Wheelwright’s Workshop, Fala Dam, Midlothian, ca. 1890

Wheelwright’s Workshop, Fala Dam, Midlothian, ca. 1890

Wood

This wheelwright’s workshop in the hamlet of Fala Dam in a rich agricultural area about twelve miles south of Edinburgh, is a stone-built, pan-tiled structure on two floors with a cottage at one end. It is part of a terrace of cottages, shops and workshops. The roof tiles suggest it was constructed in the later eighteenth century. The wide central entrance and opening above reveal the building’s specialist functions for storing the wood and components of carts and other related goods (such as wheel barrows), with the yard in front given over to the construction or repair, as here, of large wheeled vehicles. There would have been a forge nearby for making the iron components and tyres. Three men are visible in this image, which seems to have been taken in high summer. Another photograph of the same workshop a few years earlier has four men posing outside holding their wood working tools, with rolled-up sleeves and aprons. A great deal of the work undertaken was probably out-of-doors. Indeed, the dismantled cart that dominates this image is so large it could only have been built in a yard.

The range of skills practiced in the Fala Dam workshop were the subject of one of the most famous accounts of the life of a late nineteenth-century rural artisan. This was George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop, published in 1923 but referring to the years from 1884-91 when George and his brother ran a wheelwright business in Farnham in Surrey that had been in family ownership since 1810. In an elegiac account, influenced by Ruskin’s ideas of the moral authority of craftwork, Sturt detailed the techniques employed in making wheels before mechanisation, from the curing of the wood to the selection of the right timbers for strength and durability, to sawing with hand tools and the making and fitting of iron tyres.

This is one of several photographs of the workshop that was taken in the late nineteenth century, with variations in the extent of the foliage growing on the building and on the wooden railings suggesting a wide span of years. A photographic postcard from the 1930s also shows the same row of quaint cottages, with the workshop still visible, in a hamlet that was clearly attractive to tourists. Some of the contents of the joiner’s house were donated to the National Museums of Scotland in the 1960s. The buildings still exist today, though are now all converted into smart houses.

Though only a small hamlet, the local Post Office directory records that Fala accommodated a range of craft workers in the 1890s, including a cobbler, joiner, builder, thatcher, blacksmith and wright, Walter Stoddart, who is probably one of the men depicted in this photograph. There was also a dressmaker, two grocers, a baker and a butcher, along with a photographer, Robert Lothian, who may have taken this image.

National Museums Scotland

National Museums Scotland