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Day 4 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI from https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/swiftui/4 was short but still educational. I did have to look back to see how sets are created when doing Checkpoint 2, if I'm being totally honest. So far learning #swiftlang has been a pleasure and #twostraws a treat to watch.
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CW: whumptober day 4: iron rod, VOCALOID gekiyaku and kazehiki AU
Whumptober 2025, day 4: Iron Rod
from my super secret gekiyaku and kazehiki AU, their escape to the church that would go on to raise them, for better or for worse!!
The day he put his hands on her brother was the day Gekiyaku broke. She broke away from Kazehiki - agony - to pick up an iron pipe. and when the old man wasn't looking, she bashed his head in.
Gekiyaku cleaned and calmed Kazehiki as her blood boiled. As she sat him in the neighbor's red wagon, she stroked his hair with her bloody fingers, their teary red eyes meeting in a storm of emotion.
"There's a church on the outskirts. Kids go to school there. We'll go there," Her voice dropped to a broken whisper, her eyes rapidly hardening beyond her years. "They can't turn us away, Kaze, they won't."
#vocaloid #UTAU #gekiyaku #kazehiki #art #MastoArt #whump #siblings #blood #boy #girl #abuse #noncon #revenge #escape #dark #orphans #au
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CW: Behind Your Touch Ep 16
Daaaaaaamn, Yeobuuun going crazy with that iron pipe :blobcatscared:
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You remember Bob of course, our head on a stick.
But have you met Ivan? Ivan is a fur coat that someone put a rusty old iron pipe inside of and propped it against the back of the sauna, for no discernable reason. He's been there since before we bought the place. From the road it looks like a drunk guy leaning against the building.
Meanwhile a spruce has grown there (which I need to move) and it was time to get rid of Ivan. So Bob and Ivan got united.
The new hybrid says his named is Scarebob Ivansson but we'll probably just keep calling him Bob.
He resumed his summer job of guarding the big garden, basking in the setting sun and showing off his new style.
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An evolution in my DIY learning and #DisOldHouse adventure: I’m handy with plumbing, except for supply side stuff. But I’m determined to install our new water softener on my own doing some copper pipe work and Pex A, too.
Today’s 🤯= I know NPT is the standard for pipe thread. But today I learned MIP (male iron pipe) and FIP (female) are actually NPT. Why the hell aren’t they called MNPT and FNPT?!? Also the fittings are brass, not iron!
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Interceptor Sewers: the thread about Victorian efforts to clean up the Water of Leith
- The first part of Edinburgh’s sewage history covered the East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadows.
- The second part of Edinburgh’s sewage history looked at the sewage problems of the Victorian city and how to fix them
At the end of part 2 of this story, Edinburgh and Leith (separate burghs at this time) had finally agreed the terms of an “Interceptor Sewer” for the Water of Leith. What is an Interceptor Sewer? It is a sewer that “intercepts” other sewers and collects their output before it can discharge some place else; in this case into the river of the Water of Leith. This sewer could intercept all the untreated human and animal waste that was currently discharging into the river and carry it safely off somewhere else, out of sight and out of mind. The construction of the interceptor sewer began immediately after approval of the parliamentary bill in 1864, and took 3 years to complete. The engineers were David and Thomas Stevenson.
A tax assessment for the contribution towards the construction of the Interceptor Sewer under the terms of the Edinburgh and Leith Sewerage Act, 1864The 1864 Interceptor as we shall call it comprises some 5.2 miles (8.4km) of brick-built, egg-shaped sewer. This is the optimum shape for a sewer, ensuring good flow at low volumes, being “self scouring” and requiring a less wide excavation than a circular sewer of the same cross-sectional area.
Egg-shaped (left) vs. oval-shaped (right) sewer cross-sectionsThe interceptor follows the course of the Water of Leith, from the “irrigated meadow” at Roseburn park – where the Lochrin Burn discharged the waste of the south west of the city – to the Black Rocks off of Leith. It runs along the river banks in places and along the river bed itself in others. An exception is near Bonnington in Leith where it takes a more direct route, directly under the industries which had been using the river as their sewer.
