Keiss Castle

Keiss Castle is a 3-storey, 5-bay house built in 1755 and later extended and altered by David Bryce in 1860, transforming it into a mainly 3-storey, L-plan Baronial mansion. The exterior is harled with ashlar dressings and margins. The principal entrance is located at the west angle of the broad southwest wing, featuring a round-headed doorway with cabled moulding and a long architraved window above, flanked by panels.

The southwest wing rises to a 4-storey, square corbelled and crenellated tower with cannon spouts, and an angle corbelled stair turret that rises above the wallhead, topped with an ogee roof and weather vane. The 1860 angle bartizans have fish-scale slated conical roofs that are corbelled out on either side of the 1755 west gable. The southeast elevation includes a long first-floor tripartite window that lights the drawing room, with two pedimented dormers breaking the wallhead above. The building features mainly 12-pane glazing, a string course, margined and coped end and ridge stacks, and slate roofs.

Inside, the principal public rooms are located in the 1860 Bryce wing on the first floor, accessible via an imposing staircase with a pendant newel and barley-sugar twist balusters. The interior retains panelled window shutters, doors, and moulded doorpieces, along with marble chimney pieces from 1860, and decorative moulded ceiling cornices. There are extensive single and 2-storey service ranges at the rear, forming a U-plan service court, enclosed at the northwest by a rubble wall and square rubble gate piers.

The property includes a walled garden to the northeast, featuring a coped rubble wall and an angle turret with a conical roof. The gate lodge, also designed by David Bryce and dated 1860, is a simple single-storey gabled structure with rubble and tooled dressings. It has a gabled porch in the north-facing re-entrant angle, with a plank door featuring ornate cast-iron hinges, renewed 2-pane glazing, crowsteps, coped stacks, and a slate roof. There is a modern single-storey, single-bay addition at the rear.

The gate piers are high coped quadrant walls made of rubble with dressed copes, featuring terminal piers with shallow pyramidal caps. The renewed pair of simple gate piers supports a pair of cast-iron carriage gates and decorative cast-iron spearhead railings.