A couple of weeks ago I visited Newhailes, a Georgian
country house near Edinburgh. I was looking for a house to use as a model for
the one owned by my heroine, Lady Mary MacLeod, in my current manuscript. Lady
Mairi is a very rich widow with a town house in fashionable Charlotte Square in
Edinburgh New Town and it was essential that she also has a country mansion.
Newhailes was the perfect model and I had a wonderful visit.
Newhailes was originally built as a “villa,” a small country
house built for Edinburgh’s wealthy lawyers and merchants whose business
interests meant that they spent most of their time in the city but who also
wanted a country retreat and the kudos that went with landowning. The architect
was James Smith, who also found the time to father an astonishing thirty two
children from two marriages. In 1709 he sold the estate to the wealthy and
influential Dalrymple family, a dynasty of lawyers, for the modern day
equivalent of two and a half million pounds. The Dalrymples extended the house and
created an astonishing “designed landscape” around it.
Stepping into Newhailes feels like stepping back into the
Georgian era as the house retains so many of its 18th century
features and has a very strong atmosphere. Not only do the majority of the rooms
reflect their Georgian and Regency style and purpose but they also feel very
“lived in” because the house has not been polished and repainted, it isn’t
spick and span but shabby – in a rather “faded splendour” sort of a way. As a
result it feels less like a stately home on show and more the sort of place you
might meet one of the servants scurrying along the tunnel, an extraordinary
passage buried under earth banks designed to make the busy servants invisible
to the eyes of family and guests so that they didn’t spoil the view!
During the Regency period the house belonged to Miss
Christian Dalrymple, daughter of the previous owner, Lord Hailes. On the death
of Lord Hailes the title had passed to a cousin and Christian was in the act of
packing up to leave Newhailes – on the assumption that the cousin had inherited
the house as well – when her father’s will was found behind a window shutter. The
estate was not entailed and it had been left to her.
Miss Dalrymple’s journals give a fascinating insight into
life in the house in the Regency era. She used Newhailes’ enormous library,
once the jewel of the Scottish enlightenment, as a drawing and dining room and
held glittering parties there. In April 1829 she records: “The day of our great
ball… We dressed and prepared the room… The whole was thought to go off well…
The company I thought was rather too numerous, over 170. Dancing continued till
near four, not in bed till five.”
In the Georgian period the Library at Newhailes was
considered to be “the most learned drawing room in Scotland” according to
Samuel Johnson. It was huge – almost the size of a house in itself at a time
when very few people possessed sufficient books to justify a special room for
keeping them in. The shelves occupy the total height of each wall and are
adjustable, a very unusual feature of 18th century libraries.
However it was my least favourite room in the house, simply because the books
are gone now and the shelves are bare, which looked wrong and felt as though
the heart had gone from the room and the house. Many of the books were sold in
1937. The remaining 7000 were passed into the care of the National Library of
Scotland in 1971 in lieu of death duties.
By the time of Miss Christian Dalrymple the library was
already suffering. In June 1815 she wrote in her journals: “It rained heavily:
the water poured through the unfinished roof and we were forced to take down
one side of the books in the library.” Later in December 1816 she wrote: “A man
from the bookbinders examined my books and found them not in a good state and
vigorous measures necessary to prevent the worm from spreading.”
Miss Dalrymple also kept a note in her journals of various
domestic issues she had to deal with. She had a variety of problems with the servants, from secret marriages to over-zealous pruning of her favourite fruit
trees. Drunkenness was a particular problem. In 1802 she records: “Hired a girl
for my maid and afterwards I found by her behaviour I would have no comfort in
her; was in great dismay and lost my night’s rest.” In 1812 she wrote: “Caused
the stable boy to be dismissed for various misdemeanours.” In 1820 she “went
through the painful task of dismissing the coachman for drunkenness.” There
were also tragedies such as a drunken servant drowning in the well in the
garden after a heavy night out in Edinburgh, and in 1834 the ploughman’s wife dying after setting her clothes on
fire.
Guests could also prove a problem. In 1825 Miss Christian
records the visit of a very clumsy guest: “Mr Inglis here. He broke cups and
saucers in the China closet.”
