Some Northern European Comparisons for Scottish Renaissance Tall-Houses

Abstract

The traditional comparison for the Scottish tall-house has been the English country house, based on their apparent proximity. However, the ‘two opposing perceptions of the sixteenth-century noble country house are the English versus the European. The former holds that the English manor house ‘marked the security of English life’; whereas the European deployed a warlike language of crenellations, turrets and tourelles’. Scotland followed the European model, while England developed a unique, mostly symmetrical, low-slung, glazed, indefensible country house. The stark difference between the architecture of these two neighbours, and in particular, the difference between the Scottish Renaissance tall-house and the English country house, has thrown into light the fact that some European traditions of architecture have long been overlooked. The lack of an accepted definition of northern European Renaissance architecture has stranded the isolated Scottish contribution. Instead of historians finding a link between Scottish and continental architecture, they turned to the unflattering conventional view that Scotland's architecture was a vernacular hang-over of the Middle Ages which lasted well into the seventeenth century.