Description
Circa 1824. 2-storey over raised basement, 3-bay symmetrical classical house of double pile plan with flanking coach-house and roofless wing giving Palladian arrangement. Cherry-caulked stugged sandstone principal front, roughcast walls elsewhere, droved ashlar dressings. Band course below principal floor, cill and lintel courses at 1st floor with cornice at eaves, raised margins and projecting cills at windows.
NW (PRINCIPAL) FRONT: plain roughcast basement, concrete covered stone stair oversailing basement at centre with decorative cast-iron balusters and wrought-iron handrail, pilastered stone doorpiece with scrolled stone brackets supporting cornice and blocking course. Deep-set 4-panel entrance door with 8-pane fanlight above, modern glazed inner door with 5-light sidelights.
NW (SIDE) ELEVATION: single window to left of centre at principal floor.
SW (REAR) ELEVATION: 3 bays, 3-storey flat-roofed addition at centre with modern conservatory at ground floor, 2 windows at floors above.
Timber sash and case windows, 12-pane at principal floor except for 24-pane at rear, 16-pane at 1st floor and 8-pane at upper floors of addition. Grey slate piended roof with cast-iron gutters and downpipes. Paired, coped multi-flue stacks at ridge, roughcast, with dressings at corners and circular cans. Single flue roughcast wallhead stack with circular can centring rear addition.
INTERIOR: many original fittings still in place including 6-panel doors, shutters, and cornices. Modern chimneypiece in drawing room.
COACH-HOUSE: gabled, with segmental cart arch in NE gable, roughcast rubble with droved dressings at corners, string course across gable at eaves height. 2-leaf, vertically-boarded timber doors with iron hinges, grey slate roof. Lean-to and connecting wall to right, each with vertically-boarded timber doors.
NW WING: gabled, roughcast, roofless, with coped roughcast connecting wall to left with vertically-boarded timber door.
BOUNDARY WALL AND GATEPIERS: random rubble boundary wall along Kilkerran Road, plain square gatepiers to right with ball caps, wrought-iron entrance gate with flanking pedestrian gates.
Statement of Special Interest
In 1823, the Rev Norman McLeod, Minister of the Highland Parish Church, was granted a 76-year lease (from 1824 to 1900) by the Duke of Argyll of "the South Shore Park of Limecraigs.....bounded on the South by the Magazine Park or Quarry Green" with the condition that he would build and finish upon the ground a dwelling house within the space of two years from the commencement of the lease. McLeod sold the remainder
of the lease in June 1825 to Major George Colin Campbell of Malvern in Worcestershire for ?1025, "the house, offices, and garden, and the Park, above described", "with entry to the house etc at Whitsunday 1825, and to the Park from the separation of the Crop from the ground in the present year 1825".