Banff
Map of this area

Ancient fishing port at mouth of River Deveron. Seven-arch bridge spans river. Royal burgh in 1372; fashionable 18th-century wintering resort; now a quiet holiday resort with sandy beaches and sailing centre. Town of architectural surprises: Greek columns, crow-stepped gables, Venetian windows and delicate steeples. Duff House (1725-40), baroque mansion; church dates from 1789. Local history and British bird exhibition in Banff Museum.

Duff House

The most sophisticated country house in the northeast of Scotland, this splendid Baroque mansion was designed around 1735 by William Adam for William Duff MP. later Lord Braco and Earl of Fife. Architect and patron fell out; a prolonged lawsuit was settled only shortly before Adam's death in 1748 and an embittered Braco never took up residence. Sold by the Fifes in the early 20C, in the Second World War, Duff House accommodated Norwegian and Polish troops and German POWs. Resplendently restored, it now houses paintings from the Scottish National Gallery, which, together with a rich array of loan furnishings and fittings. has recreated something of the atmosphere it enjoyed in its heyday.

With its four corner towers Duff House rises dramatically from level parkland in the valley of the River Deveron just inland from its mouth between Banff and Macduff. The mansion consists of a great central block rising over a basement and entered by a double curving staircase above which Corinthian pilasters support a richly deco-rated pediment. Adam's proposed flanking pavilions and colonnades were never built, but the house is held in place visually by mature trees. Upstream the river emerges from a gorge whose woodlands conceal an ice house and a mausoleum ornamented with an effigy taken from St Mary's Church at Banff.

The Centre Of the building is occupied by the vast and sumptuous spaces of the Vestibule on the first floor and the Great Drawing-Room on the second, contrasting with the more intimate rooms to either side which served as boudoirs. bedrooms, libraries and closets. The Vestibule is dominated by William Etty's grandiose painting entitled The Combat, Woman pleading for the Vanquished - an ideal groupe, while the Drawing-Room is hung with a superb set of Gobelins tapestries as well as with a trio of Pastorales by Boucher. Other fine paintings in first floor rooms include an early portrait by Ramsay of Elizabeth. Mrs Daniel Cunyngham (Dining-Room), fragments of a large picture by Cuyp and a magnificent El Greco of St Jerome in Penitence (in Countess Agnes' Boudoir).

The Great Staircase is densely hung with portraits and other pictures, but the most remarkable object here is a porphyry lion's paw and marble wine cooler mounted on a dense black block of polished Parrot coal. On the second floor, the North Drawing-Room has a number of Raeburn portraits, while the pier-glass over the mantelpiece is the sole surviving item of the house's original fittings.

Another room has displays on the architectural history of the house, while the Outer and Inner Libraries are hung with portraits of kings of Scotland, exiled monarchs and Pretenders.

The following description takes in some of the more attractive 18C buildings in Banff.

Low Street

Of particular interest are the 18C Carmelite House, the only reminder of the former monastery, and the town house with its unusual steeple. On the plainstones in front of the house is the rare pre-Reformation mercat cross. The 16C finial depicts the Crucifixion on one side with the Virgin and Child on the reverse.

High Shore

Numbers 1 to 5 are an attractive group of 18C buildings. The doorway of no 3, with its straight-headed pediment and grotesque, contrasts with the more vernacular inn with its pend.

Boyndie Street

On the north are two more examples of 18C town houses. The first Boyndie House has a date stone and curvilinear gable.

If you would like to visit this area as part of a highly personalized small group tour of my native Scotland please e-mail me:

If you would like to visit this area as part of a highly personalized small group tour of my native Scotland please e-mail me