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Summary

Description

Robert Mathison 1871. 2-storey, 3-bay, asymmetrical, square-plan gothic style gabled villa with beaked stone crennellations to advanced windows and doorpiece. Sandstone ashlar with prominent vermiculated quoins to principal elevations; random whinstone rubble to N; painted render to rear (W). Base course and vermiculated eaves course. Dormers with slated cheeks and iron finials. Ornate floreate brackets to entrance hoodmould. Stop-chamfered mullions and window margins. Small piended-roof brick addition to rear.

Predominantly plane glazing in timber sash and case windows with smaller top sashes; some uPVC to upper floor and rear. 6-panel timber entrance door with plain fanlight above. Patio doors to rear. Graded grey slate roof; fish-scale slates to dormers. Stone skews with gableted skewputts and detail to mid skews. Corniced and canted rectangular gable end stacks with octagonal clay cans. Stone and iron finials.

INTERIOR: some good interior detailing survives including fine deep cornicing to principal rooms with carved plaster corbels. Fine turned timber stair with barley twist banisters.

BOUNDARY WALLS AND GARDEN ORNAMENTS: tall random rubble boundary walls with rounded copes and small round-arched alcoves (see Notes). Various reclaimed antique stone ornaments incorporated into boundary wall and elsewhere in garden including stone font (see Notes).

Statement of Special Interest

Runic Cross villa is a good example of a later 19th century cottage style villa with very fine carved stonework detailing and some good interior details. The highly detailed naturalistic flower and bird carvings around the door are particularly worthy of note and raise this house above other small ornamented Victorian villas.

It was built as the home of Robert Mathison a local builder, architect and stonemason who is responsible for the building contracts on many of the buildings in the town in conjunction with other architects, such as St James' RC Church and some of the larger villas. His work usually demonstrates high quality stone detailing as exemplified in the ornate detailing of the Runic Cross villa.

Mathison was a keen amateur geologist and palaeontologist and seems to have incorporated a number of his finds into the fabric of the building. The stone arches in the garden contain a number of fossils and there is the footprint of a pre-historic crocodile in the face of one of the sandstone blocks on the S side of the house. He also collected antique stonework, many pieces of which are incorporated in the boundary wall or stand elsewhere in the garden. These include an old baptismal font, inscribed 'Dryburgh font'.

The SW section was used as a Doctor's surgery and waiting room in the mid 20th century.

Mathison uncovered the shaft to an ancient Celtic cross (then considered to be 'runic', hence the name of this house) when working in the grounds of the parish church which he installed in front of the adjacent Plora Cottage. The Antiquary Society wanted to remove it to Edinburgh but he refused and a compromise was reached by displaying it outside Innerleithen Parish Church, where it remains today.

References

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