Adam’s designs for a boathouse with one mooring is unusal, as asymmetrical designs by Adam are rare. None of Adam’s designs for the boathouse at Burghley were executed, and it was built later, on the opposite side of the lake from the house, by an unknown architect, in a neo-Jacobean style.

Adam Volume 43/41 is inscribed as for the Earl of Findlater, but this inscription related to another drawing (Adam volume 36/60) giving an interesting indication of the archaeology of the collection prior to its arrangement within the volumes. Moreover, it is clearly not an entrance or a banqueting house. The drawing also corresponds with a more finished landscape perspective of the boathouse held in the Windsor Castle library, which has been catalogued as a bridge.