Route of the 1864 Interceptor Sewer, overlaid on contemporary Ordnance Survey map.The sewer intercepted some 180 outflows into the river by the method shown below, which meant the old sewers would still overflow into the river during storm events, the internal weir directed most of the waste into the main interceptor. The interceptor got larger as it went downstream to account for the progressively increased volume of waste being added to it.
Cross-section diagram of how the sewer intercepts the old outflows along the riverSewer overflow of the 1864 Interceptor at the Coalhill in LeithThe brick-built interceptor is around 2.5 feet wide (I couldn’t find a precise measure), with some sections between 2 and 3 feet wide of cast iron pipe, and where it hits the Shore at Leith (picture above) it becomes a 3 foot 6″ pipe, set 20 feet back from the quayside. It is ideally sited to take much of the waste of Leith (which historically either flowed into the river, or was directed towards the shore). The outflow was at a depth 17 feet below the high water spring tides, with the outflow generally being carried away down the Firth of Forth east by the tide. The cost of this scheme was “about £70,000 [£8.9M in current money], entailing a special drainage-rate of 2/6d per £ on the rental within the [catchment area]“.
The pin marked “1864 vent” on the map refers to that curious, square-section “chimney” above the river weir in St. Mark’s Park. It’s not a chimney at all, but a “stink pipe” or sewer vent. Noxious gasses and air compressed by storm events can escape here.
St. Mark’s Park 1864 sewer vent, CC-by-SA N. Chadwick via GeographThe 1864 Interceptor did exactly what it was designed to do, and was very successful at it. It was calculated to carry 600 cubic feet per minute at the outflow, but even by the time it was completed the requirement had more than doubled to 1,340 cubic feet as the population had exploded along its route; “in some cases fivefold“. So the additional waste from the city simply overtopped the collection weirs and continued to find its way into the river.
There was also the continued problem of the waste collecting in the old mill lades at Coltbridge (Roseburn) and Stockbridge, and the same old story of reluctant owners and landlords and fragmented ownership making it very difficult to get anything done about these. In 1873, after nearly 10 years of to-and-fro, the “Edinburgh Improvement Trust” was ready to abandon trying to sort things out. Not even a “forceful petition from Stockbridge residents” having had the required effect. By 1884, a survey by the Trust found that the Coltbridge mill dam had accumulated behind it a 4 foot depth of solid, compacted human excrement and 7.5 feet depth of more liquid matter; the situation was intolerable.
In 1885, the Edinburgh Corporation stepped in and had the Coltbridge mill lades and dam certified as a public health nuisance and obtained an order requiring the owners to clean it up. In the words of the Corporation’s presiding officer:
A deposit of putrescent sewage and other decomposing organic matter [which] is continually evolving noxious gases and germs, of a nature to produce and provoke miasmatic and malarious disease, and to endanger the health of persons who reside in, or who have occasion to frequent the neighbourhood.
Edinburgh’s preferred solution was to fill the mill lades and demolish the weirs below the Coltbridge to cause the river to flow better and scour itself, but leave the lower weir at Leith Mills as a sewage trap. Leith was of course less than pleased by this and the two councils went back to wrangling. The Edinburgh Improvement Act of 1887 gave the Corporation the powers of compulsory purchase along the Stockbridge “Great Lade” (marked brown on the map below). This power they exercised, causing the lade to be progressively bought up and filled in from 1891-1893.
Course of the “Great Lade” through Stockbridge and CanonmillsA more coordinated approach was required however; in addition to the burghs of Edinburgh and Leith, the Parishes of Colinton and Currie, the County of Midlothian, the Sewerage Commission, the Dock Commission, and the Edinburgh and District Water Trust all had an interest. It was Leith though, that really drove action, after all they were at the bottom of the river so subject to any sewage in the river from their upstream neighbours. They were ill-served by the over-capacity 1864 Interceptor and they were most directly dependent on the water for livelihood and prosperity. Leith Town Council commissioned a series of public health and sewerage reports in 1885 and 1886 to set out the problem and had the whole course of the river surveyed from the uppermost mill to the sea, to detail the causes.
