William Morehead (1737-93) was the son of a merchant. He studied at Glasgow University and later became the convener of the county of Stirlingshire and a founding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He married Isabella Lockhart in 1768 and bought the Herbertshire estate from Lady Alva which included a sixteenth-century L-shaped castle.

The Adam office made designs for a new house for William Morehead on his estate comprising a simple Palladian-style villa with a giant portico, rusticated ground floor and a rear bow. From the designs, it would appear that the L-shaped castle was not incorporated into the proposed house. The proposed house was not executed, and the existing tower-house was altered and extended piecemeal over time, and it was demolished in the early twentieth century.

Literature: The Scots Magazine, July 1768, p. 389; Society for the Benefit of the Sons and Daughters of the Clergy, ‘County of Stirling’ in The New Statistical Account of Scotland, Vol. VIII, 1845, p. 381; A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, p. 17; R. Thorne (ed.), ‘Stirlingshire’ in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1790-1820, 1986, online [accessed 31 October 2023]; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, p. 126

Louisa Catt, 2023