South Leith Parish Church, Kirkgate, Leith, Edinburgh

South Leith Parish Church, Kirkgate, Leith, Edinburgh

Thomas Hamilton designed this decorated gothic church in 1848, incorporating some late 15th century remains. It is a rectangular-plan aisled church constructed in cream sandstone with stugged ashlar and polished dressings. The building features a square-plan four-stage engaged northwest tower and a small later vestry to the southeast.

The base course runs around the building, with an eaves cornice above. Pointed-arched windows with deeply chamfered reveals light the aisles. Geometric and flowing tracery appears in the aisle and clerestory windows. Most openings are furnished with hood-moulds and label-stops, mostly carved as masques or heads. The building is strengthened by offset diagonal buttresses topped with crocketted pinnacles.

The northwest tower has four stages. The first stage contains a round-arched doorway with a timber door to the east, detailed with blind tracery and decorative iron hinges, and a bipartite window to the north, with a string course above. The second stage has paired lancets to the east and north with a sloping string course above. The third stage carries a square heraldic panel under stepped roll-moulding, with a clock above to the north, east and west faces, and a sloping string course. The top stage has chamfered corners and tall louvred bipartite windows on all faces, topped by a decoratively pierced and cusped parapet sitting on a blind traceried corbel table with masque pendants.

The east entrance front (liturgical west) is gabled with a cross finial and features a round-arched bipartite window at centre, a string course, and a large five-light window with flowing tracery above. Round-arched moulded doorways to the side aisles are detailed as the tower doorway. The west front (liturgical east) is similarly gabled with cross finial, containing a bipartite window flanked by cusped arrow slit windows at centre, a string course, and a large six-light window with flowing tracery above. The seven-bay aisle elevations, with the base of the tower forming the easternmost bay of the north aisle, have lean-to roofs and bipartite aisle windows divided by buttresses. The westernmost bay of the south aisle contains a small window. Two short gabletted wallhead stacks stand to each side of the nave.

The vestry is a twentieth-century addition, a small gabled single-storey rectangular-plan structure to the northwest with rectangular cusped bipartite windows and a curved gablet.

The roof is of slate with metal flashings, and the building has four wallhead stacks in total, with moulded skews. All windows contain square leaded panes.

Interior

The five-bay nave is supported by substantial octagonal stone piers to the arcade. The aisle roofs are panelled with pierced braces springing from carved mask corbels. An ornate carved hammerbeam roof springs from carved mask corbel stops. Raked galleries at the east and west ends feature blind tracery balustrades, with an organ installed in the west gallery. A vaulted east vestibule has foliate capitals to its columns. The west vestibule is floored with pre-Reformation grave slabs.

The church contains important furnishings: an elaborate marble and sandstone pulpit with prophet figures in columned niches, designed by Sydney Mitchell & Wilson and installed in 1893–4; a Renaissance-style marble font; galleries and a west screen dated 1909 with a framework of cusped tracery to the organ pipes. An extensive stained glass scheme by the Ballantine studio (1889–93) includes a Christ preaching window to the east and a Last Supper window to the west.

Graveyard and Surrounding Features

The graveyard contains a large number of elaborate nineteenth-century gravestones and monuments, alongside some eighteenth-century stones carved with memento mori. Gothic battlemented burial enclosures with thirteen arches line the west wall. A Tudor gothic arcade with seven arches, a quatrefoil carved parapet and shields with decorative cast-iron tie-beams, is dated 1826–34. A classical enclosure stands to the right of the Constitutions Street entrance. Enclosures for the Ramsay (1806–71), Wood (1795–1878) and Lawson families occupy the southeast wall. An empty classical enclosure to the south is now encased by gothic arches, with tombstones dated from the 1830s onwards.

Tall rubble walls enclose the churchyard, with ashlar and render to Constitution Street featuring corniced blind arches in channelled and cusped jambs. Octagonal panelled gatepiers mark the Kirkgate and Constitution Street entrances. Fleur-de-lis railings and gates complete the boundaries.