Auchtermuchty Town House is a municipal structure in the High Street,

Auchtermuchty Auchtermuchty ( ; , 'upland of the pigs/boar') is a town in Fife, Scotland. It is beside Pitlour Hill and north of Glenrothes. History Until 1975 Auchtermuchty was a royal burgh, established under charter of King James V in 1517. There is ...

Fife Fife (, ; gd, Fìobha, ; sco, Fife) is a council area, historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries with Perth and Kinross (i ...

, Scotland. The structure, which accommodates the local public library, is a Category B listed building.

History

The town of Auchtermuchty was granted a charter by

James IV of Scotland James IV (17 March 1473 – 9 September 1513) was King of Scotland from 11 June 1488 until his death at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. He inherited the throne at the age of fifteen on the death of his father, James III, at the Battle of Sauchi ...

in 1517: the charter gave the burgh council the right to erect a

tolbooth A tolbooth or town house was the main municipal building of a Scottish burgh, from medieval times until the 19th century. The tolbooth usually provided a council meeting chamber, a court house and a jail. The tolbooth was one of three essen ...

but it seems that a purpose-built structure was not contemplated until the early 18th century. At that time the burgh leaders decided that the lack of a traditional tolbooth was "uneasy and troublesome". The new building was designed in the Scottish medieval style, built in

rubble masonry Rubble stone is rough, uneven building stone not laid in regular courses. It may fill the core of a wall which is faced with unit masonry such as brick or ashlar. Analogously, some medieval cathedral walls are outer shells of ashlar with an inn ...

and was completed in 1729. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage of seven bays facing the High Street. The central bay was formed by a tall three-stage tower: there was a doorway flanked by

pilaster In classical architecture Classical architecture usually denotes architecture which is more or less consciously derived from the principles of Greek and Roman architecture of classical antiquity, or sometimes even more specifically, from the ...

s supporting a triangular

fanlight A fanlight is a form of lunette window, often semicircular or semi-elliptical in shape, with glazing bars or tracery sets radiating out like an open fan. It is placed over another window or a doorway, and is sometimes hinged to a transom. Th ...

in the first stage, three pairs of

lancet window A lancet window is a tall, narrow window with a pointed arch at its top. It acquired the "lancet" name from its resemblance to a lance. Instances of this architectural element are typical of Gothic church edifices of the earliest period. Lancet wi ...

s in the second stage and a belfry with louvres in the third stage. The tower was surmounted by a

parapet A parapet is a barrier that is an extension of the wall at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony, walkway or other structure. The word comes ultimately from the Italian ''parapetto'' (''parare'' 'to cover/defend' and ''petto'' 'chest/breast'). Whe ...

, a

spire A spire is a tall, slender, pointed structure on top of a roof of a building or tower, especially at the summit of church steeples. A spire may have a square, circular, or polygonal plan, with a roughly conical or pyramidal shape. Spires are ...

and a

weather vane A wind vane, weather vane, or weathercock is an instrument used for showing the direction of the wind. It is typically used as an architectural ornament to the highest point of a building. The word ''vane'' comes from the Old English word , m ...

. The wings flanking the tower contained doorways in the central bays on either side and were originally fenestrated by

sash window A sash window or hung sash window is made of one or more movable panels, or "sashes". The individual sashes are traditionally paned window (architecture), paned windows, but can now contain an individual sheet (or sheets, in the case of double gla ...

s on both floors. Internally, the principal rooms were the prison cells on the ground floor and the council chamber on the first floor. In the early 19th century, after commissioning four new bridges across the Calsay Burn, the burgh council got into financial difficulties and declared itself bankrupt; the borough treasurer, John Beverage, who had signed a personal guarantee in favour of the bank, was imprisoned as a debtor in the town house for nearly three weeks in May 1818. He subsequently sued the members of the local masonic lodge, who had asked for his incarceration, for damages of £5,000. After the numbers of persons being held in the cells reduced in the 1820s and 1830s, the ground floor was converted for retail use and, in the second half of the 19th century the first floor windows were replaced by bi-partite

mullion A mullion is a vertical element that forms a division between units of a window or screen, or is used decoratively. It is also often used as a division between double doors. When dividing adjacent window units its primary purpose is a rigid supp ...

ed windows which were surmounted by gables and

finial A finial (from '' la, finis'', end) or hip-knob is an element marking the top or end of some object, often formed to be a decorative feature. In architecture, it is a small decorative device, employed to emphasize the Apex (geometry), apex of a d ...

s. A new bell, cast by John Warner & Sons of London, was installed in the tower in 1874 and new clock faces were added in 1897. The building continued to serve as the headquarters of the burgh council for much of the 20th century, but ceased to be the local seat of government when the enlarged North-East Fife District Council was formed in 1975. The building was subsequently converted for use as the local public library. A detailed map of the town, prepared by the

Dundee Dundee (; sco, Dundee; gd, Dùn Dè or ) is Scotland's fourth-largest city and the 51st-most-populous built-up area in the United Kingdom. The mid-year population estimate for 2016 was , giving Dundee a population density of 2,478/km2 or ...

architect, George Jamieson, in 1883, which had been re-discovered in an antiques shop in Cupar, was returned to the people of Auchtermuchty and placed on a wall in the library in March 2019.

References

{{reflist Government buildings completed in 1729 City chambers and town halls in Scotland Category B listed buildings in Fife Auchtermuchty

History

See also

References