Dr Joe Rock received a Society of Antiquaries of Scotland grant in June 2023 to carry out research on the houses of the Earls of Galloway with particular emphasis on Glasserton house, 3 miles west of Whithorn in Wigtownshire.
The Stewarts of Garlies, Earls of Galloway from 1623, had their seat at Garlies Castle (NX 4221 6914), the ruins of which stand four miles north of Newton Stewart on the Cumloden estate, the seat of the present earl. They had been granted the barony of Garlies in 1542 which included the lands of Glasserton and this was followed by the lands of Clarie (Clary) in 1564, on a charter by Alexander, Bishop of Galloway signed at Whithorn. Alexander, fifth of Garlies was granted the lands of the Priory of Whithorn in February 1580 by Elizabeth Stewart, Countess of Moray and he was appointed to the office of Hereditary Bailie to the Priory in 1588.
It may have been Alexander, fifth of Garlies who built a house at Glasserton as he had a Sasine of the lands in right of his father, in 1576. He was certainly living there when he corresponded with Sir Patrick Waus (1540-1597) between 1582 and 1590 in both winter and summer. Nothing is known of the style or site of this house. Between 1582 and 1585 Garlies also wrote to Sir Patrick from a house in Whithorn and on three occasions in 1580, 1583 and 1588, from Clary. Andrew Sympson referred to a ‘summer house’ at Glasserton in 1684 which may have incorporated an earlier house but there is no evidence for this.
On 26 December 1701 Sir John Clerk of Penicuik married Margaret, daughter of Alexander, third earl of Galloway. They had a son John but Margaret died in childbirth. Clerk took him to see his grandfather in 1721 and reported that since his last visit, rooms for guests had been added to the house at Glasserton. There is fortunately a record of the plan of the seventeenth century house, in a drawing made by Robert Adam in 1787 as part of his proposal for additions to the older house for Admiral Keith Stewart. Adam indicated the standing ruin in pale yellow and it can be seen that the old house was a long narrow building measuring c.100 x 29 ft. with single rooms connected by a long passage along the north front. By this time it had a bow in the centre of the north front of unknown date over a rusticated ground floor. The bow is unlikely to have been part of the seventeenth century design.
The seventeenth century house may have been the work of the architect, James Smith (1645-1731) although no documentary evidence was found during this research to support this. There is however a growing body of circumstantial evidence. Smith is associated with a number of commissions that brought him close to the earls of Galloway and their wider family. The third earl married Lady Mary Douglas, sister of the first Duke of Queensberry for whom Smith designed and supervised the building of Drumlanrig Castle between 1676 and 1697. In 1701 the third earl’s daughter Margaret Stewart married Sir John Clerk of Penicuik who was amanuensis to the Duke of Queensberry and arranged a contribution to the repair of the Whithorn Tolbooth and the provision of a bell in 1708. Queensberry’s mother, Margaret Stewart, was the daughter of John Stewart, first earl of Traquair and Smith was also responsible for alterations to Traquair house in the Scottish Borders for the fourth earl, between 1695 and 1705. Queensberry’s Lady, Isabel Douglas was the sister of William Douglas who became third Duke of Hamilton on his marriage to Anne, Duchess of Hamilton, in her own right, in 1656. Smith was first employed by them in 1671, immediately after his return from Italy, at Kinneil house for their son, James, Earl of Arran. Eleven years later they commissioned him to draw up plans for what would become Hamilton Palace, Duchess Anne’s ‘great design’. In 1694 the Duke died and Smith worked with the Duchess until its completion at the end of 1697.
The seventeenth century house can be seen in pale yellow along the top (east) with the later addition in pink. One external window of the older house was retained, indicated beside the circular oven.
Finally, Smith was consulted by the Burgh of Dumfries in 1704 to design their new Tolbooth (Midsteeple) but he didn’t take up the commission.
As well as Traquair here are a number of long narrow houses by Smith of the Glasserton type; Panmure house in the Canongate of Edinburgh (1691), Cockenzie house, Port Seton (1682-4) and Whitehall house near Chirnside in East Lothian (1690’s?).
On 12 August 1734 a fire destroyed the seventeenth century Glasserton house, leaving a standing ruin that was visited in 1748 by an intrepid window tax enumerator who counted 36 windows, probably over two floors. The elderly fifth earl and his 78 year old lady had a lucky escape and they moved to a house in the Whithorn pend. The earl was determined to have a new house and wrote to Sir John Clerk in an undated letter but soon after the fire;
“I am determined to have a little house that it may be convenient to accomodat us while we live, & that with as good management as possible find the circumstances of my familie won’t admit of annie thing else, & can’t think of having it in any other place than formerly, because of the little sentimentos yet it yet may be fit for office houses & lodging for servts, I am to take advice of one Mr. Douglas who is recommended to Garlies & me for our architect we expect him to morrin or Thursday, first we go to Glasserton where we shall fix upon a place & have a plan for a little house, in the mean time its agreed for bringing my limestone & shall immediately agree for all kinds of timber as Mr. Douglas shall advise according to the dimensions my house shall be, & I shall have my Cabino in as great forwardness as possible nixt summer.”
