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Ayr, Main Street, Newton Tower

Tower (18th Century)

Site Name Ayr, Main Street, Newton Tower

Classification Tower (18th Century)

Canmore ID 112418

Site Number NS32SW 149

NGR NS 33831 22366

Datum OSGB36 - NGR

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/112418

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

  • Council South Ayrshire
  • Parish Ayr
  • Former Region Strathclyde
  • Former District Kyle And Carrick
  • Former County Ayrshire

Architecture Notes

NS32SW 149 33831 22366

38 - 44 Main Street is depicted on the OS 2nd Edition map (Ayrshire, sheet XXXIII, 1896). The houses have since been demolished, although the tower remains.

Information from RCAHMS (TIC), November 2001.

Activities

Photographic Survey (July 1961)

Photographic survey by the Scottish National Buildings Record in July 1961.

Publication Account (1996)

This steeple was built in 1792-5 as the central feature of a town-house, most of which, along with the adjacent parish church to the E, was demolished in 1967 for road-widening. The church had been built in 1777, partly on the yard attached to an earlier town-house, and the steeple rises over a pend which formed the main entrance to the churchyard. It now stands on a traffic-island, facing W to Main Street. The steeple comprises a five-stage tower, 5m square at ground level, which carries an octagonal stone spire, and it is 21.7m in overall height. The masonry is harled rubble, with painted sandstone dressings which include narrow quoins and plain horizontal bands dividing the three lower stages, and moulded cornices below the upper stages and at the wall-head. There are wide elliptical arches in the E and W faces of the ground-floor pend, while each of the next three stages has one window in the W face, respectively rectangular, round-headed and octagonal. At the fifth stage there are four clock-faces, each bearing the date 1795, and the angles at the base of the spire are marked by ball-finials. The bell-chamber is in the spire, which has a narrow louvred opening in each of the principal faces.

The steeple was originally incorporated in a two-storeyed rectangular block measuring about 22.5m from N to S by 6.3m, from which its W face projected slightly. Both wings had shops on the ground floor and two first-floor windows in the W front, with two lengths of balustrade in the wall-head parapet. Access to the first floor was by an enclosed stair against the rear wall to a small vestibule E of the first-floor room in the steeple. This room itself served as a lobby to the upper floors of the wings, and two blocked doorways are identifiable which in the 19th century gave access to a parish school on the N and assembly-rooms on the S.

The belfry in the spire contains two bells cast by Thomas Mears, London, in 1795, which measure 0.51 m and 0.6m in respective diameters.

HISTORY

The burgh of Newton on Ayr was permitted to erect a tolbooth by royal charters of 1595 and 1600, but courts were regularly held in private houses until 1650, when the 'new tolbooth' is mentioned. By 1792 the existing town-house was in a ruinous state, and a contract was made with John Neill, 'mason in Wallacetown', to erect a town-house and steeple,according to a plan supplied by himself, for £425. The contract was entered into and payments madt; by the town council, but they acted on the instructions of a separate body known as 'the Community'. The council agreed 'to drink the King's health in the New Council House' in June 1793, but the height of the steeple was still under discussion later that year when Neill offered to raise it by another storey for an extra £20, and the final inspection took place in 1795. In March of the same year the council and a local merchant were instructed to obtain the bells, which were delivered in August, and a clock which was installed by James Allan.

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

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