School House, Milton Of Buchanan

The Old Schoolhouse, built in 1764 by Alexander Gowan, is a pair of two-storey semi-detached cottages with single-storey additions to the rear. It occupies a prominent corner position in the small village of Milton of Buchanan within the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park. The building has historical interest as the former parish school and is a largely unaltered example of an 18th-century estate building.

The symmetrical front (northeast) elevation features a four-bay ground floor. The two inner bays have distinctive multi-paned sash windows, while the outer bays have timber-boarded doors providing direct access to single rooms. The first floor has three horizontally-oriented windows with unusual multi-paned, horizontally sliding sashes; the central window illuminates the staircase of the southeast cottage.

One window is visible on each side elevation at ground floor level. The rear (southwest) elevation includes a single-storey, piend-roofed extension from the 19th century which currently contains a bathroom and kitchen. To its right is a lean-to timber shed, which obscures a doorway in the original rear wall. A ground floor window is situated at the far right, and a first-floor window is positioned near the centre. Two substantial chimney stacks, with coping and circular clay cans, are symmetrically arranged at the rear. A small rooflight, situated on the left side of the roof, illuminates the staircase of the northwest cottage.

The southeast cottage contains a single ground floor room with a broad timber staircase leading up to a single first floor room. This room features a stone hearth, now inset with bricks, and a timber chimneypiece with reeded panels and roundels; this design is characteristic of other 18th-century buildings on the Buchanan Castle Estate. The floorboards continue beneath the room partitions, suggesting the upper floor may originally have been a single room later subdivided into two cottages. The northwest cottage follows a similar format, though featuring a narrower timber staircase set against the northwest side wall; this may have originally been a service stair, though it was potentially inserted later to provide access to the first floor of the northwest cottage. A small tiled cooking range with integral open hearth is in the ground floor room. The first floor room has a chimneypiece matching the design of that in the southeast cottage, but with a cast iron round arched basket grate.

The exterior is finished with white-painted harl. The windows are timber sash and case; the front elevation has 42-paned windows with horns on the ground floor and 24-paned windows on the first floor. Side and rear elevations feature a mixture of 4 and 12-pane windows. The roof is piended with graded slates and predominantly cast iron rainwater goods.