Page:The castellated and domestic architecture of Scotland from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (1887) - Volume 1.djvu/240

SECOND PERIOD 220 CRICHTON CASTLE The carved work in the staircase is also of the mixed kind belonging to the time of James vi. Besides the great staircase above alluded to, another wide circular staircase was added about this time in the south-west angle of the court- yard, instead of the narrow turnpike stair which had hitherto been the only means of access at this point to the upper floors. But this angle staircase is now almost entirely demolished. There is a building at the distance and in the position shown with reference to the castle (Fig. 186), which is always called the Chapel. It is 63 feet long by 33 feet wide, and has buttresses on each side. There is a door in the centre of each end. Apparently this building has originally been of one story, and vaulted (as it still is), and the buttresses seem to have been added to resist the thrust of the vault. At a later date the building has been raised so as to admit of rooms on an upper floor, the windows of which still exist. There is a peculiar horseshoe-shaped ornament (Fig. 187) round a small window over the door at the north end. There are no features about the building to enable one to say posi- tively what it may have been, but it seems most likely to have been the stables, with rooms for the servants above. There are also some ruins still further off, which may have been farm buildings, but it is now impossible to say. A considerable excavation in the hill behind the castle shows that the stone used in the building was quarried on the spot. NOTE. It must be distinctly kept in view (as already pointed out) that all the above extensions of the fourteenth-century keeps are of considerably later date than the keeps themselves, the description of the extensions being merely introduced, in connection with that of the original keeps, for the sake of convenience, and to avoid confusion by cutting up the description of each castle into sections. The tower-built castles above described are especially characteristic of the Scotch Architecture of the fourteenth century. In France and England the contemporary fourteenth-century castles are of the grandest and most extensive description. The great castle of Pierrefonds in France, and the immense Edwardian piles of Caernarvon, Caerphilly, Conway, etc., in England, are contemporary with the towers and keeps in Scotland which we have just been considering, and they well mark the difference in wealth and culture between this country and its southern neighbours in the fourteenth century. The keep plan of building was universal in Scotland during the four- teenth century. It was employed, as we have above seen, not only in the