The Board of Lunacy favoured asylums in the countryside that offered a peaceful refuge from a hostile world for vulnerable people and gave them opportunities for employment and activity.

A railway siding to bring building materials, and later to supply the finished hospital, was laid into the site from the adjacent line.

Under the pioneering influence of the first Medical Superintendent, Dr James Rutherford, doors were not locked and instead of prison-like wards, chemical and physical restraints, patients were given work to do.

The numbers of mentally ill grew in proportion and the years between the asylum's opening and the outbreak of the First World War were ones of almost continuous building and rebuilding on the site.

Each new development created vacant space, but no sooner was it available than a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new patients filled it up, a problem compounded by changing social attitudes and a growing tendency for people to hustle elderly relatives into asylums.

[1] With such a massive increase, and costs rising in proportion, the heady days of innovation gave way to a regime shackled by everyday chores and, in line with practice at other Scottish asylums, the open doors policy was gradually abandoned.

Barony and City Parishes became separate Lunacy Districts in 1887, with the responsibility to provide care for mentally ill people in their areas.

He was interested in the law as it related to mental illness and favoured a system of custodial care which kept patients in locked wards and restricted exercise to accompanied walks or the confines of enclosures.

Just before his appointment the drug chlorpromazine (or Largactil) had been introduced for the treatment of mental illness and Dr Cramond’s application of it at Woodilee, along with other reforms, was to have a profound effect on the hospital.

He suggested that the new drug regimes and consequent falling patient numbers would mean that within fifteen years only half the beds available at that time would be needed.