restoration

This five meter tall decorative chimney stack was so unstable you could rock it back and forward. All the mortar had been washed out of the stonework. If it wasn't for the two flues being lined with large clay liners, the joints rebated into each other and haunched with mortar, the chimney would have collapsed long ago. Very nearly a tonne of lime mortar was packed into all the joints to stabilise the structure, and here it is, good for at least another hundred years.

This chimney is one of two I restored on the gingerbread house at Gowanbank, by Sir James Gowan, an eccentric Lothians architect of the late Victorian era with an individual style.