MR. JOHN FLEMING'S recent book, Scottish Country Houses and Gardens
open to the Public, a companion volume to the English collection also published by Country Life, is well timed and will be especially appreciated by the growing body of country-house visitors (both resident and tourist) in Scotland, as well as the connoisseur of architecture and gar- dening. At a moment when the bookshops north of the Border seem to be flooded with a high tide of enthusiastic and sometimes un- critical publications by the Scots for the Scots, it is refreshing to turn to Mr. Fleming's de- tached and oblique view of his subject.
'The Scots have always had their own con- ception of architecture. Indifferent, if not actually hostile to the graces and generalities of this ,urbane art, they have yet produced an individual style which reflects their bleak but stimulating hard-headedness and logic — and their frenzied outbursts of romanticism,' he says in his excellent introduction, where he presents a lively and knowledgeable miniature history of Scottish domestic building from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. 'The dour, .thrawn quality' of the Lowlander, he thinks, is expressed in the severe classicism which (without any transitional period) super- seded the old native style of towers, turrets, crow-stepped gables and rich heraldic orna- ment, wherein, Mr. Fleming tells us, lies a manifestation of the 'gay, vain, romantic and fantastical vein apparent in Scott. Stevenson and Barrie.' But 'it is the clash, and occasion- ally the fusion, of these two opposing strains that give Scottish architecture its peculiar tang and flavour.' The brief, well-arranged accounts of twenty houses and ten (separate) gardens are informa- tive, scholarly and crisply objective. These are arranged chronologically, starting with Dun- vegan Castle in Skye, which claims to be the oldest inhabited house in Scotland, and ending with Abbotsford (where the author finds more to admire than a mere Scott museum), so that the reader can, with the help of the numerous and splendid photographs, follow out theory in practice, from the Norman donjon to the dazzling elegance of Robert Adam's interiors.
SHEILA FORMAN
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