Edinburgh finally got on board with Leith, and together they commissioned a joint report in 1887 that proposed the construction of a duplicate interceptor sewer for the Water of Leith, along a longer course and with a much greater capacity. This sewer would remedy the shortcomings of the 1864 scheme and would serve to once and for all satisfy the requirements of both Edinburgh and Leith regards sewage disposal, and it was to be adequate for the next fifty years of expected growth in demand. Long-term thinking at last!
And so it was that the Water of Leith Purification and Sewerage Act, 1889 (you can read the full provisions online, here, all 70 pages of them) went before parliament; opposed by 16 groups of petitioners, mainly mill owners and industries determined to protect their rights to abstract water from the river and discharge effluent into it.
Preamble of the 1889 actThe act passed, and work proceeded on an altogether grander scheme for the whole river, some 22.5 miles long, with a diameter increasing from 4 feet upstream to 9’3″ x 7’2″ downstream. The scheme also included a branch for The Stank, the burn cum drain cum sewer that drained the village of Corstorphine, and the marshy land and farms of the Gyle area into the Water of Leith at Roseburn.
Route of the 1889 Interceptor marked in red, with the 1864 marked in yellowThe 1889 Interceptor largely follows that of 1864 between Coltbridge and Stockbridge and the two are interconnected in places. At sections it takes a more direct shortcut, allowing the 1864 to continue to intercept the sewers at the river, while channelling the upstream waste by a more direct route to the sea. After Stockbridge the 1889 route heads away from the river to take a more direct route to the sea, running directly under Pilrig Park and Leith Links (where construction was easier), serving the expanding district between Edinburgh and Leith along Leith Walk.
Route of the 1889 Interceptor through LeithThe vent for the 1889 sewer is behind St. Mary’s School on the Links, on the site of the old Roperie, It is another apparently isolated “chimney” and has always proved very hard to get a decent photo of! now that the 15 years and more of being hidden in a stalled building development it is much easier to access. I wonder if the residents of those fancy new townhouses realise what the public “feature” in front of their windows really is!
The 1889 Interceptor vent off of Leith Links, now an architectural feature off Pillans Walk. Photo © SelfThe two sewers now served a catchment area that was where the city was expanding fastest, shown by the pale orange area in the map below (they also served much of South Leith)
Late 19th century drainage catchment map of Edinburgh, the pale orange area had been served by the Water of Leith until the Interceptor Sewers took over.Long story short, the 1889 scheme was so successful that in 1896 the Edinburgh Corporation found itself needing to secure powers to pass by-laws to protect fishing rights in the river that only a few years before had been nothing but a stinking sewer! The river Purification Act had done exactly that. That said it was only the river which had been purified; the sewage was still entirely untreated and discharged directly into the Firth of Forth off the Black Rocks, where it joined by the effluent from the Old Town and the Southside of the city that flowed through the Irrigated Meadows system to enter the Firth of Forth at Fillyside. But that will be a further thread to cover the final part of this story.
The last part of this story is the thread about the great untold engineering feat of Edinburgh’s 1970s Interceptor Sewers and the grand scheme to clean up the Firth of Forth.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
A fox, hare, swan, peewee and a cannonball: the thread about Edinburgh’s first piped water supply
Comiston is an old placename, stretching back to 1337 in records. It comes from Coleman’s tun in Old English; or the farm of a man called Coleman. You may know that it is the site of the Comiston Springs, the source of Edinburgh’s first public water supply, and if you are interested in such things then the National Library of Scotland Map Library is your friend as it shows them all.
OS 1:25 inch map, 1892 survey. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThere are multiple natural springs in this area and given its relative proximity (about 3 miles) and the elevation to allow water to flow under gravity, it was an obvious place for the city to look for its first reliable source of clean drinking water in the 17th century. It had the right to do so since 1621 when an Act of Parliament was passed authorising the Magistrates of the city to bring in water “from a distance” and to carry out necessary works in the land though which it passed. They eventually bought the rights to the springs and water of Comiston from Lady Comiston for £18. A Dutch or German engineer resident in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Peter Bruschi or Brusche, was contracted to bring the water into the city. The springs were captured by pipes that led to a central cistern house, marked on the map above. One source says it had been built as early as 1674 (although that was perhaps just referencing the date when Brusche was contracted. At their fullest flow the springs could provide 23 to 36 cubic feet of water per minute, dropping to 9 to 10 cubic feet in the depth of summer.
