Rising into the air above Canonmills is this pepperpot turret.
Close-up, it resembles the sinuous limb of a dragon, but it is sheathed in what architects term properly (and more prosaically) ‘fishscale’ slates.
This is just one memorable detail of the distinctive Scottish baronial tenement which has stood at the corner of Warriston Road and Canonmills since 1863.
A squint-inducing cipher panel helpfully makes the building date completely unclear.
Another panel reads AR – presumably the initials of its architect, developer or first owner. If any reader can help establish which by looking at the deeds, we’d be grateful.
Other distinctive features include the rocket-like ‘2-stage corbelled turret clasping angle to right’
... with its ‘decorative cruciform iron finial’ which occasionally catches the eye and bemuses it from as high up the road as Heriothill House.
It is a wonderfully big, bold statement of a building, and would have been even bolder at the time of its construction before many of the other local tenements were built and Brandon Terrace was mostly grass. For an interpretation of Knox’s manipulative painting of the local scene some 30 years earlier, see Breaking news (2.12.11).
The building was listed Category C in September 1994, with the adjoining premises of the former Taylor’s Bakery listed for demolition three months earlier. Somehow the latter survived, and both have been occupied by Napier Bathrooms and Interiors since, we think, 2011.
Taylor’s was the end of a milling and baking tradition which stretched back to the 12th century, when Holyrood Abbey’s Augustinian monks operated a watermill here under royal licence from David I. That tradition is recalled in the 17th-century ‘Baxter’s Land’ stone embedded in the wall of the petrol station over the road. It was discovered during demolition work to extend the garage in 1964.
For further banquets of bullfaced sandstone, crowsteps and scroll screwputts, visit Gifford et al.’s Edinburgh: The Buildings of Scotland (1984: 421) or Historic Scotland’s listed buildings website here.
Do you have a favourite building in Broughton, or one you'd like to know more about? Tell us about it by email at spurtle@hotmail.co.uk on Facebook Broughton Spurtle or Twitter @theSpurtle
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@theSpurtle after nerdy turret research Tayor's Bakery from whence choreying wam rolls a compulsory rite of passage