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Extreme obedience assumes ignorance in the one who obeys; it assumes ignorance even in the one who commands; he does not have to deliberate, to doubt, or to reason; he has only to want.
[L’extrême obéissance suppose de l’ignorance dans celui qui obéit; elle en suppose même dans celui qui commande: il n’a point à délibérer, à douter, ni à raisonner; il n’a qu’à vouloir.]Charles-Lewis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political philosopher
Spirit of Laws [The Spirit of the Laws; De l’esprit des lois], Book 4, ch. 3 (4.3) (1748) [tr. Cohler/Miller/Stone (1989)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montesquieu/81939/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #montesquieu #autocracy #autocrat #command #consideration #deliberation #despot #dictator #ignorance #obedience #reason #servility #tyranny #tyrant #want #will
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As useless laws weaken necessary laws, those that can be evaded weaken legislation.
[Comme les lois inutiles affaiblissent les lois nécessaires, celles qu’on peut éluder affaiblissent la législation.]Charles-Lewis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political philosopher
Spirit of Laws [The Spirit of the Laws; De l’esprit des lois], Book 29, ch. 16 (1748) [tr. Cohler/Miller/Stone (1989)]More info about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montesquieu/2895/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #montesquieu #evasion #law #legislation #mockery #perception #utility
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Political virtue is a renunciation of oneself, which is always a very painful thing. One can define this virtue as love of the laws and the homeland. This love, requiring a continuous preference of the public interest over one’s own, produces all the individual virtues; they are only that preference.
[La vertu politique est un renoncement à soi-même, qui est toujours une chose très-pénible. On peut définir cette vertu, l’amour des loix & de la patrie. Cet amour, demandant une préférence continuelle de l’intérêt public au sien propre, donne toutes les vertus particulieres: elles ne sont que cette préférence.]Charles-Lewis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political philosopher
Spirit of Laws [The Spirit of the Laws; De l’esprit des lois], Book 4, ch. 5 (4.5) (1748) [tr. Cohler/Miller/Stone (1989)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montesquieu/82465/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #Montesquieu #homeland #lawabiding #lawfulness #patriotism #politicalvirtue #privateinterest #publicinterest #renunciation #selfsacrifice #virtue
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Political virtue is a renunciation of oneself, which is always a very painful thing. One can define this virtue as love of the laws and the homeland. This love, requiring a continuous preference of the public interest over one’s own, produces all the individual virtues; they are only that preference.
[La vertu politique est un renoncement à soi-même, qui est toujours une chose très-pénible. On peut définir cette vertu, l’amour des loix & de la patrie. Cet amour, demandant une préférence continuelle de l’intérêt public au sien propre, donne toutes les vertus particulieres: elles ne sont que cette préférence.]Charles-Lewis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political philosopher
Spirit of Laws [The Spirit of the Laws; De l’esprit des lois], Book 4, ch. 5 (4.5) (1748) [tr. Cohler/Miller/Stone (1989)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montesquieu/82465/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #Montesquieu #homeland #lawabiding #lawfulness #patriotism #politicalvirtue #privateinterest #publicinterest #renunciation #selfsacrifice #virtue
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Political virtue is a renunciation of oneself, which is always a very painful thing. One can define this virtue as love of the laws and the homeland. This love, requiring a continuous preference of the public interest over one’s own, produces all the individual virtues; they are only that preference.
[La vertu politique est un renoncement à soi-même, qui est toujours une chose très-pénible. On peut définir cette vertu, l’amour des loix & de la patrie. Cet amour, demandant une préférence continuelle de l’intérêt public au sien propre, donne toutes les vertus particulieres: elles ne sont que cette préférence.]Charles-Lewis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political philosopher
Spirit of Laws [The Spirit of the Laws; De l’esprit des lois], Book 4, ch. 5 (4.5) (1748) [tr. Cohler/Miller/Stone (1989)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montesquieu/82465/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #Montesquieu #homeland #lawabiding #lawfulness #patriotism #politicalvirtue #privateinterest #publicinterest #renunciation #selfsacrifice #virtue
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Political virtue is a renunciation of oneself, which is always a very painful thing. One can define this virtue as love of the laws and the homeland. This love, requiring a continuous preference of the public interest over one’s own, produces all the individual virtues; they are only that preference.
