Kirkcaldy, 17 Tolbooth Street

Four buildings in the heart of the burgh give an insight into central Kirkcaldy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

34-36 Kirk Wynd (Andersoune's House) is a somewhat altered, probably partly early eighteenth-century dwelling house, although the date 1637 on the door lintel would suggest that sections of the house, at least, are earlier (see figure 14). Named after Matthew Anderson, a local meal dealer and maltster as well as a ruling elder in the parish church, the house is crow-stepped with a lean-to wing projecting onto the street.

17 Tolbooth Street is a pantiled, eighteenth-century dwelling comprising two storeys and an attic.

23/25 Tolbooth Street, its near neighbour, is a three-storeyed, rubble-built dwelling with moulded door frames bearing the date 1785.

219 High Street to 317 Kirk Wynd standing on the corner of High Street and Kirk Wynd is a derelict building with crow-stepped gables, the only surviving such dwelling on the High Street. It still reveals eighteenth-century features, in spite of its poor state (see figure 14).

All of these dwellings were in the traditional prime site of the medieval burgh: near the market centre and the market cross in the High Street. They are fair reflections of quality housing for important burgesses in the heart of the town in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of the buildings lining the High Street display a distinguished architectural character that developed in the commercial and banking centre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Kirkcaldy was a prosperous manufacturing town.

Information from ‘Historic Kirkcaldy: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1995).