Page:The castellated and domestic architecture of Scotland from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (1887) - Volume 1.djvu/437

 SANQUHAR CASTLE - 41? THIRD PERIOD other places, as at Morton Castle in the neighbourhood, in the north-west wall, where it projects towards the loch. Here, as well as at the kitchen fireplace, are flues in the walls, probably from what were garde-robes above. The buildings to the north of the entrance gateway are nearly all swept away. There seems to have been a stair from the outer courtyard to the top of the walls, and another stair on the inside at the north-west corner can be partly traced. The whole masonry of this wall towards the outer courtyard is of the finest kind. Being in very large courses, it conveys the idea of great strength and power. The principal apartments on the upper floors were on the west side over the entrance. In the earliest notices of Sanquhar we find the place in possession of the Ross family, and in the reign of Robert the Bruce, Isobel, the last of this branch of the family, married a son of the Lord of Creighton, and with their descendants the barony remained till the year 1630, when it was purchased by Sir William Douglas of Drumlanrig. It was undoubtedly by some member of the Creighton family that the castle was built. The first of them died in 1360, but this is too early a date for any portion of the existing structure, the oldest part of which may be safely assigned to the following century. Sir William Douglas, the first Duke of Queensberry, who built Drumlanrig, stayed in Sanquhar Castle till his death, preferring it to the splendid structure he had himself reared, and within which he is said to have slept only one night. On his death the second Duke abandoned Sanquhar, and it then fell a prey to the depredations of the burghers, from whose rapacity the few remaining ruins have been saved in comparatively recent times. THIRD PERIOD CASTLES DESIGNED AS BUILDINGS SURROUNDING A COURTYARD. In the above examples of the keep plan, as carried out and modified during the Third Period, we have noticed many special features which distinguish them from the keeps of the fourteenth century. We have , also seen how many of these keeps were enlarged at later periods into castles surrounding courtyards or otherwise. But the buildings which chiefly distinguish this period are the castles designed and erected from the first on the plan of buildings surrounding a courtyard, like the con- temporary castles in France and England. Nearly all the more important buildings of the period are of this class, such as the great castles of Doune and Tantallon, and the Royal palaces built by the Jameses at Edinburgh, Stirling, Linlithgow, Falkland, and Dunfermline.