[La vertu politique est un renoncement à soi-même, qui est toujours une chose très-pénible. On peut définir cette vertu, l’amour des loix & de la patrie. Cet amour, demandant une préférence continuelle de l’intérêt public au sien propre, donne toutes les vertus particulieres: elles ne sont que cette préférence.]Charles-Lewis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political philosopher
Spirit of Laws [The Spirit of the Laws; De l’esprit des lois], Book 4, ch. 5 (4.5) (1748) [tr. Cohler/Miller/Stone (1989)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montesquieu/82465/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #Montesquieu #homeland #lawabiding #lawfulness #patriotism #politicalvirtue #privateinterest #publicinterest #renunciation #selfsacrifice #virtue
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There need not be much integrity for a monarchical or despotic government to maintain or sustain itself. The force of the laws in the one, and the prince’s ever-raised arm in the other, can rule or contain the whole. But in a popular state there must be an additional spring, which is VIRTUE.
[Il ne faut pas beaucoup de probité, pour qu’un gouvernement monarchique, ou un gouvernement despotique, se maintiennent ou se soutiennent. La force des loix dans l’un, le bras du prince toujours levé dans l’autre, reglent ou contiennent tout. Mais, dans un état populaire, il faut un ressort de plus, qui est la VERTU.]Charles-Lewis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political philosopher
Spirit of Laws [The Spirit of the Laws; De l’esprit des lois], Book 3, ch. 3 (3.3) (1748) [tr. Cohler/Miller/Stone (1989)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montesquieu/82282/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #montesquieu #civicvirtue #democracy #equality #patriotism #populargovernment #republic #virtue
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The thread about the East Foul Burn; profiting from sewage in the 18th century
This thread is part one of a series; the link to the next part can be found at the bottom.
We begin our story with the wonderfully verbose cover of a Victorian pamphlet;
FOUL BURN AGITATION!
STATEMENT
Explaining
NATURE AND HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL IRRIGATION NEAR EDINBURGH;
Containing
A REFUTATION OF THE UNFOUNDED AND CALUMNIOUS MISREPRESENTATIONS ON THAT SUBJECT,
In
A PAMPHLET PUBLISHED IN THE NAME OF A COMMITTEE OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF POLICE, IN WHICH THE ANCIENT AND BEAUTIFUL CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND IS FALSELY DESCRIBED AS A RESIDENCE UNSAFE TO THE HEALTH OF ITS INHABITANTS!I say pamphlet, the thing is actually 166 pages long and I spent quite some time reading it (skimming much of it) so that you don’t have to. It is Victorian local politics at its best and wors, and much of it is indeed pure agitation. But it was worth ploughing my way through it as it happens to contain a complete and detailed description of Edinburgh’s largely forgotten East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadow systems of Craigentinny and Restalrig, their history and their method of operation.
Anyway, what is this East Foul Burn of which I speak? Well it’s the principal watercourse that in olden times drained most of the Old Town, the Nor’ Loch and the small suburbs south of the city into the sea; rainfall, sewage and all. We can see it on the below map of 1750 by William Roy. It is the stream which flows from bottom left to top right – the stream originating in Lochend Loch in the centre left is the tail burn of that body of water.
The East Foul Burn’s natural route to the sea via Restalrig and Fillyside (North Mains of Craigentinny). William Roy’s Lowland Map of c. 1750. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIf you examine a old map of the Old Town and consider the topography, it’s obvious that gravity will carry anything liquid downhill. John Slezer’s remarkably accurate 17th century sketches of the city help us to visualise this from a contemporary point of view; any waste discharged on the north side of the ridge on which the Old Town of the city was built is obviously going to drain itself into the Nor’ Loch.
