Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Library at Dunrobin Castle In Scotland



The 189-room Dunrobin Castle has been home to the dukes of Sutherland for over 800 years. The sycamore paneled library was designed by Sir Robert Lorimer, a noted Scottish architect, from spaces formerly used as a bedroom and a dressing room. There are over ten thousand books, many of them relating to Scots law and to nineteenth-century Highland development.

I photographed the first two pictures from one of my architectural books. The third photo is from Wikipedia.

I'll copy a bit of the castle's description from my 1990 book: "Dunrobin Castle is the largest house in the Northern Highlands of Scotland, and is the seat of the Countess of Sutherland. Parts of the castle date from the early 1400s, but it is the early-nineteenth-century Clearances, during which five thousand people were removed from Sutherland lands, that made the estate notorious. This mass eviction of small subsistence farmers appalled some Scottish journalists because of the lack of publicity that attended it."

"Today, although Dunrobin is still known as the site of some of the harshest episodes of clearance, it is also a remarkable showplace, filled with important collections and mementos of the family and of royal visits."



Content in a Cottage

Click orange square to subscribe via feed reader or email.

No comments: