The classical castle Wedderburn Castle, Berwickshire The property of David Home Miller and Catherine Macdonald-Home

Wedderburn Castle, Berwickshire The property of David Home Miller and Catherine Macdonald-Home | One of Robert Adam’s less familiar commissions, recently rescued from neglect, has a fascinating story to tell about the development of his castle style, finds Roger White

- Roger White

THE ‘castle style’ of the Georgian era might be said to have been invented by Vanbrugh, who aimed to give ‘something of the castle air’ with his additions to Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire, in 1707–10. In practice, that amounted to little more than a battlemented parapet applied to a completely symmetrical building. In the late 18th century, the architect Robert Adam was undoubtedly influenced by Vanbrugh, whose mastery of what he called ‘movement’ in architectural composition—‘the rising and fall, the advance and recess with other diversity of form, in the different parts of a building’— he admired (although he deplored the Baroque master’s ‘barbarisms and absurdities’).

It is possibly in deference to Vanbrugh, therefore, that, at a time when Adam’s rivals began to feel that Picturesque asymmetry and Gothic detailing were highly desirable in the design of houses in a castle style, Adam stuck strictly to overall symmetry. As an added curiosity, he showed little interest in Gothic trimmings. Indeed, he lacked any scholarly interest in medieval architecture and his relatively few essays may be charming, but are quite inauthentic. A much more powerful influence on his ‘castle’ exteriors—with the striking exception of the medieval Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, which he was involved with others in renovating—are examples of Roman military architecture, such as he had observed in Italy in the 1750s and surveyed at Split on the Dalmatian coast.