Prospect of the Castle and City of Edinburgh from the Nor’ Loch. John Slezer, 1673, arrows indicate the steep northern slopes of the “tail” of the crag and tail geological formation on which Edinburgh’s Old Town sitsThat loch could only drain eastwards, in the direction of the sea. James Gordon of Rothiemay’s remarkable 1647 bird’s eye view of Edinburgh shows it clearly. After irrigating the pleasant-looking Physic Garden by the Trinity College Kirk, it ran off down the North Back of Canongate (what we now call Calton Road) where it was joined by any runoff from the community nestled below the crags of the Calton Hill and from the streets and closes of the north side of the Canongate itself. The stream (in reality an open sewer) passes a number of round structures; these were wells and water cistern – one of the reasons so many breweries would congregate here. 100 years later, Edgar’s map of 1765 still shows that this open sewer still ran here.
Bird’s Eye View of Edinburgh, James Gordon of Rothiemay, 1647. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandStuart Harris, the late local historian and custodian of Edinburgh place names, refers to the wells here as being along the Tummel Burn (and you will also see it given as Tumble) which is an alternative name for the East Foul Burn, this refers to the water flow, although one imagines it wasn’t so much a pleasant babbling brook as a bubbling cauldron of filth.
The burn worked its way down the North Back of Canongate to the Wateryett (a Scots placename meaning water gate; the word for a gate was commonly port but can occasionally be yett; the word gate or gait meant a roadway e.g. Canongate). The water part of the name refereed as much to this being the route into the Canongate for drinking water from the wells as it was from being alongside a watercourse. The yett part refers to the area at the foot of the Canongate where there was a physical gateway; not a defensive structure, but a civic boundary and customs barrier. This is confirmed by a reference from a title deed in 1635 which describes the Foul Burn as being in a gutter known as the Strand. This latter term is an old Scots word for “an artificial water-channel or gutter, a street gutter” – the Abbey Strand is the name of the old building that stands to this day at the foot of the Canongate, just before you enter the grounds of the Holyroodhouse.
The Wateryett in 1818, a drawing by James Skene. By this time the physical gate had been replaced by a symbolic one for the toll house. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAfter the Water Yett, Edgar’s 1765 map shows that the burn ran in a culvert here, but we can infer its route. This map is the extent of 18th century town plans so to follow the burn we move onto an 1804 plan by John Ainslie to pick up the trail once more. It re-surfaces around Croftangry (corrupted in modern times to the Gaelic-sounding Croft-an-Righ) before disappearing underground again in the property of the Lord Chief Baron (Sir James Montgomery, 1st Baronet Stanhope) only to re-appearing on the property boundary between him and Mr Clerk. Comley Gardens and Clock Mill on Ainslie’s map are old placenames here still recalled by modern street names. The burn here now contains almost the entirety of the effluent of the city of Edinburgh, the Canongate, the burgh of Calton and the village of Abbeyhill.
Ainslie’s Town Plan of 1804, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Orange lines show the course of the Foul Burn eastThe Comely Gardens referred to on the map above were a Tivoli Garden, a sort of Georgian amusement park where – for a fee – one could stroll the gardens and admire the roses, could take tea or coffee or fruits and entertainment such as dances and musicians may be laid on. Comely Gardens is to be forever remembered as the starting point of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon, the first manned aerial flight in the British Isles. In August 1784, James Tytler rode a Montgolfier-style balloon all the way to a crash-landing in Restalrig and his name is recalled in a couple of the modern street names in this area. But back to the matter in hand, following the burn east we have reached the Clock Mill, an old house named for a mill that was driven by the burn. The name came from Clokisrwne Mylne or Clocksorrow; clock is a corruption of the Scots clack, being a specific type of mill, an onomatopoeia based on the noise its mechanism made. Sorrow refers to some form of hollow in various old tongues.
