James Murray of Broughton (1727-99) was the only son of Alexander Murray of Broughton and Cally, and Lady Euphemia Stewart. He attended Glasgow University from 1741-5 before going on the Grand Tour. In 1750, he succeeded his father and inherited his extensive estates across Scotland and Ireland. In 1752 he married his cousin Lady Catherine Stewart, daughter of Alexander Stewart, 6th Earl of Galloway. James Boswell regarded Murray as a ‘most amiable man’ with ‘very good sense, great knowledge of the world and easy politeness of manners.’

Murray focused on having a political career and sat for Wigtownshire in 1762, before surrendering Wigtownshire to his brother-in-law Keith Stewart in 1768. He then sat for Stewardship of Kirkcudbright in 1768-74. Murray faced financial complications following the failure of the Ayr Bank in 1772. In 1783, he was made Receiver General of Land Tax for Scotland. In 1785, he absconded abroad with Peter Johnston’s sister, abandoning all further political ambitions. He returned in 1789 with his mistress, having had a son. He died in 1799 and left his estates to his illegitimate son.

Richard Oswald (1705-84) was the second son of George Oswald, a Presbyterian minister in Dunnet, Caithness. In the 1730s he travelled through North America and the Caribbean working as the junior partner in Richard and Alexander Oswald, his cousins’ Glasgow-based sugar, wine, and tobacco trading business. In 1746 Oswald moved to London and became a wealthy merchant in his own right, dealing in tobacco, sugar, horses, and enslaved people. His endeavours were bolstered by his marriage in 1750 to Mary Ramsay, the daughter of the Jamaican merchant, Alexander Ramsay. At this time Oswald branched out into government contracting, making a fortune during the Seven Years War, as well as land speculation. He acquired estates in Scotland, 30,000 acres in Florida, and 1,566 acres in the Caribbean.

The estates of Auchincruive in Ayrshire, and Cavens in Dumfries and Galloway were acquired piecemeal from 1764 to 1784. Oswald sold various lands in the USA during the 1780s, and in 1782 he was chosen by Lord Shelburne to travel to Paris as a British diplomat, in the hope of mediating peace in America. Following lengthy negotiations, and heavy criticism by the British public, Oswald’s terms were accepted, and in September 1783 the Treaty of Peace with America was finalised in Paris. Oswald commissioned the Adam brothers to make designs for alterations at both Auchincruive and Cavens. It may have been through his connection with Shelburne, Adam’s patron at Bowood and Lansdowne House, that Adam came to Oswald’s attention. Oswald died at Auchincruive in 1784. His two illegitimate sons had predeceased him, and he was succeeded by his nephew George Oswald (1735-1819).

James Murray bought the Auchincruive estate, which included an earlier house, in 1758 from the Estate Commissioners of the 9th Lord Cathcart and sold the estate to Richard Oswald in 1764. During this period, he employed the Adam office to make designs for a new classical villa. The surviving undated plans appear to show a new building rather than incorporate the existing house. The designs comprised a two-storey, five-bay house with a central, rear canted bay, and flanking links terminating in pavilions, all over a half-sunk basement.

Close and Riches state that when Oswald bought the estate from Murray, the house was a ‘partial shell’, and that Oswald supervised and simplified its construction to its completion in 1767. Oswald purchased materials from abroad such as chimney tiles and wainscotting from Rotterdam and timber from Germany and Norway. The completed house, however, bears very little resemblance to the Adam office drawings and it is not completely clear if these designs were used. The exterior of the executed house varies greatly from the designs in these drawings and the house has undergone so many alterations it is not entirely clear what the completed house looked like in 1767. However, some of the room arrangements, particularly to the rear of the house, including the canted bay, appear to be similar to those in Adam’s plans. King suggests that the Adam office drawings were simply suggestions to improve an existing design by another architect which weren’t carried out, whilst Sanderson proposes that Oswald’s builder might have modified the Adam office plans during construction with Robert Adam as supervisor.

In any case, Oswald remained in correspondence with John, Robert and James Adam. John visited the site early in 1766 and in the same year, Oswald commissioned James for designs for ceilings and chimneypieces in the drawing room, dining room and hall. Oswald’s agent, John Maxwell, also wrote in 1766 about waiting for approval from ‘Mr Adam’s’ regarding the conversion of a chaff house into a malting house and kiln.

Of the interior, only three Adam office designs for ceilings and three designs for chimneypieces have survived. These are for the hall, dining room and drawing room respectively. The ceiling designs for the hall and dining room were executed and still survive; it is possible that the drawing room ceiling was also executed, however, it was replaced in the French rococo manner in the late-nineteenth century. It would appear that none of the surviving chimneypiece designs were executed.

A decade later, in 1778, the Adam office designed a castle-style tea house for Oswald on the Auchincruive Estate. The teahouse design comprised a drum tower, bound by a single-storey wall with a pair of external stairs, most probably inspired by the sixth-century mausoleum of Theodoric in Ravenna, which Robert Adam saw on his Grand Tour. The executed teahouse was faithful to Adam’s design, although the stairs appear to have been altered in execution with a single staircase to the first floor built within the ground-floor walls. The sophisticated design of Adam’s teahouse is generally well-regarded by academics and described by Close and Riches as an ‘outstanding piece of architecture on the estate’, marking ‘Oswald as a gentleman of respectability.’

Oswald continued to work on his house and estate until his death in 1784; his nephew, George Oswald, continued works into the nineteenth century. The house has been so altered that it has lost any sense of symmetry. In 1806, a pilastered porch was added to the east front of the house to designs by Balfour Balsille. In 1808-12, the south wing was raised to full height and the principal stairs were reconstructed to serve it. The mason for this work was William Gibson, the carpenter was John Paterson, and the decorative plasterwork was by John Anderson. The south wing was altered again in c.1840 with an articulated south façade. The north wing was either built or recast in c.1845 with a pedimented pavilion (similar to Adam’s designs) and west garden front had its windows enlarged in the mid-nineteenth century with two flanking canted bays added to the outer bays.

The estate was sold by the Oswald family to a local farmer, John M Hannah in 1925. Hannah gifted the estate to the West of Scotland Agricultural College in 1927 which later became the Scottish Agricultural College. The house was renamed Oswald Hall and a number of buildings associated with the college were built across the estate. The teahouse, known locally as Oswald’s Temple, fell into disrepair and suffered some subsidence from local mining. The estate has since been sold into private use as corporate offices.

See also: Cavens, Kirkbean, Dumfries and Galloway

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, p. 1; A. Oswald, 'Auchincruive, Ayrshire', Country Life, 17 December 1932, pp. 690-5; M. Sanderson, Robert Adam in Ayrshire, 1993, pp. 12-15; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 1, 2001, pp. 225, 242, 322; Volume 2, 2001, p. 121; Yale Edition, Horace Walpole's correspondence, 2011, Volume 25, p. 279; R. Close and A. Riches, The Buildings of Scotland: Ayrshire and Arran, 2012, pp. 107-111; J. Kirkwood, Auchincruive House, N.D., pp. 133-135; D. Hancock, 'Oswald, Richard', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online, [accessed 23 May 2024]; UCL, Legacies of British Slavery Database, online, [accessed 23 May 2024]; Lady Haden-Guest, ‘James Murray (1727-99), of Broughton, Wigtown, and Cally, Stewartry of Kirkcudbright.’, History of Parliament, online, [accessed 24 May 2024]

Louisa Catt, 2024