[6][7] The design involved an asymmetrical main frontage facing onto the High Street; there was a square tower at the southwest corner which featured an arched doorway on the ground floor, a window with a hood mould on the first floor and then a tall main section, which was constructed in rubble masonry and surmounted with the tiered octagonal belfry and steeple which had been recovered from the first tolbooth.

[4] The town house, which was designed by James Crighton in the Palladian style and built in ashlar stone at right angles to the tolbooth, was completed in 1733.

[2] Following the Jacobite rising of 1745, some of the Bonnie Prince Charlie's supporters were imprisoned in the tolbooth before being sentenced to transportation overseas.

[3] A large assembly hall was erected in the area behind the two buildings in the mid-19th century and modified to a design by William Constable in 1901.

[10] In 1932, as part of the arrangements to commemorate the centenary of the death of the novelist, Sir Walter Scott, a plaque was placed on the wall of the tolbooth recording Scott's residency in quarters in Musselburgh while serving as a quartermaster in the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons during the Napoleonic Wars.