ISBN: 0 300 096704
Across a wonderful swathe of natural beauty stretching from the Atlantic islands and sea-lochs of Argyll to the softer landscape of Bute and the banks of the Clyde, architecture makes its mark: mysterious and poignant in ruinous brochs, stone circles and lone Celtic crosses; aggressive and confident, castles exploding out of rock and loch, like Sween and Dunstaffnage; elegant and urbane like the white-walled streets of Inveraray. From the restored C12 simplicity of St Oran on Iona to the contemporary tragedy of St Peter's College, Cardross, the legacy of Scottish Christianity survives, a remarkable genealogy of medieval cells, chapels and priories, pedimented preaching-boxes from the C18, and fine revivalist churches built by Victorian sectarianism. Everywhere castle walls and towers emerge from moss and water: Kilchurn, Stalker, Skipness. Country houses abound: still castellar like Inveraray, cool with Georgian reserve at Barbreck, ebullient and Baronial at Torosay, gorgeously Gothic at Mount Stuart. Here, too, there is industry: iron furnaces, mills, distilleries. And set in this landscape of sea, sky, hill and glen, a scatter of settlements rich in townscape. Oban, Campbeltown, Rothesay and Helensburgh are genuinely urban with splendid tenements and salubrious villas by some of Scotland's greatest architects. Lochgilphead, Bowmore, Tobermory are no more than villages but primly planned and built with that so-Scottish architectonic edge cut from stone, slate and harl.
