Moffat, High Street, Town House

Photographic survey of buildings in Moffat by the Scottish National Buildings Record in September 1964.

The former town-house, known locally as the 'Green Steeple', is situated with its principal (W) gable facing High Street, which forms a broad market-place. It is advanced beyond the adjacent street-front to the N, and on the S it extends a fourbay frontage along Well Street. It was built in 1772 to designs by Alexander Stevens, 'mason in Prestonhall', and replaced an earlier building on an island site in the High Street, possibly the 'tollbooth in Moffet' for which plans were drawn in 1695.

The building, which is of coursed rubble with painted sandstone dressings, is two-storeyed and of rectangular plan, measuring 13.7m along the S front by 6.2m. At ground-floor level the S front has two shop-fronts flanking the doorway to a central stair, with four regularly-spaced rectangular windows on the upper level. The W front has central windows at both levels, the lower one converted from a doorway and the upper one blind, and a simply-moulded surround defines a gable pediment enclosing a bull's-eye window. Above this there rises the plinth of a square steeple whose main stage displays four clock-faces. The belfry stage above, which carries a pyramidal slated roof, was truncated when the bell was removed in the early 1960s.

The interior contained a prison and a first-floor court-room, and was also used for a period in the late 18th century as a grammar-school. It has since been converted for a shop on the ground floor and for domestic use above, and retains no original features, except for the thick W wall of the central staircase. The bell, whose present location is unknown, is said to bear the date 1660 and the Annandale family arms and coronet, and was evidently the 'Mofitt bell' for which William Langshaw, 'plummer', submitted an account in that year.

Information from ‘Tolbooths and Town-Houses: Civic Architecture in Scotland to 1833’ (1996).