Musselburgh, Linkfield Road, Loretto School Mound

NT37SW 2.00 34903 72906

NT37SW 2.01 NT 349 729 Well

(NT 3490 7290) Chapel of Our Lady of Loretto (NR) and Hermitage (NR) (remains of)

OS 25" map (1967)

The beginning of the Chapel of Loretto, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, is narrated in the Diurnal of Occurrents under date 19th April 1533. There followed a charter from Musselburgh to Thomas Duchty, hermit of the Order of St Paul, in 27th January 1533-4, granting 5 roods of land for the chapel and adjacent hermit's cell. The furnishings for the chapel were supplied by James V in 1534.

The chapel was destroyed in Hereford's expedition in 1544, but was repaired; however, by 1590 it was ruinous, and its stones were used for building Musselburgh Tolbooth (NT37SW 3).

H Scott 1950; New Statistical Account (NSA) 1845 (L Moodie and J Beveridge)

There is at the entrance to Loretto School an artificial mound which resembles the orthodox covering of an ice house. It is 82 yds in circumference at the base, 20 yds along the top, and tree-covered. A straight stone passage runs into and under the mound. The site has, for a long time, been popularly associated with that of the Chapel of Our Lady of Loretto, but it may have been used as an ice house.

The entrance to the passage faces NE. It is 5'6" high and 3'2" wide. It is set in the central part of a stone wall which extends outwards at a lower height on each side. The wall assists in supporting the lower part of the front of the mound in the same way as the entrance wall of an ice house supports the mound of many an ice chamber.

Over the entrance is the pediment of a dormer window, dated 1647, which is said to have come from Pinkie House. There is no exit at the far end of the passage into the mound, so that, without excavation, it is impossible to say whether there may exist an ice pit under the mound. There was a strong iron bar with a pulley attached, in the ceiling of the passage; this supports the tentative suggestion that the mound perhaps conceals an ice house as pulleys were frequently attached to the arch of the inner doorway of the passage of an ice house to pull the ice up from the deep ice pit. The ice could have come from an artificial pond which was laid out in the grounds of Loretto House.

Human skulls and other human bones were found under the mound in 1831. A few years later, more bones were unearthed, and a gold cross and chain. Still more bones were found in 1939 when digging behind the mound for an air-raid shelter. All this suggests that there was a burial ground here, possibly connected with the old chapel, or the bones may be connected with the Battle of Pinkie (NT37SE 38); they may even be prehistoric, in which case the mound may have originated in a round barrow.

A N Robertson 1953

An ice-house as described, now in use as a store-room.

Visited by OS (BS) 14 August 1975.

NMRS REFERENCE

Architect: John Honeyman & Kepple - Chapel, 1891

Architect: Archibald MacPherson 1903