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Publication Account
Date 1985
Event ID 1016166
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016166
Whilst Cockburn was busy improving his estates and rebuilding the village at Ormiston, Thomas Hamilton, sixth Earl of Haddington, was equally immersed in agricultural experimentation, notably in forestry. He planted Tyninghame and Binning Woods which are still prominent landscape features. It was a later generation, however, a century on, that built the estate village-still a very model of its kind, though gradually changing hands.
The harled factors house, c 1800, stands on the east side of the A 198, as do the lodge and arched gateway to the main house, c 1830. The estate sawmill opposite, now converted to a private house, was built in 1828 by Thomas Hannan, mason, and George Sked, engineer. It is an attractive, single-storey building with diamond-paned windows and crow-stepped gables. The machinery was driven by a six-spoke undershot (more accurately, low breast-shot wheel) of wood and iron, some 4.3 m in diameter by 1.2 m wide.
The main part of the village, on the side road, is largely 19th century, mostly by the same Thomas Hannan. Of rose-pink sandstone, the houses blend in varied relationships with each other and with the line of the road-a little clinical perhaps, but attractively so! The restored village pump, encased in wood, stands below the smiddy-note the windows-near to the Post Office.
'Tyninghame' signifies the farm on the river Tyne; it is one of three names in south-east Scotland (also Whittinghame, Coldingham) that reflect the earliest stratum of Anglian (Northumbrian) settlement. And within the grounds of Tyninghame House stand the remains of the old parish church ofSt Baldred (NT 619796), an anchorite who died in AD 756 or 757. The 9th century monastery on the site was sacked by the later, Anglo-Danish Northumbrians in AD 941; the mid 12th century parish church remained intact until the old village was 'cleared' in 1761. The surviving Norman carving on the arches to its chancel and apse suggest, however, a church at least as spectacular as that at Dalmeny (no. 65).
Information from 'Exploring Scotland's Heritage: Lothian and Borders', (1985).
