64 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF ABERDEEN AND DISTRICT 
times with a suggestion of entasis ; the free and occasionally fanciful use 
of corbelling, the units of which hardly vary in profile ; and the corner 
‘ rounds,’ or turrets, from which shot could be directed ‘ alongst the walls.’ 
These ‘ rounds’ are seldom quite circular on plan, but slightly oval or in 
a succession of planes ; they project very little over the corner of the 
supporting walls, and are carried up leaning backwards towards the 
parent body. It would almost seem as if the walls and turrets had been 
modelled rather than built, so sensitively are the planes adjusted to each 
other. Both at Midmar and Castle Fraser one of the end blocks is circular 
and carried up higher than the others ; its staircase turret is taken still 
higher, and finished with an ogee roof, a stang and weathervane. 
The dead forms of medieval machicolation corbelling and battlements 
were adapted at Castle Fraser to serve other uses : the medieval machi- 
colation corbels have shrunk into a purely decorative corbel table or 
cornice, whose architectural use is to tie the three blocks together, jump- 
ing down and up again to embrace the turrets. 
The pseudo-parapet is found right under the eaves of the roof, the 
pseudo-embrasures forming windows, which are carried up into the roof 
as stone dormers. But many of the smaller castles are quite free from such 
vestigial marks : they fulfil in the most direct way all structural and other 
needs, under a due sense of the nature of granite and an instinct for fine 
form. 
Freestone on the walls of Castle Fraser is confined to heraldic panels ; 
and its use elsewhere in granite castles does not go beyond such small 
things as gargoyles and bits of carving. 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN ABERDEEN.—In the town of Aberdeen 
during this period stone dressings for buildings continued generally to 
be of freestone, and towards the end of the century much competent 
work in freestone cutting was produced—tombs and monuments, heraldic 
shields and cartouches, and the hexagonal Market Cross (1686), designed 
and built by John Montgomery, a mason from Rayne in Aberdeenshire. 
Provost Sir George Skene’s house in the Guestrow, with fine plaster 
ceilings, woodwork, ironwork, and decorative painting, is about the last 
town-house of the period left in Aberdeen. 
Tue EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.—The eighteenth century saw the building 
of Gordon’s Hospital (it is said, from plans by William Adam) ; and, on 
the site of the Middle-Pointed nave of St. Nicholas’, the present West 
Church (1755), in stately Roman style, carried out in freestone from 
Fife, above a granite plinth, from plans by the architect James Gibbs, an 
Aberdeen man born and bred. 
Shortly after ‘ the Forty-five,’ granite ashlar houses began to appear in 
Gilcomston, then a suburb, and in the town; dates in the fifties and 
sixties, still to be seen, show when and where the development took place. 
A gateway to St. Paul’s, Gallowgate, designed in a rather homely but 
interesting Classic manner, shows that the art of masonry in granite was not 
entirely neglected at the time when the West Church was new. 
About 1772, after a disastrous fire at King’s College, parts of the south 
wall of the chapel and of the east wall of the steeple were faced with 
excellent granite ashlar, whose ‘ cherry-cocked ’ pointing still remains 
