Tolls and tankards
Over 200 years ago, this board would have been at the junction of two toll roads, next to one of the village’s former pubs, the White Horse.
Over the road is the old Toll House, built sometime after 1800. There would have been a gate across each road that the toll keeper opened on payment of a charge. Before the toll roads were established in 1791, it was very difficult for any wheeled vehicle to get to the village. The board on the Toll House lists the tolls charged in 1841. Tolls were abolished in 1881.
Opposite the Kirk is the Old Mill pub. While the building dates from the late 18th century, it has only been a pub since the 1980s. It was used by the village carter, and then in the 1930s it became the workshop of a handloom weaver. On either side of the Toll House are early 19th-century cottages. The vets’ surgery used to be the doctor’s surgery and the cottage at the end was the Post Office until the 1930s.
On the same side of the road as this board, is the former Free Church, built in 1847 after the ‘Disruption’ split the Church of Scotland in 1843. When the two churches reunited in 1931, it became the Church Hall and then in 2004, a shop and flats.
Did you know
Early on Christmas Day 1950, a group of nationalists removed the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey. For a few days immediately before it was returned to Arbroath Abbey on 11 April 1951, it was hidden in a house in Killearn.
