Publication Account
Date 1951
Event ID 1096447
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1096447
232. The Village of Restalrig.
This ancient hamlet, which is named after the family of De Lestalric, lies E. of the Old Town of Edinburgh on one of the roads to Leith, and has been engulfed by the modern city. Of the characteristic cottages that formerly bordered the village street only one has survived without material alteration. This is an oblong, rubble-built, harled structure of two storeys, by tradition "the wricht's house," with a gabled projection towards the street to contain the staircase. The entrance, which has a moulded architrave bearing the date 1678 on the lintel, opens at the stair-foot.* Some years ago a wide gateway was forced through the main block; morer ecently a gablet of the staircase has been taken down.
A few yards farther N. is a fragment of the outer wall of the 16th-century Deanery of Restalrig.** The front, which to-day forms the W. boundary of the Scottish Milk Marketing Board's premises, was originally a simpler version of Mar's Wark in Stirling. Coarsely built in rubble, it has two piers projecting on each side of an opening which has probably always been an entrance. The tops of the piers are set out on corbelling. On their N. side can be traced a large built-up window, as well as a high and wide' doorway, with an unusually slender lintel, which has only recently been filled in. There is some reason to believe that the room inside was once vaulted.
The buildings of the Church Hall, which lie S. of the structure first mentioned, have recently been contrived from the remains of a row of old cottages, the lower parts of the front wall being left intact apart from the closing-up of the openings.
RCAHMS 1951, visited c.1941
*One of the stair-landings inside was a re-used gravestone, but this memorial has recently been returned to the churchyard near by.
**In 1630 Captain Ludovic Fowler was served heir to his father, Master William Fowler, "in that great house the Dean's house" together with "the orchards and gardens and the chamber hous called the Priests ' chambers adjacent to the same." This entry in the Register of Service of Heirs, Edinburgh, shows that the prebendaries' manses stood beside the Deanery.