John Douglas (1709-1778) may have been consulted but he eventually designed a new house, still standing at Garlieston, three miles to the east of Whithorn, for Lord Garlies, later sixth earl. The building of this house was eventually overseen by John Baxter. The earl took his own eccentric course and settled on a much more modest house in the grounds of his burnt out ruin. Garlies was furious at this waste of money and resources and wrote to Clerk himself in February 1738:
“I’m told he has contracted with a sort of mason, no better than a barrow man, to build him a summer house, he calls it, of three rooms above besides cellars and I know not what below, its to be situate in the garden at Glassertoun.”
And again with more detail on 7 June following:
“…the little building at Glasserton is of a most extraordinary kind, it being neither a summer house, as he said he intended, nor a house of any kind, or for any use that I can imagine, its about 39 feet by 16 within the walls; a ground story half vaulted, and another above which enters from a stair without, the vault is divided into a cellar & sort of Charter room, the other half of the ground story is divided into two rooms and two closets in which there are to be three beds for what use God knows, only my Lord talks sometimes of going to live there, which at present is absolutely impossible, and it will require offices far beyond his house, for Kitchen, lodgings for his children, servants & strangers. There are chimneys in the charter room, low parlour, two rooms & one of the closets above, he has sent as I’m told, for furniture of all kinds, altho I was vex’t to see any money thrown away so hastly uselessly yet if it stops here, there’s no great harm, and it can come to so great affair, but if it go on, as there’s no plan, nor no architect, only a drunken ignorant mason, the use of it the end of it, nor the expence they know not themselves, before it was begun my father mentioned it to me as a little summer house he intended. I told his Lop, that altho it never possibly could be of any use, nor I believed amusing to any body but himself, yet if it was agreeable to him, why should he not do as he pleased since then we have never spoke about it, only once he carried me to see them at work, the mason was by accident making the middle door quite wrong, which I observed, and it was set to rights, this pleased my father much… [PS] I almost forgot to tell you the house is situated above the garden, without the planting & nixt to the town, at such a distance that the old buildings can be of no use.”
On 30 June 1740 the earl wrote to Clerk from Whithorn:
I am to go out of ye town to Morro & take up my abode in my little lodge at Glasserton, with a little more addition though not modern, I think I may pass the remainder of my time with more pleasure as here.
The exact position of this new house is unknown but the 1850 OS map indicates a ‘Summer House’ at the eastern edge of the Glasserton grounds without any specific point shown. There is no trace of any building there today.
The undated presentation elevation for Glasserton by Robert Adam is inscribed to “…the Honourable Commodore Keith Stewart.” suggesting that he began thinking of restoring his grandfather’s house as early as 1781 when he was appointed Commodore and Commander in Chief, North Sea. The other sheets are inscribed Admiral Keith Stewart and although dated 1787 he was not promoted to Vice Admiral until 1790 and Rear Admiral in 1794, having seen no active service from 1783. Adam’s proposal was carried out in a simplified version of the plans and elevations in the Soane Museum. Adam designed a new south front and single story offices to the west but the addition was executed in harled brick with red sandstone margins which interfered with the proportions and given the uncertainty over dating, it may be that the work was not supervised by the architect who died in 1790. The new building was the same width as the seventeenth century house at c.100 ft. but deeper at 65ft.
At an unknown date before 1843 Glasserton house acquired a new north front in granite, clumsily imposed as a skin on the elevation of the seventeenth century façade. The stone was transported from an unrecorded house at Machermore, close to Newton Stewart and John Morrison writing in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1843 recorded that it had been suggested to Sir Walter Scott, sometime before his death in 1832, that he might knock down Abbotsford and replace it with the Machermore house: “…You require no architect, or new plan; the stones are numbered as you take them down; and if you have committed any mistake, you will have an opportunity of correcting it in the new erection”. The misalignment of new frontage with the fenestration of the east and west walls at Glasserton gives the lie to that airy confidence. But the effect was dramatic, the more so because the garden on the north was excavated out of the slope and redesigned in the Italian manner with views stretching out towards Whithorn. What had been a modest house was visually transformed.
Glasserton was stripped by Charles Brand of Dundee in 1949, removing all the usable material including the roof. The brick and stone shell was finally sold and removed in 1954. Only the foundations of both the seventeenth century house and the additions remain, largely buried under demolition rubble. Further research is required on the design and development of the much larger and more complicated Galloway house at Glasserton and the transcriptions of the Clerk correspondence have already shed new light on the genesis of that building including the amusing discovery that John Baxter’s wife accompanied him during his supervision of the project and supported herself by selling alcohol to the masons! The Clerk correspondence also revealed that it was Lady Katherine Cochrane, wife of the sixth earl, who very abley supervised the building of Galloway house during his absence.
Research in the Wigtown sasines as part of a larger copying exercise, of all the manuscript sasines relating to Whithorn, has found that the sixteenth century Clary was still standing when it was purchased by the General Collector of the Minister’ Widows’ Fund on 9 August 1827. It was described as “the 5 merk land of Clary with the tower and fortalice of the same”. Nothing of this castle remains apart from some sixteenth century fireplace and window fragments (unseen) in a nineteenth century house on the site, reported in 1973.
