Then suddenly, as though he said to himself, “I can’t stand this restraint any more,” the Scottish architect goes mad and produces something more wildly exuberant, more ornate and peculiar than anything to be found in England. Roslyn chapel, for instance, is a late medieval building which so flowers with carving, pendants and unbelievable riches of decoration that you might almost consider it to be a Burmese temple, were you not certain you had come out in a bus on a short journey from Edinburgh. Even in the Presbyterian kirks, the Victorian Scots sometimes let themselves go. All may be plain within, covenant-keeping fittings, bare table, towering pulpit, plain glass, grim walls and rising rows of sermon-centred pews, but suddenly the architect has said, “You may restrain me inside the kirk, but you wait till I get outside,” and all the marbles of the cliffs of Scotland will be jammed on to the front and a steeple will be built of such fantastic richness that, except for an absence of Christian symbolism in the form of cross or statued saint, it might have been conceived by the Pope of Rome himself. I think particularly of the steeple of a Presbyterian kirk at Queen’s Cross, Aberdeen. I never saw such a thing. I cannot describe its style or changing shapes as it descends in lengthening stages of silver-grey granite from the pale blue sky to the solid prosperity of its leafy suburban setting. I only know that when I tried to draw this late Victorian steeple, I gave it up at the seventh attempt. It is this mixture of the romantic and the severe that makes Scottish architecture so exciting.
It was this anticipation of treats for the eye that drew me to Aberdeen. For even in Lowland Edinburgh there are contrasts enough. Edinburgh, that most beautiful of all the capitals of Europe, no, not excepting Rome—Edinburgh though it produced John Stuart Mill, also, thank God, gave birth to Sir Walter Scott. If Edinburgh can thrill with contrasts what, I thought, may I not expect to find in Aberdeen?—I did not know whether the Lowland Scottish genius for architecture had a Highland counterpart.
James Gibbs, the Adam Brothers, Colin Campbell, James Stuart, “Capability Brown,” Sir William Tite, Thompson, Gibson—these are only some of the names of Classic architects who have come from Scotland to embellish England with their buildings. Inevitably many Scots became civil engineers when that science divorced itself from architecture, and the famous names of Nimmo, the Stevensons and the Rennies are among the first. For, naturally, engineering made a strong appeal to the Scottish mind, so attracted by fundamental structural principles in building.
In the south we think of Aberdeen granite as that highly polished pink stuff which flushes the white cheeks of Metropolitan cemeteries and forms glistening shafts to Gothic Revival façades. But the granite which comes from the immediate neighbourhood of Aberdeen is grey and silver, a lovely stone, immensely durable and worked with consummate skill in the deep, shadowy quarries. The pink granite comes chiefly from Peterhead, thirty miles north of the city, and from the Island of Mull on the other side of Scotland. No one can go to Aberdeen and not become interested in granite. I shall not forget my amazement, taking the tramcar one windy day down to the sea beach for the first time and standing on a lonely shore below the tufted links which separate Aberdeen from the sea. All around me was the veined and glittering produce of the cliffs of Scotland pounded into rounds and ovals by resistless breakers. So beautiful, so varied were the stones on the beach, grey, silver, pink, red, crimson, white, green, purple, pink-red, and silver again, that for a moment it was like standing in a dream of avarice surrounded by precious stones. And then, on the tide line where the waves had washed the pebbles so that they were still wet, they glowed with an intenser colour just as the city of Aberdeen glows a deeper, richer silver after rain. I collected fifteen different sorts of granite in as many minutes.
Granite is the strongest building stone in these islands, the hardest to shatter and the hardest to work. So hard is it that joints are hardly perceptible and a great column in such granite can be made to appear as a solid unjointed block.
The granite called me to Aberdeen; that it was Highland and I know only Lowlands also called me, and so did the thought that the city was the birthplace of James Gibbs, the great architect of the eighteenth century, and J. N. Comper, the great church architect of today. But there was another reason for going—the excitement of seeing a place I had never visited before. I bought guides of all sorts in one of the many marvellous second-hand-book shops of Edinburgh, for old books about Aberdeen are cheap in Edinburgh and vice versa. Finally I bought a modern one so as to see what the city looked like today: there were usual photographs of crowded commercial streets, draughty promenades, bandstands and putting greens.
From Waverley Station north and north for hours. I had not realised there was so much Scotland. The train ran on, over wide brown moors with bluely distant inland mountains and then along the edges of cliffs whose grass was a deep pre-Raphaelite green. And down steep crevices I saw rocks and fishermen’s cottages above them, but still no Aberdeen. Could there be such a thing as a great city with tramcars, electric lights, hotels, and cathedrals so far away among empty fields, so near the North Pole as we were going? In England, spring had brought the leaves out on the trees, but here the wind-swept beechwoods were bare and daffodils and primroses were freshly yellow on brown woody banks that sloped to browner, tumbling streams. And
