Page:The castellated and domestic architecture of Scotland from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (1887) - Volume 1.djvu/369

BORTHWICK CASTLE 349 THIRD PERIOD The windows are rather few and small. At the south end there is a large and sculptured fireplace 9 feet wide (Fig. 301), with caps and cornice, enriched with mouldings and ornaments of the period (Fig. 302), and a lofty pointed hood ; there is also a sideboard, or seat, with enriched canopy SICTWN C B V*-*/y " ' '""F- SECTION . T> . E. FIG. 300. Borthwick Castle. Transverse and Longitudinal Sections. of fifteenth-century work. A triangular-headed door leads from the hall to the private parlour in the south wing, and the door has had a wooden porch to shut off the stair-landing (see Plan of First Floor, Fig. 297). There is a privy closet adjoining this parlour, the arrangements of which show more attention to sanitary requirements than these old builders often receive credit for. The well being immediately below this room, it has been found advisable not to carry down the flues from the garde-robes in the thick- ness of the wall, or to discharge them to the exterior in the usual manner, but to remove the materials in a special way so as to avoid contamination ; instead of a flue from this privy closet, therefore, a moveable receptacle was used. In the same way provision is made for removing similar receptacles from the garde-robes in the floors above this, by an aperture in the ceiling, through which they could be lowered and carried away (see Plan). The stair leading from the screens was no doubt the common stair used by the domestics and soldiers ; it also gave access to the musicians' gallery over the screens, and to a passage in the wall leading to another