Gone With the Wynd: A Shopper’s Prehistory of the Tron Kirk

Meet the ancestors with Morag Cross and explore the wooden shops that lined the wynds, selling both the exotic and the mundane

By Scottish Historic Buildings Trust

A lecture by Morag Cross

It’s the 1580s in the Royal Mile, so where could you buy 60 shirts, foil cloth breeches, drawing boards, pan hats, Spanish almonds, Swedish iron bars, confectionary boxes, French canvas and 636 golf balls? Before the Tron Kirk was built in the 1630s, wooden shops lined the wynds, selling both the exotic and mundane. The residents were equally intriguing, tailors and booksellers, widows remarrying, five nuns, and a pioneering spinster ‘being and abyding without marriage’. Meet the ancestors!