ABBOTSFORD

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 19155, 11 April 1932, Page 12

ABBOTSFORD

SIR WALTER SCOTT’S HOMK (By T.C.L.) “Conundrum Castle" was Scott's own nickname for the home he built at Abbotsford. To anyone looking for a certain school of architecture Sir Walter's little pleasantry seems as fitting to-day as it was a century ago. It betokens the influences to which its creator responded. The site, a beautiful slope above the river Tweed, two or three miles from Melrose town, is all that could be desired. It owes its choice to Sir Walter Scott’s reputation as an impassioned antiquary when he was but a youth. It was his own father who showed him the spot as being near, amongst many other relics, the “Tumagain Stone.” commeemorative of the last great clan battle of the Border. The lawyer’s clerk was thrilled at the prospect of a home in such a locality, one almost in the shadow of Melrose. Dryburgh. and other Scottish records in stone. So when the lawyer’s clerk had become the successful practitioner, a rising literary celebrity and one of His Majesty’s sheriffs, what wonder that when he sought to make a home within his sheriffdom his thoughts turned to the Tweedside farm he had visited with his father years before? It is not easy nowadays to see the Abbotsford demesne the “wild and solitary position of which Scott wrote. His first purchase of 100 acres he envisaged as “half in meadow and tillage and half in plantations.” He was ever a treelover. and the estate and the whole countryside is the richer for his precept and example in the matter of treeplanting. Later he added other lands to the estate, usually because they contained some antiquarian treasure, until the original area had been doubled. The house is unique, and when its genesis is remembered, it is no wonder. Sir Walter Scott valued his profession, he enjoyed to the full the fame his literary genius brought him. but his deepest pride lay in his ancestry, and his great ambition was to be respected as a Scottish laird. He writes with refreshing candour of the delight he and Lady Scott have in being addressed as the “Laird and Lady of Abbotsford.” To pride of race adds his love of Scottish history, his patience in antiquarian research. and the evolution of his home is easier to understand. Its name is typical. There was a ford across the Tweed on the property, and at one time all the land had belonged to the Abbots of Melrose, so “Abbotsford” became the name of the new homestead. Its first design was modest. It was to be a “country cottage” in which the lawyer of Edinburgh might be a laird at holiday seasons and entertain his friends. The first designer was an architect who had turned actor and whose principal qualification appears to have been that he was almost as keen an antiquarian as Scott himself. On his recommendation an English architect was engaged to design an ‘ornamental cottage in the style of the old English vicarage house.” Those who know rural England will appreciate how such a design was likely to appeal to the student of ecclesiastical architecture. who also desired a stately home. But the English architect died and then Abbostford seems to have just "growed.” After 10 years of building Scott pays a tribute to the skill of the architect later engaged in “assorting such a complicated mansion as Abbotsford” and with achieving comfort despite all its disproportions. The house in the days of prosperity was an open house to all who would pay a tribute to the novelist who had set aflame more countries than his own. Antiquarians were constandly sending him word of precious relics or of historic buildings being destroyed of which the more interesting portions might be rebuilt at Abbotsford, and the needs of hospitality were ever growing, too It was no wonder the house expanded and its cost increased. In one respect the mansion gained from the mixture of antiquarian and new material. Before it was 10 years old an English visitor comments upon its Gothic style and the manner of its construction making the house “so admirably old in appearance.” and to-day it has the appearance of being as old as other Scottish mansions many times its senior. There are towers and turrets galore, parapetted roofs and roofs as plain as can be imagined. Windows of many designs and sizes add to the picturesqueness of Abbotsford as the really handsome entrance does to its dignity. The antiquarian relics were not confined to the house itself. The grounds were enclosed with high walls into “courts.” that have since become the loveliest of gardens. Between the upper court and one nearer the liver there is a high wall, and the gateway between them is the actual doorway of the ancient “tolbooth” of Edinburgh which readers of the Heart of Midlothian will remember so well. It was a gloomy structure, the old Tolbooth. For two and a-half centuries it stood in what is now Parliament Square in Edinburgh. First used as Parliament House, then as the Court of Justice, it later became a prison with almost the ominous characterises of the Tower of London for those who rebelled against law and authority, whether of Church or State. In 1817 the capital city had a wave of civic selfconsciousness. It decided that many relics of the bad old days must go and the Tolbooth was one. Scott begged for the doorway, and, so meticulous was his care in handling historical relics, had every stone numbered and replaced in proper sequence in the garden wall of his mansion at Abbotsford. The visitor enters the castle by the tradesmen's path, and the guide pilots him to the entrance hall, which is a veritable museum of medieval battleaxes. executioner's swords, suits of mail, and other relics of those delectable days. The walls are panelled with carved oak brought from Dunfermline Palace and paved wuth white and black marble from the Hebrides. The windows also are a feature. They are fitted with armoury, with the coats of arms of the border families on shields round it.