to his sister Lady Isabella Hope, whose husband was Hon. Charles Hope, who briefly occupied Park House in the 1890’s. Ownership of Park House finally passed out of the dynastic line in the early 20th century.
Believed to have been built between 1842 and 1866, the house is of granite construction under a hipped high-pitched double slate roof with sweeping dormers, high chimney stacks, rusticated quoins and label mounds to fenestration. Rectilinear in plan with a projecting asymmetrical wing at right angles, the massing has two fully unified front elevations, and with the absence of ornament, a design more villa than country house.
The original layout has a simplicity and clarity of proportion, being a classic composite of principal public and private bedroom accommodation off a central spinal hall to ground and first floors, complemented by garret service accommodation to second floor and secondary service quarters, liberally interspersed with closets. Later additions include a two-storey service tower of brick construction with weatherboarded outshut to east elevation.
The house retains much of its original fabric, including panelling, sashes and fireplaces.
Park House is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
Two informative essays on Lord and Lady Selkirk in Manitoba, The Quest for a Usable Founder: Lord Selkirk and Manitoba Historians, 1856-1923 and Lady Selkirk and the Fur Trade, are available online from The Manitoba Historical Society.
New Naturalist Series
- Galloway and the Borders
Shaun Castle 22 April 2007
NN’s distinctive dust-jacket design by Robert Gillmor
Conceived during wartime, the New Naturalist has provided expert accounts of Britain’s natural history for 60 years. Each volume in the series is a themed exploration of one particular subject, encyclopaedic in its breadth of knowledge, and beautifully illustrated with colour plates.
The latest volume Galloway and the Borders is a fitting tribute to its author, Derek Ratcliffe, who died shortly after completing the manuscript in 2005.
Ratcliffe’s first-hand account of this relatively unknown region is startling in its observations, at once a lament for the wealth of nature lost in our lifetimes, a celebration of a beautiful upland landscape, and an attempt to conserve it, in a rapidly changing climate.
Drifting masses of cumulus casting shadows over vast desolate hills carpeted in heather, block screes of grey granite and broad watersheds and peatlands—these are the abiding images which have made Ratcliffe’s images conservation icons—many of which liberally illustrate this volume, none more so than the images of vast waves of conifers breaking over the uplands of Kircudbrightshire.
Whilst Ratcliffe casts a broadstroke over the region, his real strength is illuminating the particular, whether its a ground nest of peregrine, a rare pyramidal bugle, a stonecrop on shore shingle, a waxwing in search of berries, or a young golden eagle feeding small young - the region is brought to life in all its affirmative diversity.
Published by HarperCollins
£45 (hardback) £25 (paperback)
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