Culross Palace is a late 16th to early 17th century merchant's house in Culross, Fife, Scotland.
The palace, or "Great Lodging", was constructed between 1597 and 1611 by Sir George Bruce, the Laird of Carnock. [1] The house was mainly built in two campaigns. The south block in 1597 and the north building in 1611, the year when George Bruce was knighted. Bruce was a successful merchant who had a flourishing trade with other Forth ports, the Low Countries and Sweden. He had interests in coal mining, salt production, and shipping, sending William Stewart to Spain for wine, and is credited with sinking the world's first coal mine to extend under the sea. [2]
Many of the materials used in the construction of the palace were obtained during the course of Bruce's foreign trade. Baltic pine, red pantiles, and Dutch floor tiles and glass were all used. The exterior boasts the use of crow-stepped gables, including a statue of a veiled woman posing on the gable step. The palace features fine interiors, with decorative mural and ceiling painting, 17th and 18th-century furniture and a fine collection of Staffordshire and Scottish pottery.
Although it was never a royal residence, James VI visited the Palace in 1617. [3] The palace is now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland who have restored a model seventeenth-century garden, complete with raised beds, a covered walkway and crushed shell paths. The herbs, vegetables and fruit trees planted in the garden are types that were used in the early seventeenth century.
The renaissance paintwork was restored in 1932 for the National Trust and again in the 1990s by conservators from Historic Environment Scotland. On the second floor of the south block a ceiling painting includes 16 emblems adapted from Geffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (London, 1586). The north block has the fragmentary remains of a scene showing the Judgement of Solomon, and extensive original decorative painting. [4]
Culross (/ˈkurəs/) is a village and former royal burgh, and parish, in Fife, Scotland.
Delgatie Castle is a castle near Turriff, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
Falkland Palace, in Falkland, Fife, Scotland, is a royal palace of the Scottish Kings. It was one of the favourite places of Mary, Queen of Scots, who took refuge there from political and religious turmoil of her times.
Rossend Castle is a historic building in Burntisland, a town on the south coast of Fife, Scotland.
Alexander Seton, 1st Earl of Dunfermline (1555–1622) was a Scottish lawyer, judge and politician. He served as Lord President of the Court of Session from 1598 to 1604, Lord Chancellor of Scotland from 1604 to 1622 and as a Lord High Commissioner to the Parliament of Scotland.
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Pinkie House is a historic house, built around a three-storey tower house located in Musselburgh, East Lothian, Scotland. The house dates from the 16th century, was substantially enlarged in the early 17th century, and has been altered several times since. Its location at grid reference NT348726 is to the east of the town centre, on the south side of the High Street. The building now forms part of Loretto School, an independent boarding school. Pinkie House is not far from the site of the disastrous Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, fought in 1547.
Edward Bruce, 1st Lord Kinloss PC was a Scottish lawyer and judge.
John Clerk of Penicuik (1611–1674) was a Scottish merchant noted for maintaining a comprehensive archive of family papers, now held by the National Archives of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.
Sir George Bruce of Carnock was a Scottish merchant, ship-owner, and mining engineer.
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Scottish renaissance painted ceilings are decorated ceilings in Scottish houses and castles built between 1540 and 1640. This is a distinctive national style, though there is common ground with similar work elsewhere, especially in France, Spain and Scandinavia. An example in England, at Wickham, Hampshire, was recorded in 1974. There are records of over 100 examples, and a much smaller number of painted ceilings survive in-situ today. Some salvaged painted beams and boards are stored by Historic Environment Scotland. The paintings at Crathes Castle, dating from 1597 and 1602 are probably the best known.
The Renaissance in Scotland was a cultural, intellectual and artistic movement in Scotland, from the late fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late fourteenth century and reaching northern Europe as a Northern Renaissance in the fifteenth century. It involved an attempt to revive the principles of the classical era, including humanism, a spirit of scholarly enquiry, scepticism, and concepts of balance and proportion. Since the twentieth century, the uniqueness and unity of the Renaissance has been challenged by historians, but significant changes in Scotland can be seen to have taken place in education, intellectual life, literature, art, architecture, music, science and politics.
Architecture in early modern Scotland encompasses all building within the borders of the kingdom of Scotland, from the early sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. The time period roughly corresponds to the early modern era in Europe, beginning with the Renaissance and Reformation and ending with the start of the Enlightenment and Industrialisation.
Estate houses in Scotland or Scottish country houses, are large houses usually on landed estates in Scotland. They were built from the sixteenth century, after defensive castles began to be replaced by more comfortable residences for royalty, nobility and local lairds. The origins of Scottish estate houses are in aristocratic emulation of the extensive building and rebuilding of royal residences, beginning with Linlithgow, under the influence of Renaissance architecture. In the 1560s the unique Scottish style of the Scots baronial emerged, which combined features from medieval castles, tower houses, and peel towers with Renaissance plans, in houses designed primarily for residence rather than defence.
Art in early modern Scotland includes all forms of artistic production within the modern borders of Scotland, between the adoption of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century to the beginnings of the Enlightenment in the mid-eighteenth century.
Gardening in Scotland, the design of planned spaces set aside for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature in Scotland began in the Middle Ages.
Sir William Nisbet of Dean was a 16th/17th century Scottish merchant who twice served as Provost of Edinburgh from 1616 to 1619 and 1622 to 1623.
Henry Nisbet (1535–1608) was a 16th-century Scottish merchant and Provost of Edinburgh for 1597/98.
Helen Leslie, Lady Newbattle (1520-1594) was a Scottish aristocrat and supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots.
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