Clockmill House in 1780, from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant. Notice the naval telegraph mast on top of Calton HillIn the vicinity of Clock Mill, two further open sewers joined the burn, adding yet more effluent. The came from the Pleasance (and by extension much of the Southside) and from the Cowgate to its payload. Both of these first drained into a myre just south of Holyroodhouse, marked on Kincaid’s map of 1784 as Common Sewer Kept Stagnate for Manure, i.e. the sewage solids would settle out of the slow moving water and could be collected to fertilise the city’s gardens and orchards. There was good money to be made in such “soil” or “dung”. Before the advent of early industrial fertilisers or the Kelp Boom it was one of the few copious and economical sources of fertiliser for fields and was much in demand – all you had to do was collect it (or pay someone to do this)!
Kincaid’s Map of 1784, showing the “Common Serwer Kept Stagnate for Manure”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAfter Clockmill House, which was demolished in 1859 to landscape its grounds as a military parade ground, the burn passed beneath the main road east out of the city (the London Road would not be built until 1819). The bridge here was known as the Clockmill Bridge. It is the presence of the burn that explains why significant culverts were built here under both the North British Railway and the London Road when each was constructed. Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson, the engineer of the London Road, produced beautiful drawings for the culvert here under his road;
Stevenson’s drawings for the London Road culvert. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (MS.5849, No.54 – 57)By the time the burn passed under this culvert, it was carrying the daily sewage of about 60-80,000 people, not to mention their animals. The Foul Burn Agitation! pamphlet describes it as “a rapid and copious stream… to which [is] added the impure waters that proceed from the houses, streets and lanes of the city“. From there, the effluent of the city should have been a relatively straightforward journey down the broad, shallow natural valley in which Restalrig sits to the sea, at Fillyside (roughly where the Matalan store now is).
The East Foul Burn at Restalrig village, flowing along the foreground and passing under the road in a culvert. From an old post card, early 20th century.However it could not take this natural procession to the sea as its process was interrupted; it was industriously turned over into a series of irrigated meadows, “irrigated by the waters from the City” at Restalrig, Craigentinny and Fillyside.
Kirkwood’s Plan of 1817 showing the irrigated meadows along the Foul Burn. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIn the irrigated meadows, the Foul Burn was intersected by “principal feeders“, ditches cut along the topographic gradient. Water could be admitted to the feeders by means of sluices or damming the outflow. These feeders in turn fed further side-ditches into individual plots. The plots would be subject to controlled flooding from April to November, the fodder growing season. For two or three days a plot would be flooded, saturating the ground with sewage which would settle. The water was then allowed to run off and the plot was given three to five weeks for the grass to grow. It could then be cropped and the process could begin again. The process of flooding and cropping plots was rotated so that there were always fields ready to crop, and there was always a good supply of sewage with which to flood it. The whole object of this exercise was to provide a steady supply of food for the city’s dairy herds – this was a time when milk could not be preserved or transported any great distance, so the cattle had to be kept in and around the immediate vicinity. The system also had dedicated settling ponds where the soil could be collected and sold off by the cartload.
Craigentinny Meadows, James Steuart, 1885. Note the sluice and ditch and the ample crops. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Restalrig Meadows were at the turn of the 19th century the property of the forementioned Sir James Montgomery Bt. and extended to around 30 acres. The Craigentinny and Fillyside Meadows were owned by William Henry Miller of Craigentinny and were the largest at c. 120 acres.
Craigentinny Meadows, photograph by David Sclater, 1895. On the horizon are the “Craigentinny Marbles” (tomb of William Henry Miller) and Wheatfield House on the present day Portobello Road. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThere were further such irrigated meadows at the foot of Salisbury Crags, about 14 acres – the property of the Earl of Haddington – and near Coltbridge (modern Murrayfield) to the west, some 40-50 acres owned by Russell of Roseburn. This latter ground was fed by a much smaller foul burn – the West Foul Burn – which drained the portion of the city around Tollcross, West Port and Lauriston and the west end of the Boroughloch, making its way west via Dalry to Roseburn and then into the Water of Leith.
