Mort House, Yester Parish Church, Main Street, Gifford

The graveyard surrounding Yester Parish Church in Gifford contains a T-plan church dating from 1708 to 1710 and a hearse house constructed around 1830. The church also includes a projecting four-stage tower. The church is white-harled, with ashlar margins that are chamfered at the arrises. Various decorative wall plaques and 18th-century wall monuments are present.

The tower advances from the center of the symmetrical, seven-bay southwest elevation. It is set-back above the second stage and includes a corbelled parapet with diminutive angle finials. A round-arched doorway sits at the center, topped with an oculus; each stage above has a louvred opening. A similarly detailed opening is present at the fourth stage on each remaining elevation. A narrower door is set into the re-entrant angle to the southeast. Two paired shields decorate the parapet of the southwest elevation. A slated polygonal spire rises above, topped with a decorative gilded weathervane.

The southwest wing features a southwest elevation with two large round-arched windows flanking the tower on each side, with smaller arched windows in the outer bays. The gable end elevations include tall doorways with two-leaf doors and small-pane fanlights. Large pointed arch windows sit above, featuring intersecting tracery and oculus at the apex. The northeast elevation has round-arched windows closely flanking the northeast jamb on each side.

The northeast jamb is gabled and two-storey, projecting from the center. It includes a narrow doorway at the center of the two-bay northeast gable, two rectangular windows above, with oculus at the apex and a coped apex stack. Windows are present to each floor by re-entrant angles to each side. A first-floor window and doorway sit within a lugged, bolection-moulded, and corniced doorpiece to the southeast return, leading to a flight of stone steps with wrought-iron railings and an architraved door.

Sash and case windows are fitted with small-pane glazing patterns, with a Gothic pattern to the pointed arch windows. Plain raised skews are present, and the northeast gable is steeply pitched. The roof is covered with grey slates.

The interior retains a central orientation and features rendered walls, boarded to dado height, and coomb ceilings. Deep embrasures are present. Lofts are incorporated into each jamb, supported by cast-iron columns with panelled fascia. A Tweeddale Gallery exists in the northeast jamb, with an earlier carved panel inserted, dated 1687 and bearing entwined initials. A finely panelled oak pulpit, likely from the 17th century and possibly originating from St Bothans Kirk, Yester, is topped with a gilded eagle and a decorative wrought-iron lamp bracket. An oak communion table, dating to 1895, is sympathetically designed. An oak front was added around 1945. A fine pierced balustrade is carved with ornate scrollwork. Box pews are also present, along with five fine oak chairs in a later 17th-century style.

The hearse house, built circa 1830, is a piend-roofed, rectangular building located to the east of the church within the graveyard. It is constructed of rubble with droved dressings, a wide pointed arch carriage doorway, and narrow pointed windows on each side elevation. It is roofed with slates.

The graveyard's gatepiers and walls are composed of square ashlar gatepiers with droved and carved panels, moulded cornices, and pyramidal coping at the main entrance. Lesser stugged stone gatepiers stand at the side gate. Decorative cast-iron gates are in place, flanked by ashlar coped rubble walls toward the burgh and rubble coped beyond to the circular graveyard.