Dovecot, Pilmuir House

Pilmuir House is a laird's house dated 1624 with early 18th century alterations, comprising a 2-storey rectangular building with attic and garret, arranged in 3 bays and incorporating a central stair tower with later service additions set in a re-entrant angle. The walls are of rubble with orange harling and ashlar dressings, featuring rounded arrises. Attic windows break the eaves in gabled dormerheads. Grey slate roofing tops steeply pitched gables with ashlar crowsteps and beak skewputts.

The north elevation shows 3 bays grouped towards the centre with a projecting rectangular stair tower at the middle. A deep surround frames the doorway at ground level, decorated with bead and hollow moulding and topped by a decorative armorial panel dated 1624, bearing the initials "GH" and "AH" for the original owners William Cairns and his wife. Above this are a small stair window and a garret bedroom window, with a gablehead stack rising beyond. To the left, a single-storey service bay with attic sits in the re-entrant angle, featuring a small square ground-floor window and attic window above, covered by a catslide roof. On the right sits a corbelled circular stair turret in the re-entrant angle, rising on a squinch with tiny lights set below the eaves of its conical roof, which sweeps into the main roof. To the right of the turret are windows to each floor, with a dormerhead window to the attic breaking the eaves. An early 18th century stone stair with sweeping stone balustrade was added at the centre, leading to French doors installed in a former principal-floor window; the flanking bays contain windows to each floor, with a further dormerhead window to the attic at centre.

The east elevation is of 2 bays, with a small ground-floor window at the centre and windows to each bay on the upper floors, including the garret. The west elevation similarly displays 2 bays with an adjoined outbuilding at ground level and windows to the principal and attic floors.

Sash and case windows throughout employ 12-pane and other small-pane glazing patterns. Ridge and end stacks are of ashlar.

The interior contains a kitchen and office at ground level. The drawing room preserves a 17th century ribbed plaster ceiling. Early 18th century pine panelling lines the rooms throughout.

Adjoining the house is a walled garden of rectangular plan, enclosed by high rubble walls with harl pointing and continuous retaining walls to the north, sections of which retain rounded coping. Two pairs of square bee-bole recesses are set into the south side of the north garden wall. Lean-to toolsheds stand outside the garden to the north. A garden gateway with ashlar surround flanks the entrance, and quadrant walls with ashlar coping define the driveways. The gatepiers are of rusticated ashlar.

The dovecot, dated 1624, is a lectern dovecot measuring 19 feet by 17 feet in plan, set within the walled garden to the south of the mansion. Constructed of rubble with ashlar rat course and coping, it features a doorway to the south with a relieving arch and square openings above the rat course to the south, east and west. The interior contains 1000 stone nesting boxes.

Pilmuir House provides an excellent, minimally altered example of a 17th century laird's house, comparable to Fountainhall in Pencaitland parish. The Lodge is listed separately.