James Macpherson (1736-96) was a celebrated author and political writer. He was the son of Andrew Macpherson, a farmer in Ruthven, Invernesshire and his wife Ellen, who were both relatives of the Chief of Clan Macpherson. In 1752 he attended King’s College, Aberdeen, followed by Marischal College and from 1755 to 1756 he was a divinity student at Edinburgh University. On leaving university Macpherson briefly ran a charity school in Ruthven, before becoming a family tutor.

It was through his role as a tutor that he met Adam Ferguson and the Edinburgh literary circle, and began his literary career, supported from 1761 by the patronage of the Earl of Bute. His works were largely inspired by the Gaelic songs and ballads of his childhood and included translations of the poems of ‘Ossian’, which received considerable public attention. The authenticity of these poems, however, were questioned within literary circles, and following Macpherson’s death, it was discovered that the original texts had been considerably altered and included passages of Macpherson’s own work.

In 1761 Macpherson moved to London and in 1764 he took up the role of Secretary to the Governor of West Florida. He later became the London-based agent for John Macpherson, Governor General of Bengal. He continued his literary work, writing several publications on the history of Great Britain, his most notable being Papers containing the Secret History of Great Britain, published in 1775. In 1780 he was elected MP for Camelford in Cornwall, a seat he held until his death in 1796. Politically, he supported his relative John Macpherson, who sided with the opposition during the Regency Crisis of 1788-89 and from 1790 Macpherson made several attempts to join the Prince of Wales’s circle.

Macpherson had acquired considerable wealth through his government work, and in later life, he returned to Invernesshire and acquired land near Kingussie where he intended to build a substantial house called Balaville, or sometimes Belleville, now Balavil. Macpherson died in February 1796 before Balavil was completed.

Macpherson died unmarried but left behind five children for whom he made considerable provision. Macpherson left £500 in his will for a monument to be erected, alongside a request to be buried in London, ‘the City where I lived and passed the greatest and best part of my life’. He was interred in the south transept of Westminster Abbey next to Robert Adam, who had died four years earlier.

In 1790, Macpherson asked Robert Adam to make designs for his newly acquired home, Balavil House. This was a property that previously belonged to the Macintosh Clan and was described by Col Thomas Thornton in 1786 as ‘by no means equal to what it had been represented on paper’.

Robert Adam’s designs for Balavil House are one of three schemes produced by the office for the client. Designs were also made for Macpherson’s villa on Putney Heath (SM Adam volume 37/93-98) in c.1785, along with a further undated scheme for Tully Soul, Perthshire (SM Adam volumes 46/7, 10/75 & 10/96).

The Adam office proposed at least three different designs for alterations to Balavil house. The first design, marked ‘A’ in some of the drawings, proposed an additional range of the same width and depth as the existing, maintaining the structural internal partitions of the existing house, and refacing the south front. An alternative design, marked ‘B’ in the drawings, follows the same premise of doubling the depth of the house but appears to propose a more radical alteration shortening the width of the house and generally eradicating the footprint of the existing house. In set ‘B’, Adam also proposes the addition of flanking wings which terminate in two-storey pavilions.

The third design appears to have been an amalgamation of the other two. There are no known surviving drawings relating to this design, however, the Adam office drawings appear to have been reproduced as engravings in Christian Ludwig Stieglitz’s Plans Et Dessins Tirés De La Belle Architecture Ou Représentations D'édifices Exécutés Ou Projettés En CXV Planches Avec Les Explications Nécessaires in 1801. The illustrations include a ground plan along with a front and rear elevation. John Fleming suggests that James Adam probably gave Stieglitz the latest designs after Robert Adam’s death in 1792, which is why they are not within the Adam office volumes. The elevation from set ‘B’ was reused in this latter design, but with an additional bay either side of the central bay (to make it the same width as set ‘A’), and the omission of attic-floor windows across the central five bays, along with additional decoration including paterae, medallions, panels with arabesque and friezes with Vitruvian scroll. The rear elevation does not align with any of the surviving Adam office drawings, nor does the internal floor plan.

The house was built between 1790 and 1796 and was not completed until after the deaths of Robert and James Adam, and also that of Macpherson. The house as executed appears to have been based on the elevation drawings published by Stieglitz. The floor plan, however, is thought to have been built to a different design. This is based on an early-nineteenth century survey by the mason James Russell which apparently shows the room layouts and staircases in a completely different arrangement (Miers, p. 64).

Russell’s survey was made in order to add a low range of offices to the east, and further alterations were made by William L. Carruthers in 1899. This included the addition of a heavy porch to the south front, balustraded bay windows either side of the main entrance, as well as heightening the attic windows in the outer bays and adding a heavy balustrade with pedimented dormers added over the central bays. The house was badly damaged in a fire in 1903 and the house was reconstructed in 1904-5 to designs by MacGibbon & Ross. The house has since undergone several alterations and featured as Kilwillie Castle in the BBC drama series ‘Monarch of the Glen’.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, pp. 30, 79; J. Fleming, ‘Balavil House, Inverness-shire’, The Country Seat (ed.), 1970, pp. 178-180; J. Cannon, ‘MACPHERSON, James (1736-96), of Putney Heath, Surr. and Belville, Inverness.’, The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1754-1790, 1964, online [accessed December 2023]; A. Rowan, Designs for Castles and Country Villas by Robert & James Adam, 1985, pp. 24-25; J. Gifford (ed.), Buildings of Scotland: Highland and Islands, 1992, p. 81; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, pp. 247, 252, 259; D. Thomson, ‘Macpherson, James (1736–1796)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2006, online [accessed 1 December 2023]; M. Miers, ‘Adam and the sublime savage’, Country Life, 28 December 2011, pp. 62-67; A. Macalaney, ‘Putney Common’, Sir John Soane’s Museum Collection Online, 2021 [accessed 1 December 2023]

Louisa Catt, 2024