Terminating a vista from Preston Hall, near Pathhead, stands a striking garden ornament. It was originally intended as a family memorial and mausoleum, but instead became a summerhouse and eye-catcher.
In 1789 Alexander Callender, grown immensely rich through his career as a merchant in Bombay, bought Preston Hall (sometimes Prestonhall), some 12 miles from Edinburgh, in his native Scotland. Three years later, he commissioned a new mansion from the architect Robert Mitchell and the old house was pulled down. With work barely underway Alexander died on 1 April 1792, and the estate passed to his brother John. John Callender (1739-1812) asked Mitchell to complete work on the house and commissioned him to design a mausoleum to stand in the park ‘in memory of his late brother’.
The structure must have been under construction in January 1794 when a visitor to the house was taken to see the ‘Mausoleom’. The same guest returned in September, and noted the ongoing ‘very great’ improvements to the house (Mitchell’s elevation drawing of the new house was exhibited at the Royal Academy in this year). Also in 1794, the landscape designer Thomas White drew up a ‘Design for the Improvement of Preston Hall…’, and his coloured plan includes a vignette view of the mausoleum. White’s sketch would seem to represent the architect’s vision for the structure, rather than a finished structure.
Mitchell published his design for Preston Hall in his Plans & Views in Perspective of Buildings Erected in England & Scotland of 1801, and although the mausoleum is not pictured he describes it at some length, suggesting he was the author of the design. He wrote that the ‘prospect from the north front is through a noble avenue, which terminates in a mausoleum erected by Sir John Callender in memory of his brother Alexander Callender of Crighton’ (John was created a baronet in 1798, although an Irish peerage had been his goal).
Mitchell then goes on to note that ‘in the chapel of this building there is intended to be placed a monument of marble’. A design and explanation survive in the family archives for a mural monument of the ‘reclining figure’ of the deceased Alexander Callender holding a list of the five boroughs he had represented in parliament.
Alexander Callender is overlooked by a lamenting female, personifying Scotland, and a boy with an inverted torch, symbolising the end of a life. The first of the two medallions on the pedestal, left blank in the drawing, was intended to represent India ‘pouring wealth into the lap of Scotland’, and the second was to show the good works achieved as a result of this accumulated fortune – ‘the progress of agriculture and architecture’. A plan in the archive shows that this was intended for the back wall of the intended mausoleum, facing the entrance door.
It seems unlikely that this monument was ever erected, or the planned doors and windows fitted to the monument. When the surveyors were preparing the Ordnance Survey maps published in the middle of the nineteenth century they were told that the building was ‘originally intended’ for a mausoleum, suggesting it was never put to use. By then it was known as ‘the temple’, and the surveyors described it as ‘open at 4 sides’. The Flâneuse can find no record of why the mausoleum plan was abandoned.
Alexander may never have reposed in the elegant mausoleum, but he is reported to have had a grand funeral. In April 1792 he was conveyed from Edinburgh to Crichton Collegiate Church, where the family vault in the north transept had been hung with black cloths and illuminated with wax candles. The hearse was attended by ’12 mourning carriages […] and upwards of 20 gentleman’s carriages’. At Dalkeith the cortege was joined by a number of ‘country gentlemen’ in their carriages, and around 60 tenants on horseback. The procession was described as being over a mile long. No trace of the vault, or any memorials that might have existed, can be seen today after the ‘desolate and unwholesome’ church was extensively restored in the last years of the nineteenth century.
There is however a curious footnote: the temple/mausoleum at Preston Hall does have a vault, and it did briefly house human remains, but not of a family member. In 1967 renovation works were underway at Edinburgh Castle, and it became necessary to move the body of Ensign Charles Ewart, a soldier who had died at Waterloo. He was temporarily interred in the vault below the temple until he could be returned to his last resting place, at the castle, when work was complete.
The temple remains as a very lovely landscape ornament. It was restored in 1988 and is listed by Historic Environment Scotland at Category A in a group with the house, offices, walled garden and lodge.
You can find out more about the picturesque Preston Hall estate here.
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