While the soil of the city had been collected since time immemorial, it’s not clear when this industrial-scale meadow system evolved. The Foul Burn Agitation! recounts testimony of elderly farm workers of Restalrig that they had been in place since at least 1750. However a document from 1561 when the lands of Restalrig Kirk were confiscated during the Reformation records “of certain prebendaries yardis, in Restalrig and Chalmeris pertening to the saidis prebendaris, callit their Mansis and pece of suard Meadow” – the suard here referring to a piece of marshy or boggy ground. The pamphlet states the “practice existed from time immemorial of flooding the Meadow grounds by means of the Foul Burn“. So we can say with some certainty that it was an old and established practice, and indeed the courts agreed with this when Alexander Duncan WS of Restalrig House tried to sue his neighbouring sewage barons, Miller and Montgomery, on account of the smell from the meadows spoiling his quality of life.
Restlarig House, c. 1883Indeed the legal action ended up backfiring on Duncan because in 1833 the Burgh Police Act protected the proprietors from any act “to divert or alter any stream or watercourse, or diminish the ancient and accustomed quantity of rain or other water or soil flowing therein“, guaranteeing their right to operate the meadows and collect the profits. (Side note, this was included in a Police Act because at that time in Scotland the Police had the powers and responsibilities for cleansing the burgh, distributing water and preventing disease).
The East Foul Burn at Craigentinny, WS Reid, 1860. Looking towards Miller’s Craigentinny House. Notice the bridge across the river and that the bank is reinforced – evidence of the extensive river management. Notice that the crops on the left of the picture seem long and those on the right are short, evidence of the constant rotation of cropping in the plots. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe other aspect of the system was the settling ponds. These are recorded as far back as 1738 when Mr Baird of Clockmill was irrigating his fields and “collecting dung“, but by the late 18th century they were beginning to be infilled and had vanished by the 1820s. These are clearly shown on Kirkwood’s 1817 town plan. Appropriately enough parts of it look like a bit like a drawing of the human digestive system! The reason for abandoning the ponds because of two problems; firstly, there was too much sandy sediment washed off the city streets into the burn, and the customers – market gardeners mainly – were loathe to pour sand onto their plots and orchards. More importantly however the sediment was found increasingly to be full of seeds. Without putrefaction (fermentation), these seeds could not be killed, and when the seed-rich manure was spread it was an instant recipe for spreading weeds.
The soil settling ponds around Restalrig and Craigentinny. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAnd so the system concentrated around the production of grass for animal forage; a very productive and profitable system it was. 400 labourers were employed seasonally, and some 3,300 cattle in Edinburgh and 600 in Leith depended on it, mainly pen-fed dairy animals. Most dairies were small concerns, run by the occupation of a “cow feeder“, with 20-40 milk cows each.
The Holyrood Dairy, c. 1830-40. Painting by William Stewart Watson. © Edinburgh Museums & GalleriesThe meadows were estimated to turn a profit for their proprietors of £5,000 per annum (about £600,000 in 2022), with William Henry Miller estimating he made £30,000 (c. £3.4 million) over 2 years. Rents were 20-30/s per acre, or up to double that for the better pasture or during times of food scarcity. Preparing a meadow cost £20-25 per acre and was a sound investment. Miller in 1821 spent £1,000 turning over 40 acres of “sandy wasteland” – the lands of Fillyside were ancient raised beaches – to meadow use. Each acre could provide up to 6 full crops per year.
A Map of Miller’s estate at Craigentinny showing the huge network of feeders and ditches that supported the Irrigated Meadow system. This map was surveyed for Miller in 1847. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAll-in-all, this was a very productive and profitable concern, so much so that in 1834 the Police Commissioners tried to extend the burgh boundary to include the irrigated meadows and to give themselves rights over them. They spent 4,000 of the city’s pounds on the scheme, which the Foul Burn Agitation! describes as “Dung Speculation“. They were unsuccessful though as the proprietors and their one-time adversary Mr Duncan fought the Commissioners off. William Henry Miller (a former MP by this point, wealthy and influential) was quick to defend his profitable scheme. In 1843 when the North British Railway proposed running their line across his meadows, Miller had them shift it about 100 feet west so that it instead skirted around his lands. He then exchanged parcels of his land on the south of the new line with his neighbours – the Dukes of Abercorn – who had parcels trapped by the railway on the north, so each could maintain a contiguous field system. Miller also made thinds hard enough for the NBR that they never built their proposed shorter branch to Leith across his land.