Comiston springs cistern house, CC-BY-SA 2.0 Callum BlackThis was the source of clean drinking water that was led to the city reservoir on the Castle Hill, where it arrived in 1681, which could contain 9,070 cubic feet of water. Brusche was able to defy the doubters and make water run “uphill” to the Castle Hill as it was 44 feet lower than the Comiston cistern. His lead pipe was three inches in diameter and he was paid £2,950 to lay it. It would remain the sole source of piped water in the city until 1722, when an engineer called Desaguilon laid an additional pipe of 4.5 inches diameter. This was joined in 1787 by a 5 inch cast iron pipe.
“The first Waterhouse or Reservoir, Castle Hill”, a John Le Conte watercolour of 1840 showing the old water reservoir and house on the Castle Hill which supplied the city, and was a convenient location for the housing of a fire engine. © Edinburgh City LibrariesFrom there it ran downhill under gravity to public wells along the High Street and Canongate where it could be collected for free.
“A Walk thro’ Edinburgh. 1817”. Image showing the Tolbooth Well by James Skene. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Comiston cistern house is still where it always ways, although suburban sprawl means it is now in the middle of a housing estate and down a lane off the appropriately named Swan Spring Avenue in south suburban Edinburgh.
The cistern house marked in red behind the neat houses of Swan Spring Avenue.So why Swan Spring? Well the four springs that led to the central cistern house in four conduits were each named for an animal; the swan, the fox, the hare and the peewee (the Scots term for a lapwing). The Fox Spring also has streets named for it. In cistern house, where the four conduits arrived, there are (or perhaps now, were) four lead statues of all the animals to denominate the pipes.
Inside the cistern house. © Scottish WaterThese statues (or it may be copies of them, I am not clear) are now kept in the museum of Edinburgh.
The animals of Comiston Springs. Left to right the Swan, the Fox, the Hare and the Peeswee (Lapwing), from the Blipfoto of Flumgummery.Interestingly, I have found a 1976 photo that shows the animals in different positions. Which is right? I suspect the statues may have just been taken in and posed in these images for the photographer, then returned to safe keeping.
Inside the cistern house, 1976. © TSPLAnd here they are 10 years previous to that in the Water Board offices in Cockburn Street, so it seems they’ve been in the habit of taking them out and putting them back at least twice!
The Comiston animals, 1966 © The Scotsman Publications LtdI can recall learning this story as a schoolchild when once or twice you got to go to the council-owned Cannonball House on the Castlehill where the tour guide, Mrs Quick, would regale you with local history. She was obviously very good at this as it has stuck with me all these years. A formative experience clearly! Cannonball House is that old tenement at the top of the Castle Hill, which the story says is named for the cannonball lodged in its walls that this was shot out of the castle at Bonnie Prince Charlie during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Right? Well, personally I think no.
Eighteenth century cannon were not peashooters, they were high velocity weapons. A cannonball like the one in the wall would have tore straight through the building, not lodged gently in the wall protruding out slightly. Given the size, it’s likely to be a “42pdr” (i.e. a “full cannon”, firing a 42lb shot with a diameter of 6.7 inches). This would have had an initial muzzle velocity of 1,200 feet per second and a kinetic energy sufficient to turn a domestic masonry wall to dust. The source of the story is the antiquarian James Grant in his book Old & New Edinburgh. Although Grant is usually reliable, we cannot rely 100% on what he collected in his books as being just local fable or hearsay – writing in 1947, local historian George Scott-Moncrieff says it is “not very convincingly reputed“.
The cannonball embedded in the walls of “Cannonball House”. CC-BY-SA 4.0 Enchuffla Con ClaveSo, if it’s not a relic of the ’45 what is it? Well there’s two theories. The obvious one is that it was just a convenient piece of material to fill a hole in the wall, but at 42lbs it’s a very heavy piece to lift all that way up. The nicer theory is that it’s a levelling marker for the gravitation feed from Comiston Springs – although it isn’t quite high enough for that as the Castle Hill reservoir is 44 feet below the Comiston cistern house.
