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Kirkwall, Old Tolbooth

Tolbooth (18th Century)

Site Name Kirkwall, Old Tolbooth

Classification Tolbooth (18th Century)

Canmore ID 111031

Site Number HY41SW 142

NGR HY 4489 1086

Datum OSGB36 - NGR

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/111031

Ordnance Survey licence number AC0000807262. All rights reserved.
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Administrative Areas

  • Council Orkney Islands
  • Parish Kirkwall And St Ola
  • Former Region Orkney Islands Area
  • Former District Orkney
  • Former County Orkney

Archaeology Notes

HY41SW 142 4489 1086

'The Orkney Herald' reported in 1890 and 1891 a number of finds on the site. Builders discovered a tombstone fragment and a number of large sandstone balls were also found. Some six months later a skeleton was revealed.

Activities

Publication Account (1981)

From the middle of the seventeenth century until the middle of the following century a burgess' house at the foot of the Strynd served as the burgh Tolbooth, but judging from the large number of escapes made from it the dwelling failed utterly as an institutional deterrent. Although inadequate as a prison, it apparently served quite well as a chamber for council meetings. While burgh officialdom met in the Strynd, the sheriff court had been meeting in the cathedral since the period after the demolition of the castle. To rectify the latter situation and to aid the former, the Earl of Morton proposed the construction of a new Town House which was to be shared equally by both parties. A new Town House was built in the Kirk Green on the site of the Covenantors' memorial out of stone from the castle ruins. When the project was completed in the 1740s, Kirkwall had 'a neat building in which the sheriff's and other courts are held, and the assembly in their proper halls of the middle storey, below is the common prison and in the upper the Mason's Lodge, etc.(Low, 1879, 59). The assembly rooms were a new departure for Kirkwall – an important landmark in her social history (Hossack, 1900, 271). That Town House served the burgh until the closing years of the nineteenth century.

Information from ‘Historic Kirkwall: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1977).

Publication Account (1996)

James III granted the right to have a tolbooth in 1486, and a house at the foot of Strynd was acquired for this use in the mid-17th century. A timber guard-house was built in St Magnus’s churchyard in 1703, and a new tollbooth proposed. A new tollbooth replaced the guard-house in 1742. The 13th Earl of Morton gave £200 and the use of stone from the royal castle, for the right to hold sheriff courts (formerly held in the cathedral) in the hall; it was roofed with slates from the Earl’s Palace (TCM in Kirkwall Library; Tudor, J R, The Orkneys and Shetlands (1883), 232-3). The ground floor was a jail and lock-up, the first floor was used for courts and assemblies, and the second floor was a masonic lodge. The tolbooth was demolished in 1890, and a town hall was built nearby, to designs by T S Peace, 1884-7.

(Hossack, B H, Kirkwall in the Orkneys (1900); pre-demolition drawing by T S Peace in Kirkwall Library).

Information from ‘Tolbooths and town-houses: civic architecture in Scotland to 1833’ (RCAHMS 1996).

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