THE biggest country house crisis in a decade has been triggered by the sudden need to resolve the future of two of Scotland’s greatest treasure houses: the Adam brothers’ Dumfries House in Ayrshire and Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford in the Borders. Abbotsford is world-famous thanks to Scott’s novels. By contrast Dumfries House is one of the most secret of all great houses, known only from black-and- white photographs of the entrance. Amazingly, the sumptuous Adam interiors have never been published.
It is an almost miraculous survival — a complete and undisturbed work of the three Adam brothers, John, Robert and James — exquisitely built, perfectly symmetrical in plan, with ornamental plasterwork of great delicacy and fine marble fireplaces. It contains, intact, Chippendale’s first important commission, consisting of an extensive set of mahogany chairs, sofas, giltwood overmantels, girandoles and pier glasses, exotically crested rococo four poster beds, and towel rails, chamber-pot cupboards and trays — the full range of kit that could be bought or commissioned from England’s most famous cabinetmaker.
The house was commissioned by the 4th Earl of Dumfries, a man of exceptional taste with a fine picture collection. His new drawing room was designed round a magnificent set of Gobelins tapestries given to his cousin the Earl of Stair by Louis XIV while ambassador to France. Dumfries House also contains furniture by the best Scottish makers, notably Francis Brodie, William Mathie and Alexander Peter. Sebastian Pryke, an expert on the Edinburgh furniture makers, says: “There is more documented mid-18th-century Scottish furniture here than in the whole of the rest of the world.”
The correspondence shows that Lord Dumfries consulted the Earl of Hopetoun about the design; he in turn wrote to the high priest of Palladianism, Lord Burlington, shortly before his death. Robert Adam came to stay at old Leifnorris Castle in 1754 as the guest of the Earl for three months, laying out the foundations.
In Italy, Palladian villas are often faced in stucco. Dumfries House is built of an attractive buff sandstone, with a tinge of red. The best blemishless stone was exclusively used for the entrance front. On the other three sides the masons used the stones which came from the quarry with a veining of iron. All this stone is still in superb condition, with the original diagonal tooling or chiselling. Other flourishes are the placing of a central pediment on all four fronts and an abundance of Venetian and Diocletian (lunette) windows.
The house stands in an Arcadian park with a handsome three-arch bridge over the River Lugar. It could be straight out of a Claude Lorraine landscape painting, with its two sets of John Adam lodges, an ice house and a Gothic temple on a hill by Robert Adam.
Dumfries House passed by marriage to the Butes, who in the 19th century were to build two of the most astonishing houses in Britain, Cardiff Castle and Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute. Dumfries House became a dower house, left untouched until the 3th Marquess, feeling that it was the only one of his houses where he could be warm and comfortable, commissioned Robert Weir Schultz to extend it. With great subtlety Schultz doubled the depth of the wings, introducing domed corridors and a gallery to display all the Gobelins tapestries.
When the present Marquess — the racing driver Johnny Dumfries — inherited, he was faced with a huge financial challenge, but thanks to his business acumen the Mount Stuart Trust is now endowed and open to the public. He has offered Dumfries House with 2,000 acres and principal contents to the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) as a private treaty sale. If a package cannot be agreed by the autumn, a Christie’s sale is planned for next year.
Robin Pellew, the Trust’s director-general, says: “Dumfries House is superb, intact and exactly as it was 250 years ago.”
An “in lieu” tax settlement should nonetheless cover part of the cost. The main difficulty arises with the policy that requires country house acquisitions to be grant aided through the National Heritage Memorial Fund, not the Heritage Lottery Fund, though the two organisations have the same trustees.
After the acquisition of Tyntesfield the NHMF’s coffers are now empty, though they may now be topped up by £5m a year. At Tyntesfield, HLF monies are now being found for the very extensive community programmes which require the involvement of local schools and the unemployed — and this should set the pattern for Dumfries, which is close to the Ayrshire coalfields, an area in strong need of community projects. The NTS already has a strong presence at Robert Adam’s Culzean Castle, just 15 miles away and one of its most popular properties.
The crisis at Abbotsford has been precipitated by the sudden death of Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott, who had inherited the task of showing the house from her sister.
Abbotsford is not threatened with imminent break-up, but if no member of the Scott family wishes to live there and become the standard bearer of the Scott legacy, the NTS may need to become involved. Many of the contents have been in a form of trust ownership since Scott himself was ensnared in financial difficulties after the bankruptcy of his publisher.
Both houses are indisputably of pre-eminent importance in national terms and HLF resources need to be deployed as skilfully and decisively as they were at Tyntesfield to avoid devastating losses of unique entities. What is certain at Dumfries is that if the whole package on offer cannot be saved, there will be an exact repeat of the tragedy at Mentmore, where the money spent on buying a select number of objects for museums exceeded the cost of acquiring the house complete.
