Page:The castellated and domestic architecture of Scotland from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (1887) - Volume 2.djvu/383

STOBHALL 36? FOURTH PERIOD Moiitifix, in 1360, and their daughter, Annabella Drummond, as the Queen of Robert m., has made Stobhall memorable as one of the ancestral homes of our Scottish and British Sovereigns. In 1488 the Drummonds, although still continuing proprietors of Stobhall, removed to Strathearn, twenty miles away, where they built Drummond Castle, which ultimately became their chief residence. It is needless to observe that there are now no buildings at Stobhall belonging to the above early period, unless it may be the masonry of the lower part of the walls of the latest buildings at the south-east angle already referred to. Local writers have not hesitated to claim for the chapel building an antiquity reaching to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and to say that the dates on the walls refer to the time when FIG. 815. Stobhall. View of Main Building from the South-East. repairs or transformations took place. It is scarcely necessary to refute such statements, as the merest tiro in architectural knowledge will see from the style of the building that such a view cannot possibly be correct, and that there is no room to doubt but that the dates on the walls are the dates of the erection. We have already referred to evidence of an earlier castle, and there can be no question but that such a building existed Queen Annabella's father is designated in a charter by Robert in. as of Stobhall, which may be taken to imply a residence, and this is further confirmed by a verse in the beautiful poemTayis Bank," written (in the opinion of the late David Laing) nearly a century before the earliest of the present buildings " Joy was within and joy without, Vncler that wlonkest waw, Quhair Tay run down with stremis stout Full'strecht under Stobschaw,-