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Publication Account
Date 1951
Event ID 1095935
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1095935
176. ‘The Old Tolbooth’, Bell's Brae, Dean.
In the part of the Dean village that was anciently the village of Water of Leith (RCAHMS 1951, p. lxi), there are still a few 18th-century houses built of rubble and roofed in some cases with pantiles. The majority are of no great interest, but at the foot of Bell's Brae stands a fine double tenement with crow-stepped gables which is known as the Old Tolbooth. It has four storeys at one end and five at the other, where the ground falls away. The N.W. corner is splayed back near the ground and corbelled out to a right-angle above the first floor. The windows have dressed back-set margins with chamfered arrises. Two rectangular stair-towers, which contain the entrances to the upper floors, project northwards. The entrance to the E. stair has a moulded architrave and cornice, with a heavy keystone dated 1675, and the original entrance to the W. stair, now built up, also has a moulded architrave and cornice, as well as a panelled frieze inscribed in two lines GOD BLESS THE BAXTERS OF EDIN/BRUGH UHO BUILT THIS HOUS 1675. On the cornice rests a carved panel with a circular garland, surmounted by a wheat-sheaf flanked by two cherub's heads and bordered by the inscription GODS PROUEDENG* IS OUR / INHERITENS, enclosed in its turn by scroll work. Within the garland are two bakers' peels in saltire, one charged with three cakes, the other with a pie, with a pair of scales set fesswise across them (Fig. 32 [SC 1225757])
RCAHMS 1951, visited c.1941
*The G probably represents a C
