Visiting the royal palladian

After a long sleep last night I was still tired and had a very lazy morning in which the most exercise I did was washing my hair.  I made up for it this afternoon with a trip to Penicuik, to get something for tea.  Since the weather was great I went via the Penicuik House estate, as I'd not been for ages.  I actually wanted to recreate the view of the big house shown in a couple of Dad's slides from many years ago but I couldn't really get the right angles because a lot of the grassy bits are being left to grow with wild flowers.  Top left gives you an idea of the house.

But then I noticed that the side entrancey bit where there is a sort of a micro-cafe-cum-visitor-centre thing was open.  Ooh, exciting!  I didn't know you could sometimes actually go inside the house, and so now was the time.

Long story short: the Clerk family bought the estate in 1646, and built the big house a bit over a century later.  A bit over a century later again, in 1899, a fire took hold in the attic and gutted the house over several days.  Luckily, the most important items were saved.  The ruins became somewhat overgrown over the decades but were stabilised by 2014 and that is much as the house is now.  There is a lot to see, and various interpretation boards really help you imagine how the house once was.

Top right is one of the two grand stairwells, the stair treads mostly fallen down and also much narrower than I had expected, perhaps about the same width of tread as the big town houses in Woodlands in Glasgow, and a similar spiral-ish arrangement.  Bottom left is a painting of "Ossian's Hall", which was the fanciest room in the house and whose ceiling and walls featured paintings by Alexander Runciman.  The perspective of the painting is from its floor level but I was standing in the basement (essentially the ground floor).  Even so, the view is similar and you can see the fireplace and the chimney breast, and the great windows to the right.  Clearly the room was modified later on with a new doorway.

After that it was off to the supermarket and then home for tea.