18thC carved stone on Coburg House

Image: © kim traynor Taken: 9 Oct 2011

A tablet showing a newly built wooden ship flying two saltire ensigns, above which are displayed the words 'God bless the Carpenters of No.[rth] Leith who built this House 1715'. Below the ship appear the words 'Trahuntq siccas machino carinas'*, which is a line by the Roman poet Horace that apparently translates as 'machines dragging out the dried-up hulls of ships'. The lower panel explains, 'The above stone moved from old tenement in Sand Port Street, now taken down and placed here 1840. Robert D. Menzies Esq. Boxmaster.' The carving looks surprisingly, almost suspiciously modern, but this tablet is illustrated, presumably as an antiquity, in Grant's Old and New Edinburgh published in 1883. A boxmaster was the name for a Scottish guild treasurer, in this case of the Incorporation of Carpenters. *'trahuntque siccas machinae carinas' in the original For a wider view of the tablet's position, see Image

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