Town Hall, Crieff Road, Aberfeldy

The Town Hall, on Crieff Road in Aberfeldy, was designed by James M MacLaren of London and built in 1889. It incorporates an earlier building, the Old Breadalbane Academy, dating to around 1840, which is located at the rear. The Town Hall is a broad-gabled, L-plan building in the Free Style, influenced by the work of H.H. Richardson. It is constructed with harled walls, rock-faced red sandstone margins, quoins, and polished dressings, with squared and snecked local chlorite-slate rubble used at the rear.

The west (entrance) elevation features quadrant walls flanking a broad-gabled section with a three-arched loggia containing decorative ironwork gates, carved stonework, a deeply-voussoired doorway with a two-leaf timber door, and windows in the flanking bays. A horizontal five-light window is set into the gablehead above a plain frieze.

The south elevation is a tall, single-story, six-bay section with a deep base course of red rock-faced rubble and a broad cill course, abutting two-story bays of the Lesser Hall to the left. Four large transomed bipartite windows are arranged in the centre and left bays, with a large, slate-hung, ogee-roofed ridge ventilator with a decorative cast-iron weathervane positioned centrally above. A catslide roof covers a narrow projecting stair tower with small square windows on the first and second stages; a timber door and cast-iron lamp bracket are featured on its return to the left. The outer right bay is a single-stage, piend-roofed projection. The north elevation largely mirrors the south elevation.

Leaded, multi-pane, timber-transomed windows are present throughout, along with graded grey slates. Overhanging eaves feature decorative bargeboarding. The building’s setting includes rock-faced rubble quadrant walls and random rubble boundary walls.

The interior of the Greater Hall features a gallery and a hammerbeam roof, while the Lesser Hall has plain cornices and panelled timber shutters and soffits. The window glazing patterns consist of 12 and 24 panes in timber sash and case windows. Banded and coped square-section ashlar stacks, some grouped with cans, rise from the building.