Publication Account

Date 1981

Event ID 1018480

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1018480

Two of the famous townhouses of the burgh were the Inns down on the Rampart and Tankerness House on Broad Street. The Inns was a popular name for a house built by Sir David Sinclair of Swinbrucht in the last half of the fifteenth century. Tankerness House, on the other hand, dates from the sixteenth century and is built around a rectangular courtyard. The house itself was entered from Broad Street through a heavily moulded archway which carries the date '1561' on an armorial panel. The west wing of the structure was remodelled, if not entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century (RCAM, 1946, II, 148). Today, Tankerness House houses Kirkwall museum.

Tankerness House is probably the oldest domestic dwelling in the burgh and several others on Palace Street are perhaps of the same sixteenth century date.

Information from ‘Historic Kirkwall: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1977).