FRESWICK HOUSE
Henrietta Munro
This tall gaunt house stands with
its feet in the sea on the east coast of Caithness. It is a tower-like
structure which bears a resemblance to the tall gaunt Scottish castles
which are all around the coast in this northern land. They were built to
defend themselves from the Viking raids which were numerous and which
lasted for many years.
Freswick House, is very often
called Freswick Castle but William Sinclair who built it in the mid 18th
century, in spite of his pretensions always called it Freswick House.
William Sinclair was a Sma' Laird
who was determined to improve himself. To this end he worked hard, lived
fairly frugally and his great delight was to enter into law. This appears
to have been one of the chief amusements of the Lairds of Scotland at that
time and the records of the courts are full of these. William was sure
that by building this great house, with of course, a tower for defence, he
would prove to the other lairds in the county that he was the third
richest. He made the inside of the house modern and spacious for the times
and he determined to have it lit with plenty of windows. Outside there
would be houses for a granary to store corn and a brewhouse to turn it
into ale along with other necessary buildings, and just up the road he
built a magnificent doo'cot.
William's previous house was a
large roomy building down the coast at Dunbeath and it was here that he
began his glorious fight with the window tax collector. In those days
there was a tax on windows if they exceeded a stipulated number. The
record of William's argument is kept in a letter to his lawyer. 'As to Mr.
Angus the Caithness Collector, I shall honestly tell you the reason I was
not civil to him. In the year 1753 he came here and surveyed my windows
and reported them to be 28. The next half year he came and surveyed them
and found them to be 31 when there was none either added or taken away. In
June 1754 he came here again and said he wanted to view my windows. I
ordered a servant to go along with him but would not see him myself. Then
he left a list showing my windows to be 47 and gave that number to the tax
man. I appealed and was charged at 31. The last time he came he said there
was 34, and I fell into a passion and swore him that I would be revenged'.
It is difficult to see how there
con be any dispute about how many windows a house has but the window tax
accounts in the Edinburgh Register House shows that something odd did
happen. In 1753 the house at Dunbeath was taxed at 28 windows while in the
second half of that year it was 31. Next year the number is given as 47
but 16 of these were let off on appeal. After that the figure was 34 but
more was to happen.
In the pages of the window tax
accounts books one can follow the building of Freswick House. When it was
finally finished and occupied in 1758 it should have started to pay window
tax, but never a penny was paid in old Freswick's lifetime. Every year the
collector recorded that he had visited it and that it should only be
charged the sixpenny house duty of a house with fewer than 8 windows, and
it is only in April 1770, when Freswick had been dead for a year, were the
windows of the house put at 42, and tax paid on them at 2 shillings each.
Of course Freswick could have built his new house with 35 blocked up
windows. People did block windows to avoid tax but not on this scale
surely.
I prefer to think that the old boy
so terrified the collector that he was allowed to escape for 11 years,
discretion being the better part of valour. So today the old house still
stands on the shore at Freswick, rather more dilapidated now but the
outbuildings and the doo'cot are still there and the secrets of the house
are still kept.