ScottishArchitecture.com

Braeloine was the Deeside vision of Manchester merchant banker and politician William Cunliffe-Brooks, whose focus turned north when his daughter married Charles Gordon, Marquis of Huntly.   Brooks, the Member of Parliament for a Cheshire division, thus developed an attachment to Deeside, and between 1888 and 1899 he bought several estates, including Aboyne, Glen Tanar and Ferrar.   Brooks imported a team from England to stamp his personality on the area:  Thomas Hayton Mawson, the landscape architect, and Daniel Gibson, who was Mawson’s architectural partner;  however, most of the buildings, and the village of Braeloine, were set out in an Arts & Crafts manner by William Truefitt during the 1890’s and 1900’s.   According to architectural historian Gavin Stamp, George Truefitt was “one of those rather noisy young men who were founders of the Architectural Association in 1847, and who were determined to move beyond a tame adherence to precedent in the direction of an original modern architecture.”   Truefitt (1824-1902) finally got his opportunity rather late in life.

Prior to Glen Tanar, George Truefitt certainly had clients, but in William Cunliffe-Brooks, he found a patron.   His early practice was based in London’s Bloomsbury, and whilst acting as architect and surveyor to the Tufnell Estate in Holloway, he designed a number of rather mannered churches.   He later built Lloyd’s Bank in Altrincham, a church in Davyhulme, Lancashire and the Royal Exchange Assurance buildings in Manchester–  this may have been when his connection with William Cunliffe Brooks was forged.   However, the re-creation of the old, abandoned Brelyne farm (re-styled “Braeloine”) as a model village was his largest, most architecturally ambitious and longest-running project.   Comprising of cottar houses, a farm court, the laird’s house–  plus model farms and many other things beyond the glen in Aboyne, Truefitt’s vision for Deeside incorporated many elements from the English Arts and Crafts movement.   Eyebrow-shaped dormers make an uncharacteristic appearance in Aberdeenshire, and roofscape is used here in a very un-Scottish way.   With his eclectic approach to themes and materials, Truefitt’s approach was similar to that of Detmar Blow and similarly peripatetic “wandering architects”, who picked up and dropped influences and allegiances as they travelled the country.

Truefitt retired to Worthing in 1890, but as is often the way with architects, he kept his hand in, and most of Glen Tanar was designed during his “retirement”:  meanwhile, his son George Heywood Truefitt was articled to his father in 1879, and must also have been involved with the work at Glen Tanar.   Truefitt’s design themes included the manipulation of busy rooflines for picturesque effect, the use of pyramidal oasthouse roofs, and towers with witches hat roofs as pivots around which compositions could hinge, plus quotations which draw on a little on the Scottish vernacular and much more on English Arts & Crafts traditions:  but all pulled together by his facility as a designer.   Many buildings are faced in Aberdeen Bond granite masonry, and the articulation of openings is emphasised using over-sized quoins.   Aberdeen Bond consists of dressed stone laid to regular courses, where full-height blocks alternate with three small “snecks” or pinning stones in a vertical line, and as the name suggests it is a bonding pattern unique to the North East.  

However, oasthouse-type roofs sit uneasily with rustic Scots Pine trunks:  Braeloine has a surreal quality which although unique, occasionally reminds you of Portmeirion.  Perched on the edge of Snowdonia, Portmeirion was assembled from salvage by Clough Williams-Ellis, creating a whimsical Italian scene on the North Wales coast:  it became well-known as a backdrop to The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s cult television show.   Like Portmeirion, Braeloine opens your eyes through its otherness, its difference, its stretches of imagination.   Both sought to import a language which their architects felt would work well in a new context.   Who is number one?

The second aspect of Truefitt’s work, and the more practical one, is the lesson which Braeloine can offer us in terms of how housing should actually work.   Bush Cottages, the Keepers’ and Kennels Buildings, and the Stable Block are all laid out around narrow courtyards, taking a superficially similar form to Scots clachans, but carefully considered in practice.   The domestic scale of the buildings is maintained, partly to act as a contrast to the “Big Hoose”, and also to allow the buildings to sit happily within folds of the hillside.    Most importantly, Bush Cottages capture a semi-private, communal space using three arms of housing, grouped informally to form a garden court which contains both landscaping, outhouses and hardstanding.   Long before architects began the debate how you could encourage a sense of community, encourage folk to interact and be good neighbours, and also create safe harbours for bairns–  the Victorians got there first.   The courtyards are open and sunlit, but feel sufficiently private to discourage strangers from wandering through them.

