Newmilns, 48-50 Main Street, Town House

This diminutive town-house stands on a prominent site on the S side of Main Street, the adjacent houses to the E being set back to reveal its main (E) gable-wall. It is a two-storeyed rubble-built structure with dressed margins and crowsteps, measuring 6.1m across the E front by 6m to its junction with a later building which encloses its W wall. A double forestair on the E rises to a central doorway flanked by heavily-moulded round-headed windows. Surmounting the crowstepped E gable there is a stone bell cot with plain columns, carrying a heavily-corniced ogival cupola whose vane bears the date 1739. The N front has at ground-floor level a central doorway and a small window immediately E of it, and at first-floor level there are two windows with chamfered surrounds.

The ground floor is barrel-vaulted and presumably functioned as a prison, while the first-floor room was the council-chamber. This has been modernised, but retains an original fireplace and grate in the W wall.

It is possible that the N wall, whose masonry is less regular than that of the E wall, may preserve part of an earlier building, although this may reflect the greater level of refinement appropriate to the main front. The survival of an earlier window-jamb E of the W first-floor window in the N wall also suggests the re-working of an older structure. The main fabric may be ascribed to about the middle of the 18th century, and perhaps to 1739, with alterations to the embrasures of the Nand E fronts later in the same century. The heavily-moulded E windows may indeed have been renewed at a later date. The forestair is probably also of late 18th-century date, but may replace one of similar form. It has been extensively renewed in recent restoration, along with the pedimented timber door-surround.

An early wayside-marker set against the Wend of the N wall gives distances to Kilmarnock, Galston, Darvel and Edinburgh.

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