The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Landscape and townscape from AD 1500
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was completed as late as 1661. Some of the later
Scottish fortified houses did, however, place as much
emphasis on style and architectural embellishment
as on defence, adapting French chateau features to
Scottish layouts in a distinctive style that reaches its
apogee in castles like Crathes (Figure 15.4) and
Craigievar, Aberdeenshire. Following the Restoration,
Scottish landowners began to convert their castles,
remodelling irregular facades and adding more
spacious accommodation blocks, as at Traquair
House, Peeblesshire. By the end of the seventeenth
century, the first classical mansions were being built
in Scotland by Sir William Bruce. By the later
eighteenth century, Scottish architects like Robert
Adam were influencing the style of country houses
south of the Border. During the eighteenth century,
the new trends spread to the Highlands where the
use of fortified houses continued until the Jacobite
rebellion of 1745. From the 1740s, new-style
mansions, such as Inveraray Castle, Argyll, began to
appear in the Highlands.
Churches have been studied more for evidence
of their origins and medieval development than
for their post medieval history. Relatively little
attention has been given to studying how they
adapted to population change after 1500. In parts
of northern England, where medieval parishes
were huge, rapid population growth in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the
Figure 15.4 Crathes Castle, Aberdeenshire. A late
sixteenth-early seventeenth-century Scottish fortified house.
Source: I. Whyte
splitting of parishes and the establishment of new churches. In areas of rural depopulation,
as at Wharram Percy, this period saw a contraction of the church, with aisles and side chapels
being abandoned as parish population dropped. From the late seventeenth century, there
was a rapid increase in the number of non-conformist chapels and meeting houses, a class
of building that has only recently been the subject of serious research and which is particularly
vulnerable to destruction and conversion.
Military architecture changed rapidly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the
impact of artillery. Henry VIII’s system of defences along the east and south coasts, begun in the
late 1530s, was obsolete before it was finished, its round gun platforms, well seen at Camber
Castle, Sussex, having been superseded by angled bastions. These were introduced in the earthwork
forts constructed in Scotland during the campaigns of the late 1540s; the fort at Eyemouth,
Berwickshire is the best preserved example. The new military technology was preserved more
massively in the rebuilt defences of Berwick. Earthworks from the Civil War period, generally
linked to sieges, have mostly been obliterated by urban expansion. Forts in the Scottish Highlands,
designed to counter the Jacobite threat, have mostly disappeared. Only smaller outposts such as
Ruthven Barracks and Glenelg, Highlands, have survived in anything like their original form. The
ease with which Fort Augustus and Fort George, Inverness-shire, were captured during the 1745
Rebellion prompted the construction of a much larger and powerful Fort George east of Inverness.
It survives intact as the best British example of an eighteenth-century artillery fortification.