Sir William Bruce's Hopetoun House

Hopetoun House, West Lothian, is often described as Scotland's finest classical mansion, which is fair enough given that James Smith's Hamilton Palace, reworked from 1693, was demolished in the 1920s. Yet, to laud the classicism of Hopetoun House predisposes a bias in favour of William Adam and his imperial frontispiece, begun in 1721, and the state rooms of his sons. It denies the fact that at the rear there is an even more significant house and one that may well be unique not only in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Scotland but also in Britain.