Cranston House

Cranstoun House (former manse), including service buildings and walled garden

Cranstoun House is a two-storey house built around 1835 in the manner of William Burn, though it may represent a reconstruction of an earlier manse of the 1790s. The building presents as a double L-plan with a main L-plan block to the north and a subsidiary L-plan block to the south and west that originally contained offices. Former barn and stables, now converted to domestic use, enclose a courtyard to the east and south.

The house is designed in asymmetrical Scots Jacobethan style, featuring crowstepped gables and dormer-headed windows. Tall grouped chimneys with diagonally-set square-plan ashlar chimney shafts are a distinctive feature. The walls are constructed of squared and snecked sandstone with ashlar dressings, droved quoins with narrow raised margins, and beaked skewputts.

The principal north elevation is asymmetrical in L-plan form with an advanced full-height gable on the left. A three-bay parapetted canted bay window projects at ground floor with a single window above. Three bays set back to the right contain the entrance to the left, which is sheltered by a steeply pitched pointed canopy hood. This hood is deeply projecting with an apex finial supported on sculptured ashlar consoles and encloses a triangular tympanum. The entrance door is four-panelled with a letterbox fanlight with margined glazing above. Two single windows occupy the ground floor to the right, and three crowstepped dormers light the first floor.

The interior contains a masonry staircase with cast-iron balustrades. Original window shutters with pilastered panels between windows survive in the dining room, positioned within the projecting canted bays.

The stable and barn ranges form an L-plan single-storey structure enclosing a courtyard to the southwest of the house. These are linked by a gateway to the southeast corner leading to the garden. Openings have been blocked and glazed during conversion, with paired slit ventilators in the west-facing gable end of the south range and a small slit ventilator on the west elevation of the east barn range facing the garden. The former offices, originally single-storey on the south side of the west house block, were heightened to single-storey with attic dormer heads in the later 19th century.

A walled garden with coped walls of stugged and snecked sandstone encloses a rectangle to the east of the house, with the east wall of the barn incorporated into the garden's west wall.

The house features twelve-pane timber sash and case windows. Pitched slate roofs with masonry ridges cover the building; the west former barn range lacks a masonry ridge. Chimney flues are carried up through the centres of the gable ends.

The building's history is complex. Records describe a former manse planned in 1793–1795 according to designs by Alexander Stevens, whose specification documents dated 1783 detailed materials and finishes. However, this design appears never to have been executed. A Heritors' meeting in December 1783 had declared the existing manse and church (possibly both dating from 1698) "not habitable", particularly as they were "surrounded and obscured by Lord Adam Gordon's plantations and policy at Preston Hall". Although a new manse was planned, it was not relocated until 1835, after the Callander family took over the estate. The old manse, formerly sited adjacent to the Lion's Gates at Preston Hall, remains marked on estate plans of 1794 and 1806. The new manse was built at the sole expense of William Burn Callander Esq., who considered the aged building too close to his estate. The Reverend Alexander Welsh was the first occupant of the new house.