Burntisland, High Street, Town Hall, Bell

Bell in Town Hall.

This bell, which once hung in the Tolbooth, is a large and unusually good casting, measuring 2 feet 6 ½ inches in diameter at the skirt and 1 foot 10 inches in height from the skirt to the crown. Its canons are complete and each bears on the outer surface a cherub's head and leafage. There are two annulets on the sound-bow, and seven at the waist. Above the latter are two representations in bas-relief of a full-rigged ship. The crown is enriched with two lines of crest-work bordering an inscription in Roman letters, EN LAN 1595 SOVPLIF SVIS NONSFIFE PARLES HABITANS DE CLASTRE 1677 BEN YCK WER HER GOETEN DOR G.H.S.I. The first part of the inscription is obviously in mutilated French and it has been suggested (1) that it should read, EN L’AN[NÉE] 1595, JE SVIS MONTÉE PAR LESHABITAN[T]S DE CLASTRE; the full inscription thus being: ‘In the year 1595 I was set up by the inhabitants of Clastre’- a place not identified. The letters SOVPL are held to be a misreading of ‘SOUS L’ originally intended as an instruction to the founder and meaning that the date preceding it was to be placed ‘under the letter L’ of LAN and not in the actual text. The second part of the inscription is in Dutch and records a recasting of the bell: ‘1677 I was refounded by G.H.S.I.’ WER HER must be for WEDER= ‘again’.

RCAHMS 1933, visited 14th October 1931.

(1) Proc. Scot. Ant. Soc., xlix (1914-15), pp. 339-40. In this description GOETEN appears as GORTEN