I have a third, purely conjectural, explanation of my own. The first mentions of it being called Cannonball House in the local newspapers are only in 1909 when it came up for sale, the name was given in quotation marks so if not official, certainly had local recognition. It was purchased by the Edinburgh School Board to serve as a teaching annexe for the overcrowded Castlehill Public School next door (now the Scotch Whisky Heritage Centre). They even stuck this name on the facade in stone to commemorate the completion in 1913! So perhaps the story of it being hit by a cannonball in the ’45 is true. We do know that there was intermittent and at some times quite intense exchanges of gunfire between the Castle garrison and the Jacobites. Perhaps some humorous builders found a suitable round stone (it may even have been a cannonball) in the demolition rubble during the alterations and decided to include it as they rebuilt the western gable, to fit the name of the building? Certainly during the works some significant alterations were made to both the inside and outside of the building, and antiquarian additions were made to the façade from bits and pieces recovered from other parts of the building. Ultimately, who knows…
Carvings on the east gable of Cannonball House in commemoration of the Edinburgh School Board rebuilding in 1913. © SelfThere’s a nice BBC article on the subject of these springs but it does overlook that the engineering was German.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
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If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
The thread about the water supply to old Leith, why it never really worked and what you can see of it today
This thread was originally written and published in August 2019.
Yesterday’s library trip was surprisingly productive on the subject of the water supply of old Leith. What I already knew was limited to the facts that it was unreliable, that it was supplied from the loch at Lochend and that it went from there via pipes to a reservoir at the foot of Water Street (hence the name).
Kirkwood’s map of Edinburgh and Leith, 1817, spyglass over modern map. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandSo what new things did I learn? Let’s start with some of the problems Leith faced when it came to getting drinking water. Traditionally the obvious source of water would have been the Water of Leith, but at this time it was tidal quite and so you had to take any water quite far upstream. But the principal problem was its water was also heavily used for milling by villages upstream and would have been badly polluted by the time it arrived in Leith. The other streams passing through the burgh, the Broughton Burn and the Greenside Burn, were fundamentally natural land drains and have been entirely unsuitable as a steady source of water.
Google Earth view with traces of the Water of Leith (thicker blue line) and the narrow lines of the Greenside (right) and Broughton (left) burnsSourcing water was a serious problem for Leith industries too; distilling, soap making and sugar refining all suffered from a lack of the stuff and migrated upstream on to Bonnington where there was a well. Big houses would have kept their own wells and there were wells at Yardheads too for the brewers, but the supply was meagre and upredictable. There was a good reason brewing never figured as a big Leith industry beyond meeting the residents’ own needs and disappeared altogether once Edinburgh had excess capacity to supply it. So where else could water have been sourced from? There is a description and a number of images of water being carted in from the well at Restalrig, the “holy” well of St. Triduana and/or St. Margaret. However supplying enough water in this manner would have been exceedingly difficult given the limitations of transport, so this might have been more of a niche trade than a serious supply of potable water.
Water being carted from St. Margaret’s Well at Restalrig, an 1817 sketch by James Skene. © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn 1752, the Incorporation of Traffickers of Leith (the Leith Company of Merchants) heard that Edinburgh was petitioning parliament for the right to levy a tax on ale of 2d per pint brewed. This would cover Leith too as Edinburgh exercised the rights of taxation over it. Leith saw an opportunity here and lobbied Edinburgh to try and gain access to some of the collected revenues of this taxation to improve the water supply in their town. Surprisingly Edinburgh agreed, if Leith drew up a schedule of costs and the plans themselves. The only realistic source of the water was obvious, it was the only substantial body of standing fresh water in the whole parish of South Leith; the loch at Lochend. Conveniently this had been made available for sale by the Crown who had confiscated it after the Jacobite rising of 1745. The previous proprietor of the Barony of Restalrig, Arthur Elphinstone, 6th Lord Balmerino, had forfeited this estate and his head for his part in that rebellion.