The Keepers’ and Kennels Buildings take the form of a narrow cul-de-sac court which has a “gatekeeper” lodge (now the Glen Tanar Estates Office) at its entry point:  this exercises visual control over the street and helps to throttle down the roadway and thus promote traffic calming.   The court is stop-ended by the Stable Block, with a small stable yard surrounded on three sides by stable and tack buildings, grounded by the larger scale barn with its pyramidal roof, which acts as the cluster’s centre of gravity.   Although motor cars were only just reaching Scotland as Braeloine was set out, the form of this short court is coincidentally ideal to keep speeds low, and also encourage cars to disperse, rather than parking in great blocks which disfigure our public spaces–  just picture Golden Square in Aberdeen, or the “plaza” in front of Aberdeen’s Railway Station, on a busy weekday.   Then, imagine how they looked when the car wasn’t king…

Both pink granite and pine from Glen Tanar itself were used throughout, plus decorative slating, stained glass and cherry-cocking in the masonry walls, all of which provide layers of Arts & Crafts detail:  it also suggests that almost every raw material was at hand, and thus Braeloine is the antithesis of today’s approach, where designers choose mass-produced components from a catalogue and assemble them into a prêt-à-porter architecture   As a true “estate village”, there was a degree of self-sufficiency to both the materials and craftsmanship at Braeloine, since the estate had and still has its own sawmill:  from the decorative timber bargeboards and framing on the stables, to the timber shingled shelter on the village green, estate-cut and -milled timber was put to work.   This was, of course, part of the great scheme which lairds organise:  they like to put both the resources and inhabitants of their estates to work–  through a sense of social responsibility as much as a zeal for organisation.

Glen Tanar's quarries have long since fallen silent, but in the 1890’s, and until the post-war period, there was a string of granite quarries along Upper Deeside.   The stone comes from the Later Caledonian epoch which is characterised by generally reddish, coarse-grained, acidic biotite granites–  including Birsemohr, a red granite with larger-than-usual crystals of felspar and quartz;  the quarries on the hill above Cambus o’ May yielded a pinkish stone;  Inver Quarry in Glen Gelder was silver-grey with a marked tinge of reddish-brown, and it provided the stone for Balmoral Castle.   In fact, it was said that Cambus o’ May station existed solely to import dynamite from Nobels, and export the quarried rock.   The buildings on Glen Tanar estate are built from that coarse, coral pink native granite, often left bull-faced, bossiert-faced or “rusticated” in order to complement its grainy texture–  which acknowledges that it would be impossible to achieve the laser-sharp edges you can form with Kemnay stone.

William Cunliffe-Brooks’ Glen Tanar is more than just a collection of picturesque buildings:  it is a designed landscape.   Glen Tanar contains one of the most important areas of relict Caledonian Pine forest in Scotland, and this formed the backdrop for the naturalistic landscape created by Thomas Mawson and George Truefitt between 1875 and 1900.   Rather than formally laid-out policies, the sense of place or genius loci of Glen Tanar is all about the natural contours of the land, nestling buildings in clearings, planting blocks of trees which complement the Forest of Caledon, and introducing complementary features.   Throughout the estate, there are drystane dykes and the little stone briggies of which Mawson was inordinately proud:  “I believe to be the finest in Great Britain, a fact on which my client greatly prided himself.”   Outwith Glen Tanar, Cunliffe-Brooks later owned Aboyne Castle, and Truefitt worked for him on Birse Lodge, Fasnadarach and Glentanar School–  the latter in the form of a Kentish oasthouse, with two steep, pyramidal roofs.   Truefitt also created the Coo Cathedral as part of Cunliffe-Brooks’ model farm at the Mains of Aboyne:  the carved, inter-twined WCB monogram is prominent on the keystones of this, as it is on most of his buildings.

After many years under the control of William Cunliffe-Brooks, the new Lord Glentanar was George Coats (of Paisley thread-making fame), who bought the Glen Tanar estate and became 1st Baron Glen Tanar in 1916.   His son Thomas, 2nd Lord Glen Tanar, enlarged and added to the gardens.
The big hoose was demolished in the 1970’s and rebuilt in a half-hearted modern vernacular, much smaller:  although it may be more practical than its sprawling, rambling predecessor, in architectural terms it is the weak point of the estate.   In a strange piece of symbolism, the site of both the old and new Glentanar House is lower down the hill than the estate workers’ houses.

Finally, as you would expect, there is a “statement” building at the entrance to Glen Tanar, a symbolic gatelodge which alerts you to the presence of ambition.   I’ve left it to last, since although it’s the first thing you notice, it’s the final thing you actually see.   Once you’ve travelled the length of the glen twice–  on your way up, and on your return–  then the lodge at Bridge of Ess begins to make sense.   The lodge’s design has been attributed to Truefitt, but in fact Thomas Mawson’s autobiography tells of the planning of Glen Tanar and the Tower of Ess, as well as providing a flattering pen-portrait of his client.   So, despite the detailing and materials being similar to Truefitt’s work, it’s likely that this lodge-tower is the work of the Mawson-Gibson team.  It sits in a carefully-contrived Romantic landscape:  the 1894 rebuilding of the Bridge of Ess saw it set on a curve over a deep pool in a pine-clad ravine, with the lodge at its springing point.   A square-cut tower of four storeys, the lodge was built in polychromatic granite:  dark stone in the basecourse, pink Glen Tanar granite above, with pale silvery granite quoins and a chunky parapet corbelled out on top.   There’s even a dinky little turret overlooking the approach to the bridge:  both herald and farewell to the Deeside vision of a Manchester banker and his metropolitan architects.