Revealing the History Behind the Facade: A Timber-framed Building at No. 302 Lawnmarket, Edinburgh

Abstract

The property at No. 302 Lawnmarket, Edinburgh, is a rare survival of a ‘timber land’, the timber-framed buildings that were once commonplace along the city's Royal Mile and elsewhere in Scotland in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two painted panels survive as components of the timber frontage, providing insights into the nature and function of the galleries that projected from these buildings. The building also retains fragments of two richly decorated board-and-beam ceilings, the beams of which have been successfully dated by dendrochronology. One possible interpretation of the dendrochronological results is that multi-storied tenements such as No. 302 may not have been conceived as such but were built upwards in stages, the platform-framing of the box-like construction allowing for storey-by-storey development.