Page:The castellated and domestic architecture of Scotland from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (1887) - Volume 1.djvu/416

 THIRD PERIOD 396 RUTHVEN CASTLE building. Each floor (Figs. 341, 34-2) contained an apartment 27 feet by 14 feet, the ground floor being vaulted, with the entrance door and a newel stair in the north-west angle. The hall on the first floor contains a good fireplace of the fifteenth century (Fig. 343). PIG. 342. Ruthven Castle. Plan. The accommodation in the keep being found too restricted, additional rooms were provided by building another independent house, with a square tower at the south-west angle (Fig. 344), and so situated as to leave an open space about 9 feet wide between the new and the old buildings. The western tower was entered by a door on the first floor (to which an outside stone stair has been built in recent times, Figs. 341 and 345), from which level a newel stair led to the upper parts of the building. The ground floor was either reached by a trap down from the first floor, or more likely by a door, now built up by the outside stair, as just opposite this stair, on the inside, a recess exists in the room where the entrance door probably was (see Plan). The peculiarity here is, that the east and west towers were quite detached, and had no communication with one another, except by a moveable plank or bridge at the battlements, where a door of communi-