Standing Building Recording

Date August 2009 - September 2009

Event ID 606507

Category Recording

Type Standing Building Recording

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/606507

NT 2560 7330 Works at the site in August–September 2009 included a desk-based assessment, the recording of the 1950s pharmacy building in advance of its demolition, and a survey of the outside of the Greyfriars churchyard boundary walls where they face into the Grassmarket Campus site.

The pharmacy building was on the site of the early 19th-century Castle Brewery, which was built on the site of

tenements that dated from at least the mid 17th century. In 1913 a new Department of Mining was established in the former Castle Brewery buildings at Heriot Watt College. The Mining Institute which included a Mine Rescue Station, one of only two in Scotland, was opened in 1915. However, the facilities proved to be inadequate and were remodelled in 1926. The main brewery building was retained but the smaller outbuildings were cleared. The growth of Heriot Watt College in the mid 20th century included an increase in the number of pharmacy students, and new pharmacy buildings were constructed on the Grassmarket Campus in 1951–2. The Z-plan Pharmacy Department building occupied the eastern and part of the southern side of the Grassmarket campus, the site of the former malt house and brass works. A comprehensive photographic survey was made of the 1952 pharmacy building.

The E and S sides of the campus site are enclosed by the boundary walls of Greyfriars churchyard. A drawn record, photographic survey and written description of the rear (school) side of the walls was produced. It has been suggested that the E–W aligned section of this wall may incorporate parts of the 16th-century Flodden Wall. The site survey and analysis of historical documents revealed that while it was unlikely that in situ segments of the wall remained, it was possible that parts of the city wall were incorporated into the 18th-century property boundary wall constructed on the same alignment. The visible parts of the cemetery wall were

found to have been created in sections at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, and each of these related to the construction of individual burial-plots. Fragmentary upstanding wall sections of pre-existing tenement buildings were recorded at the extreme SE corner of the site, a narrow pend existed between these and the cemetery wall.

Archive: CECAS SMR and RCAHMS (intended)

Funder: George Heriot’s School

Amanda Gow, Kenneth Macfadyen and Tanja Romankiewicz – Addyman Archaeology