The survey of Miller’s lands in 1847 show the main and sub-feeders, and the direction of flow of the water of the Foul Burn through them. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBut the whole system had a number of problems facing it. Firstly, the woeful sanitation of the Old Town needed resolving – it was recognised by now that waste needed to be piped under the ground, not just run in an open sewer for the benefit of a couple of wealthy landowners. And secondly, in 1817 the Edinburgh & Leith Gas Light Company began building a gas works at New Street, crowned by its great chimney that dominated the Canongate.
The gasworks and its chimney, with the Canongate Kirk on the left for scale.At this point, coal gas works had yet to begin extracting their by-products for industrial use, so you can guess where the gas works were dumping all the highly toxic waste chemicals. Coal tar, sulphur and ammonia as well as any other numbers and varieties of hydrocarbons went into the Foul Burn from New Street. The gas works “give forth an abundant stream, the odour of which is no doubt extremely offensive, being the most nauseous of all compounds… …This flows into a principal feeder of the old foul burn at the South Back of the Canongate“. To put it simply, the gas works was poisoning the burn. This was not the first time that the foul burns had been polluted by industry. In 1791, Russell of Roseburn attempted to use the courts to stop the Haig’s distillery at Lochrin from polluting his irrigated meadows at Coltbridge.
The proprietors of the eastern irrigated meadows managed to get fines applied to the gas works, £200 per instance of pollution and £20 per day – this seemed to have the intended effect. Or perhaps the gas works just found it more profitable to begin capturing its by products for commercial gain rather than letting them run away. Whatever the reason, the Foul Burn was “cleared up” and the eastern meadows managed to carry on; the 1888 OS 6 inch Survey shows they still occupy their main extent. In 1901, an attempt was made to bury the entirety of the burn underground as a sere, but this was unsuccessful. The scheme finally commenced in 1921 as a work programme for unemployed men; a £60,000 government grant being secured to provide employment for 400 men for six months. This “draining of the swap” opened up the lands of Lochend, Restalrig and Craigentinny for public housing schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the land of the Fillyside Meadow had already been set aside as Craigentinny Golf Couse, which had been undertaken by Leith Corporation to clear golfing off of the Links. A railway yard was later also laid adjacent, appropriately it was called the Meadows Yard.
Craigentinny Meadows, looking towards Edinburgh, 1930, in the vicinity of what is now the golf course. The dark building in the mid ground is Craigentinny House. An amazingly pastoral scene, unchanged for about 200 years, so late on. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAnd what of the East Foul Burn? Well I can tell you it’s still there but just like many of Edinburgh’s old burns it’s hiding under the ground in its culvert. Very few people who live above it probably know it’s there. We get other reminders of its presence from local place names; the area name Meadowbank? that’s lifted directly off a house known as Meadow Bank, built on the southern of the meadows. And Sunnyside Bank off of Lower London Road? that’s the south-facing (therefore sunnier) bank.
The old house of Meadowbank. An 1854 sketch by William Channing. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThis thread continues with part 2 – The thread about the problem of sewage disposal in 19th century Edinburgh and Leith; and how something ended up being done about it.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
The thread about the East Foul Burn; a long-forgotten Edinburgh stream that was the centre of a vast sewage-based agribusiness
This thread is part one of a series; the link to the next part can be found at the bottom.
We begin our story with the wonderfully verbose cover of a Victorian pamphlet;
FOUL BURN AGITATION!
