JK GILLON

Perhaps the strangest house ever built in Scotland was Rockville or, as it was variously known, The Pagoda, The Chinese House, Tottering Towers and Crazy Manor. Rockville, described as "a building to delight every child who enjoys a fairy tale", stood at the corner of Napier Road and Spylaw Road in Edinburgh's Merchiston area and was built by Sir James Gowans in 1858 as his own home. Gowans was an architect, a railway engineer, a quarry owner, Edinburgh's Lord Dean of Guild and was Knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886 for his work in organising the International Exhibition in Edinburgh.

Rockville consisted of a three-storey house with a five-storey, 64-foot tower of Oriental influence. Its projecting stone dormers, decorative iron balusters, massive chimneys and ornate gables gave it an eerie Gothic appearance. The interior was spacious with hot water and gas in all the rooms and a kitchen with the motto "Waste Not Want Not" carved in stone over the cooking range.

The acre of sunken garden included various statues, a bas-relief of Gowans as a master mason, a stone table carved with gowans (Scots for wild daisies) and a gate lodge like a diminutive Hansel and Gretel house. The external walls of Rockville were built in a checkerboard pattern with a mosaic infill of coloured stones in a sandstone framework. The stones were selected from every quarry in Scotland, with samples from the Continent and China, and gave the building a rich effect of lightness and sparkle. The coloured granites produced a mainly reddish tint with highlights of green crystals of iron pyrites, an amethyst-like purple stone, silver mica and glittering quartz.

It was considered that Rockville represented "the embodiment in stone of the same spirit which produced in literature the Gothic novel", but Gowans maintained that he had "no desire to create novelty". Rockville to him was an experiment in building rationally using a modular grid system to produce an economic and aesthetically pleasing result.

Proposals to demolish Rockville in the mid-1960s caused a public outcry and 2,500 signatures were collected on a petition to save it. Details of Rockville were event sent to the publicity manager of Disneyland suggesting that he might consider buying "Edinburgh's Wonder House".

Rockville was finally demolished in 1966 and a block of flats constructed on the site. However, a hint of the romantic eccentricity of Rockville can still be seen in the surviving stone wall and gateposts.