West Port, St Andrews

At the west end of South Street, St Andrews' grand street of shops, colleges and ruins, the West Port is the best preserved town gate in Scotland. The mason Thomas Robertson built it in 1587 as a monumental entrance to the town, reusing parts of an earlier gate, and modelled it on Edinburgh's Netherbow Port, which was itself based on a gate in Paris. St Andrews was never walled for defence: like other Scottish burghs it was bounded by garden dykes with gates where the streets came in, and this is the only one left, more a statement of civic pride than a fortification. A round-arched pend runs between two half-octagonal towers under a corbelled parapet with mock cannon spouts. By the 1800s it was dilapidated, and in 1843 it was renovated, with new buttresses and new carved panels of the town's arms and of David I on horseback. Traffic still runs through the central arch; walkers use the side arches.