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Excerpt from A Visitation of the Seats and Arms of the Noblemen and Gentlemen, Vol. 2: Of Great Britain and Ireland Binns House, in the co. of Linlithgow, about fifteen miles to the west of Edinburgh, is the seat of Sir William C. C. Dalyell, Bart. Captain in the Royal Navy. This is a place of great beauty, situated on the slope of a hill, commanding the Firth, and surrounded by a well-wooded park, with extensive shrubberies and thriving plantations. On the summit of the hill, a quarter of a mile above the house, stands a high round tower, from which there is a lovely view of the Firth of Forth on the one side, and of the fertile plains of West Lothian on the other. The House is a very ancient mansion, of great height and considerable extent; which was enlarged and improved in its interior accommodation about twenty-five years since, by the elder brother of the present baronet, a man of considerable taste and acquirements, who, however, failed in his architectural design. He removed the ancient pointed windows, so characteristic of an old Scottish chateau, and replaced them with battlements, which are entirely out of keeping. At the same time he built handsome public rooms on the ground-floor, and enlarged the gardens, and added much to the beauty of the park, by plantations and tasteful approaches. In former times, before these recent changes, Binns House remained very much in the state in which it was inhabited by its distinguished proprietor in the reign of King Charles II., General Thomas Dalyell, and it might pass for an excellent specimen of the residence of a considerable Scottish country gentleman of the middle of the seventeenth century. However, the house dates from a considerably older period, and the roof of the ancient and spacious drawing-room is ornamented with a profusion of old-fashioned stucco mouldings, in which the impaled arms of Dalyell and Bruce are prominent. This marks the time of the father and mother of the general, viz., the reign of Charles I., or the latter part of that of James I. of Great Britain. It is even not improbable that some portion of the building may be as old as the original proprietors of the ancient house of Meldrum. Binns has had the honour of being the abode of two very eminent men, of whom the first was celebrated as a hero of romance, and the other as a distinguished historical character. We allude to "Esquire Meldrum" and General Thomas Dalyell. The history of "Esquire Meldrum," written in verse by Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, in the year 1550, may be considered the last romance of chivalry, though there is nothing in it that is extravagant or beyond probability. It is the life of a gallant feudal squire of the end of the fifteenth, or the beginning of the sixteenth century, drawn up from his own recital, by an affectionate friend and companion, and that no less a statesman, poet, and courtier than Sir David Lindsay, Lord Lion King-of-arms, the preceptor of James V. of Scotland. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
