Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Herbertshire House, Stirlingshire: designs for a house for William Morehead, ND, unexecuted (8)

Browse

Purpose

Herbertshire House, Stirlingshire: designs for a house for William Morehead, ND, unexecuted (8)

Notes

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

Level

Scheme

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).  


Contents of Herbertshire House, Stirlingshire: designs for a house for William Morehead, ND, unexecuted (8)