St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral

This guide to St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh opens with a puzzle: why the skyline carries three spires when the winning 1872 design called for only one. It follows sisters Barbara and Mary Walker, whose fortune funded the cathedral on condition it be built, and the six-architect competition that picked Sir George Gilbert Scott's quieter single-tower plan over a local favourite's three-spire design. Scott's costs then climbed from an estimated eighty-nine thousand pounds toward something closer to one hundred ten thousand.