Publication Account

Date 1978

Event ID 1017696

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1017696

The great empty shell which crowns Broad Street is all that remains of a residence built by the Regent Mar in 1570-72. The building was probably never completed although the Earls of Mar Hved in the structure until the end of the seventeenth century. Repairs were carried out on the building so that it could accommodate soldiers in 1715 and the Town Council in 1733 entertained plans to turn Mar's Wark into a workhouse, that is, a place for vagrants, a correction house. Nimmo writing in the 1770s described Mar's Wark as ruinous (RCAHM, 1963, 285). Stones from the structure were apparently used in the construction of a churchyard wall at St. Ninian's and the portion of the Wark which was left standing was probably left so puposely to protect Broad Street from howling winds (Drysdale, 1904, 55). The hundred foot (30. 48m) long structure is marked by its well-balanced architectural design. A central feature of the existing frontage is the archway surmounted by the Royal Arms and flanked on both sides by two octagonal staircases towers bearing the arms of the Regent Mar and those of his Countess (RCAHM, 1963, 287).

Information from Scottish Burgh Survey, ‘Historic Stirling: The Archaeological Implications of Development’, (1978).