Fort William Sheriff Court

Fort William Sheriff Court was designed by James Matthews and William Lawrie in 1876, with an extension added to the rear around the 1880s. This building is a two-storey structure with an attic, featuring two bays on the street elevation and an irregular plan in the French Gothic style. It is set on raised ground and constructed from squared and snecked red sandstone, with sandstone ashlar chamfered quoins. The rear elevation is made of rendered brick. The building includes a stone base course and cill course, as well as a string course that incorporates hoodmoulds at the first floor.

The entrance is accessed from a squared three-stage tower on the north side, which has a window on each stage and a hoodmould over the second stage. The tower's attic features a frieze with a cornice, trefoil and quatrefoil blind windows, and central round arches that support stone ball finials. The windows throughout the building are architraved single-pane shallow pointed arches, all with hoodmoulds above that terminate in scrolls and corbels. There are also small blind trefoil windows in the attic.

The roof is multi-gabled, covered with slates, and features lead skews and decorative skewputts. The tower has a slated pyramidal roof with brattishing, and there are cast iron downpipes.

The interior, as seen in 2014, retains much of the original 1876 layout, with the court and public offices located on the ground floor and a principal courtroom facing southwest on the first floor. This courtroom has a high, coombed ceiling with simple moulded cornicing and decorative roof vents. Some of the timber courtroom furniture has been replaced in a 19th-century Gothic period style, including the timber panelled sheriff's bench. There is an open well with a stone staircase featuring a decorative metal banister and timber railing at the entrance, leading to the first floor. Secondary rooms and offices include decorative cornicing, roses, panelled doors, and several fireplaces, many of which are now boarded up. The hallways on the ground floor have timber panelling to the dado, and some openings have shallow pointed arches. A dog-leg stair with simple metal railings and a timber banister leads to the rear elevation, while a turnpike stone stair connects the first floor to the attic level.

The property is enclosed by a rendered stone boundary wall on the northwest, southwest, and southeast sides, which features metal railings and shallow pyramidal capped piers.