John Murray, 3rd Duke of Atholl (1729-74), was a politician and son of a Jacobite army officer. He was brought up by his uncle, the 2nd Duke of Atholl, whilst his father remained in exile and was educated at Eton and the University of Göttingen. He married his cousin, Lady Charlotte Murray, in 1753 and together they had eleven children. He was elected MP for Perthshire in 1761, and was chosen as a representative peer in 1764 and 1768.

Dunkeld House was a property belonging to the Atholl family estate, built in the seventeenth century to designs by Sir William Bruce, and later demolished in the nineteenth century. The Adam office made a design for a gated entrance to the property for the Duke of Atholl in 1765, a year after he gained the title following the death of his uncle. There is a dated client’s copy of the design in the Blair Castle Collection. The design comprises an elegant Doric gateway with tall iron gates for carriages with a continuous iron frieze, and flanking pedestrian gates. The only difference between the design in the Soane collection and the design in the Blair Castle Collection, is that the client’s design has ram heads in the metopes of the pedimented frieze. The scheme was not carried out.

Literature: A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 10; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume 1, pp. 197, 199, 217; T. F. Henderson (ed.), ‘Murray, John, third duke of Atholl (1729–1774)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online [accessed 27 October 2023]

Louisa Catt, 2023