Lochend loch and House in the early 19th century. Note at this time the water level was significantly higher than it is now. This is a picture credited as Duddingston Loch, but is very definitely Lochend, with Whinny Hill of Arthur’s Seat in the background. By Hugh William Williams, CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland.The cost of the scheme was to be £600 and the plan was to lift the water out of the loch by a pump and siphon, and draw it from there down the gradient to Leith in wooden pipes to a cistern at the junction of Carpet Lane and Rotten Row1 (which would become Water Lane). Wooden pipes sound odd to modern ears, but were actually cheaper and lighter than the alternative; lead. Whole elm trunks were used as they were resistant to rot, and they were hollowed out and joined with leather seals, you can see some contemporary originals in the Museum of Edinburgh. It was reported in 1922 that wooden water pipes from this scheme were still in the possession of a “Leith Museum”.
- (* = Rotten Row was nothing to do with being rotten, it’s an ancient name recorded in Leith as early as 1453 as Rantoneraw, later Ratoun Raw, from the old Scots roten, describing a soft piece of ground.) ↩︎
The cost was to be met half each by Leith and Edinburgh. A campaign for public subscription in Leith raised only £110, so the Trade Incorporations had to foot the remaining £190. The contractor was a local plumber, however had no experience of laying a public water supply. They also had no capital of their own and thus work proceeded piecemeal as the money came in and they could pay for labourers and pipes. A contemporary writer wrote critically of the whole initiative:
The Loch was too small and unhygienic. The contractor he said was “a fool“, and laid the pipes so deep (15 feet) that cost was too high, progress was too slow, and the inevitable repairs were difficult.
William Maitland, in “History of Edinburgh”The pipes were laid either under, or alongside, Lochend Road which at this time ran through open fields. Water descended by gravity, but a pump house with a simple chain pump was constructed at the loch to lift the water out initially and start the siphon action. That pump house is still there. It’s very intriguing, a small, octagonal structure. If you peek inside you will see it goes down below the current ground level and there are signs of where the pump was within. If you look around at the pump house from the outside you may notice on the south wall there are signs of where a pipe has once entered the building and investigate the ground heading off north towards the park entrance you can trace a line of stone slabs in the grass, which undoubtedly covered the wooden water pipe.
The line of cap stones running away from the pump house towards Lochend RoadThe south face of the pump house showing where an iron pipe has gone through the wallThe interior of the pump house, showing the depth below ground and some supports for the pump sylinder or pipes. That cast iron pipe comes through the wall in the top right of the photo.Lochend pump house, with the Doocot/ kiln beyond. © SelfLochend pump house details © selfIt is worth noting that the surface of the loch back then was about 5-10 feet higher than it is now (depending on the season), and therefore its surface reached much further into the grounds of the park than it does today. This also meant that the pump house was inside the loch, not distant from it. The drop in level is a combined result of the abstraction of water, building drains into it and some of the underground springs feeding it were reputedly cut through by railway construction. Water reached the pump house from far into the water by way of an inlet pipe, the remains of which can be seen on the late 19th century postcard below.
An old postcard of Lochend Loch, of interest are the row of supports sticking out of the water and mud, these would have carried the water inlet pipe to the pump house.The end result of this endeavour was that Leith now had it’s own piped water supply! But immediately, there were problems; the pipes were too narrow; the cistern was too small. There just wasn’t anything like enough water! So at the expense of Leith it was all dug up again within months and relaid with larger bore pipes. A larger cistern was constructed further south and this area appropriately became known locally as “The Big Pipes“. A bar of this name stood until cleared away with most of the rest of old central Leith in the mid 1960s.
“The Big Pipes” bar, opposite the water cistern, where the Kirkgate met Tolbooth Wynd, [Queen] Charlotte Street and Water Street. © Edinburgh City Libraries.Six wellheads were provided within the town for public use, the locations of five being;
- on the Kirkgate at Brickwork Close
- in the yard of The Vaults
- on the Coalhill at the bridge
- on the Shore at the New Quay
- and at Bernard’s Neuk on Bernard Street.
