Buildings of Scotland: Lothian by Yale University Press is fascinating

Yale University Press, £45

Spare a thought for the unknown mason of Hailes Castle near East Linton. Sometime in the Middle Ages – anyway long before painkillers – he left his finger in a joint between two massive stone blocks. It turned up during conservation work in 1974.

Workplace accidents, fatal ones included, went unrecorded then. But so too did the identities of the centuries of master craftsmen whose versatility and courage (rickety scaffolding, no cranes) shaped and stacked the stones that form our Scottish inheritance.

And now we have a record of the sum of their achievement: Yale University Press’s completed Buildings of Scotland series. Founded by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Colin McWilliam in 1978 it is finished at last with this revision of the original Lothian volume.

Together the 15 shiny black tomes form the catalogue and guide to our physical realm. Although 1,000 pages long, this final Scottish volume represents a tiny fraction of the insanely ambitious scholarly enterprise launched in the 1950s in England and two decades later in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. ‘Pevsner’ set out to analyse and document every significant building in the British Isles, a feat untried in any other country before or since.

Beautifully edited, illustrated and produced, these magisterial books comprise one of the great publishing feats of the age. With so many authors, all with divergent expertise and styles, such consistency, precision and understated flair is down to Yale’s editor Charles O’Brien, as much as to all the contributing experts and scholars.

Much has changed in West, Mid- and East Lothian in the 46 years it has taken for the Scottish series to come full circle. Traditional industries have upped and gone -- Bathgate no more – requiring repurposing of that heritage. A big west-to-east population shift necessitated dormitory development, a lot of it regrettably soulless in the eyes of the authors.

Such changes are but blinks of the eye in Lothian’s long story. For centuries this land, plus Edinburgh, were part of an Anglian kingdom stretching from the Humber to the Forth. Early medieval Scots kings seized it as a fat economic and strategic prize: “The keeping of Haddington [is] the wynnyng of Scotland” as was later said in Henry VIII’s ‘Rough Wooing’. Blood has been shed here in buckets from prehistory to Prestonpans (1745), a history of violence written in the buildings catalogued with minute observation, heroic archival research, and well-grounded speculation about who built what, when and why.

Lothian follows the BoS formula established at the start. An introduction covers the main themes: Roman period, the early church, castles, country houses, industrial heritage etc. Then most of the book is the Gazetteer: An alphabetical list, from Abercorn to Yester, describing and contextualising every ancient or modern building of interest, or site of ancient forts (Cairnpapple Hill, Traprain Law), plus ecclesiastical showstoppers such as Rosslyn Chapel whose interior is irreverently described as “resembling cake icing more than carving in stone”.

Rosslyn Chapel. Picture: Gordon Terris (Image: free)

It’s not just these elite sites, culminating in the grand country houses, in which Lothian is so richly endowed (Hopetoun, Gosford, Newhailes, Tyninghame), that merit description. There’s also the tooth-shaped dentist’s surgery in Prestonpans and the Dalkeith Miners’ Welfare Club (“Postmodern of 1982”). Many of the buildings described amount to petrified pages from Scots history, like Borthwick Castle whose Lord provoked Cromwell’s silky advice: “If you necessitate me to bend my cannon against you, you must expect what I doubt you will not be pleased with.”

As well as military matters, the Gazetteer captures vivid slivers of Scottish social and business life that, like the mason’s finger, might otherwise slip between history’s cracks. Like the entry on Dalkeith Palace, “the grandest of all”, directed by one of Scotland’s few female patrons, the Duchess of Monmouth and Buccleuch.

She insisted on keeping the structure of an ancient castle within James Smith’s classical extravaganza against his advice. When crevices and bulges inevitably appeared, she refused to pay. Noblesse not always oblige. Implicit in all this knowledge is a message not to take the masons’ and architects’ legacy for granted. Because our built heritage isn’t just a decorative backdrop to something more fundamental called ‘Scotland’. It is Scotland, in all its inventiveness, its drama, its humdrumness and its guilty secrets. Bathgate Academy, for example, a splendid Grecian Revival building of 1833, was “endowed by… a local carpenter turned ‘Jamaica planter’ (i.e. slaver)”.

Each volume of this series contains more truth about Scotland’s essence than all the wha’s-like-us? abstractions of politicians and academics put together, though some of it could be cherry-picked to support their favourite themes, such as Scotland’s links with continental Europe. For a brief period at least, our willingness to import Continental styles stood “in contrast to England’s late medieval bellicose insularity.”

The extent of that Scots cosmopolitanism is just one of many surprises: who knew, for example, that Linlithgow’s Tolbooth was modelled on Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome? Such echoes and resonances, bequeathed by great artisans now buried by centuries and social obscurity, are among the chief pleasures of being in Scotland. Lothian, like all the others in the series, allows us to savour them more.