Crail. View from north of Marketgate including Tolbooth.

Description Crail. View from north of Marketgate including Tolbooth.

Date c. 1885

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number SC 739291

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of F 1931

Scope and Content Marketgate, Crail, Fife, looking west Marketgate, a broad thoroughfare that runs parallel to the shore, is one of Crail's oldest streets, and once formed one of the largest medieval market-places in Europe. The Scottish photographer, Erskine Beveridge, photographed Marketgate on a visit to Crail c.1885. The street is rough and unsurfaced, and has a roadway lined with newly planted trees running down the centre. On the north side (right), behind garden walls and impressive gate piers, are large houses originally built for rich merchants or local lairds, and on the south side, 18th- and 19th-century houses built in the vernacular style. At the far end, standing out from the building line, is the 19th-century tolbooth (town hall) with large first-floor windows lighting the council chamber, and its 18th-century tower, crowned with a two-tiered slated hat like a malt-kiln, and topped with a weathervane in the shape of a fish. Crail was famed for its medieval craft markets where pots, cloths, silverware, copperware, wood and leather goods were all sold and displayed in booths presided over by the respective deacons of the crafts or guilds. The area close to the tower of the tolbooth (where the town guard was located) had permanent stalls called luckenbooths erected to accommodate those merchants, such as goldsmiths, whose wares were highly priced and easily stolen. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/739291

File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap