Cousland Park

Cousland Park

Cousland Park is a late 18th-century house of two storeys over a basement, arranged in a three-bay rectangular plan in the Georgian style. It is built of coursed rubble with dressed ashlar forming long and short quoins, cills, lintels and a band course. The building is skew-gabled.

The principal (south) elevation features a basement level with windows to left and right, topped by a band course. Seven ashlar steps of quarter-circle shape lead up to a central projecting porch on the ground floor. This porch is constructed of squared ashlar with engaged Tuscan columns supporting an architraved projecting pediment. The entrance comprises a two-leaf door with an astragaled glazed fanlight above. Flanking the porch are tripartite windows with stone mullions and projecting cills. The first floor is similarly composed, with a central window with projecting cill and tripartite windows with stone mullions and projecting cills to each flank.

The east elevation is a skewed gable-end with a lowered gable-head stack. Fenestration is irregular, including small basement windows, a blind window to the ground floor left, and a lower entrance to the right accessed by steps with metal railings. Above is a window at mid-floor level and a smaller window to the centre of the gable.

The north (rear) elevation has three main bays at ground floor level with two smaller windows between the central and left bays. A rubble outbuilding or garage sits below the central and right bays. The first floor has three bays, with a blind tripartite window to the left and single windows to the centre and right bays, separated by a canless wallhead stack.

The west elevation is a skewed gable-end with a lowered stack and a small window to the left of the attic storey.

The windows throughout are predominantly twelve-pane timber sash and case, with some elongated four-pane examples and a small eight-pane window to the rear. The pitched slate roof features a Carron light to the rear. Rainwater goods are of replacement metal, and the stacks are lowered with replacement cans.

The interior was not inspected in 2000.

Associated with the house is a former orchard of distinctive crescented plan to the southwest. It is enclosed by tall coursed sandstone rubble walls with flat sandstone copes. The southwest elevation is concave in curve while the northeast is convex. Doorways in plain surrounds with sandstone lintels open to the southwest and north elevations. Some sections were in poor repair as of 2009.

Cousland Park probably served as the seat of Sir John Dalrymple of Cousland and Upper Cranston (1726–1810), who succeeded as fourth Baronet of Cousland in 1771. He married his cousin Elizabeth, the sole child and heiress of Thomas Hamilton of Fala and Oxenford in 1760. She inherited Nether Cranston (now the area containing Oxenfoord Home Farm, Edgehead and Sauchenside, which included her family's former home, Oxenfoord Castle) in 1779. Following her father's death, the couple relocated there and upgraded and extended the old castle.

The house stands outside the village to the east. Cousland village itself was formerly a well-known lime-producing centre for centuries, though most of its older structures have been replaced by modern houses. The crescented orchard is an important integral part of the estate and its unusual form makes it architecturally notable.