The well at the Shore was to be used for watering ships, but the task of filling casks lead to long queues of locals (mainly women and girls) with stoups (narrow leather buckets suspended from a yoke) and so ships were forbidden to water between 5am and 8pm. Notice that North Leith (the part of the town to the north and west of the Water of Leith) is excluded from all this as it was a separate parish from South Leith at this time and to many intents and purposes administratively part of Edinburgh. In 1771 a Police Act for Edinburgh included South Leith parish. The concept of Police at this time covered powers of sanitation, lighting, cleansing and the prevention of infectious diseases, rather than law enforcement. The Act made provisions for the paving, watering, cleansing and lighting of areas of South Leith including St. Anthony’s, the Kirkgate and Yardheads. One of the provisions was a new water cistern reserved exclusively for shipping at the Ferryboat Steps on the Shore. It would cost £850 and ships could get water for 1 shilling per ton. Clearly a lot of water would need to be provided to cover the costs.
But the basic problem persisted for Leith that Lochend was not a satisfactory reservoir and even the Big Pipes were insufficient. The inlet pipe was sunk deeper into the loch but silted up and had to regularly be cleared. As a result of this deeper and increased abstraction, the Loch would start to dry up in summer. Various schemes were mooted to resolve this, including constructing a dam across the Back Drum – the area of high ground to the west of the Loch on which Easter Road Stadium stands. This would have used a steam-driven pump to lift clean, silt-free water from the loch up the hill and from where it could run by gravity to the wells and cisterns in Leith. Instead and after much lobbying a two inch lead pipe was provided from Edinburgh’s own precious water supply to supplement that of Leith. Leith of course had to pay for this privilege and £1,000 was billed to the Leith Police Commissioners. Not long after this connection was completed a drought in 1793 resulted in Edinburgh cutting off the pipe. Chalk up another example in the long history of Edinburgh messing with Leith!
The water situation in Leith remained dire. Money was really the problem, the Commissioners had the powers but not the funds as Edinburgh kept a tight and uncooperative hand on the purse strings. All that changed in 1799 when John’s Place, a fashionable new development of merchant class villas, was constructed in Leith along the western edge of the Links as the town slowly and tentatively began to expand from the confines of its medieval boundaries.
John’s Place, LeithThe proprietors of this development wanted to match the New Town and that meant having piped water. So they proposed to the Commissioners that they would lend them the money for water improvements at 5% interest, if they would also lay supplies to them at John’s Place. The Commissioners jumped at the chance as the residents would also pay annual dues to them for this supply. On hearing this, “every heritor on the line of the pipe from Lochend” also got on board and wanted water. Each would pay 1 guinea per annum, and the required money was therefore lent to the Commissioners. Work to improve the supply and provide the private supplies took 2 years, but finally it was complete. On the grand day, the private stop cocks were opened and the public cistern promptly ran dry! That’s the problem with tapping off your water supply upstream before it reaches its destination! And so the private supplies were all shut off and could only be opened as and when the town cistern was filled.
And so the supply remained poor and the water quality was doubtful. Finally, in 1869, the Corporations of Edinburgh, Leith and Portobello made the sensible decision to combine their water interests and took over the Edinburgh Water Company to run it for themselves. Thus the Edinburgh District Water Trust came into being (look for EDWT street furniture at your feet) and Leith finally got a proper water supply.
I have used some educated guesswork to determine the likely route of the Big Pipes into Leith from Lochend and followed that on the 1849 Ordnance Survey town plan. Lo! and Behold, you can find a line of public water pumps and troughs along it near John’s Place!
Water pump marked on Leith Links. OS 1849 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland Water pump and trough marked at south end of John’s Place. OS 1849 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland Water pump and trough marked at north end of John’s Place. OS 1849 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBy this time Leith was finally a municipal burgh in its own right and retained the rights over the Loch as a water source even after it was abandoned for the drinking supply in 1869. It was still useful to some industries as it was softer water than the drinking supply so better for use in boilers. The Roperie was allegedly the last user of the Lochend supply, as late as 1922, as a source of cooling water. Leith exercised its rights in Parliament in 1906 when Edinburgh put forward a Parliamentary Bill which would have allowed it abstract water from the Loch for the condensers in its electrical power station at McDonald Road and return it to source warmed up. This was a threat to The Roperie and so although the Loch was partly within the municipal territory of both Edinburgh and Leith, the rights of the latter, junior burgh were successfully defended.
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