STATEMENT
Explaining
NATURE AND HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL IRRIGATION NEAR EDINBURGH;
Containing
A REFUTATION OF THE UNFOUNDED AND CALUMNIOUS MISREPRESENTATIONS ON THAT SUBJECT,
In
A PAMPHLET PUBLISHED IN THE NAME OF A COMMITTEE OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF POLICE, IN WHICH THE ANCIENT AND BEAUTIFUL CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND IS FALSELY DESCRIBED AS A RESIDENCE UNSAFE TO THE HEALTH OF ITS INHABITANTS!I say pamphlet, the thing is actually 166 pages long and I spent quite some time reading it (skimming much of it) so that you don’t have to. It is Victorian local politics at its best and wors, and much of it is indeed pure agitation. But it was worth ploughing my way through it as it happens to contain a complete and detailed description of Edinburgh’s largely forgotten East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadow systems of Craigentinny and Restalrig, their history and their method of operation.
Anyway, what is this East Foul Burn of which I speak? Well it’s the principal watercourse that in olden times drained most of the Old Town, the Nor’ Loch and the small suburbs south of the city into the sea; rainfall, sewage and all. We can see it on the below map of 1750 by William Roy. It is the stream which flows from bottom left to top right – the stream originating in Lochend Loch in the centre left is the tail burn of that body of water.
The East Foul Burn’s natural route to the sea via Restalrig and Fillyside (North Mains of Craigentinny). William Roy’s Lowland Map of c. 1750. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIf you examine a old map of the Old Town and consider the topography, it’s obvious that gravity will carry anything liquid downhill. John Slezer’s remarkably accurate 17th century sketches of the city help us to visualise this from a contemporary point of view; any waste discharged on the north side of the ridge on which the Old Town of the city was built is obviously going to drain itself into the Nor’ Loch.
Prospect of the Castle and City of Edinburgh from the Nor’ Loch. John Slezer, 1673, arrows indicate the steep northern slopes of the “tail” of the crag and tail geological formation on which Edinburgh’s Old Town sitsThat loch could only drain eastwards, in the direction of the sea. James Gordon of Rothiemay’s remarkable 1647 bird’s eye view of Edinburgh shows it clearly. After irrigating the pleasant-looking Physic Garden by the Trinity College Kirk, it ran off down the North Back of Canongate (what we now call Calton Road) where it was joined by any runoff from the community nestled below the crags of the Calton Hill and from the streets and closes of the north side of the Canongate itself. The stream (in reality an open sewer) passes a number of round structures; these were wells and water cistern – one of the reasons so many breweries would congregate here. 100 years later, Edgar’s map of 1765 still shows that this open sewer still ran here.
Bird’s Eye View of Edinburgh, James Gordon of Rothiemay, 1647. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandStuart Harris, the late local historian and custodian of Edinburgh place names, refers to the wells here as being along the Tummel Burn (and you will also see it given as Tumble) which is an alternative name for the East Foul Burn, this refers to the water flow, although one imagines it wasn’t so much a pleasant babbling brook as a bubbling cauldron of filth.
The burn worked its way down the North Back of Canongate to the Wateryett (a Scots placename meaning water gate; the word for a gate was commonly port but can occasionally be yett; the word gate or gait meant a roadway e.g. Canongate). The water part of the name refereed as much to this being the route into the Canongate for drinking water from the wells as it was from being alongside a watercourse. The yett part refers to the area at the foot of the Canongate where there was a physical gateway; not a defensive structure, but a civic boundary and customs barrier. This is confirmed by a reference from a title deed in 1635 which describes the Foul Burn as being in a gutter known as the Strand. This latter term is an old Scots word for “an artificial water-channel or gutter, a street gutter” – the Abbey Strand is the name of the old building that stands to this day at the foot of the Canongate, just before you enter the grounds of the Holyroodhouse.
The Wateryett in 1818, a drawing by James Skene. By this time the physical gate had been replaced by a symbolic one for the toll house. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAfter the Water Yett, Edgar’s 1765 map shows that the burn ran in a culvert here, but we can infer its route. This map is the extent of 18th century town plans so to follow the burn we move onto an 1804 plan by John Ainslie to pick up the trail once more. It re-surfaces around Croftangry (corrupted in modern times to the Gaelic-sounding Croft-an-Righ) before disappearing underground again in the property of the Lord Chief Baron (Sir James Montgomery, 1st Baronet Stanhope) only to re-appearing on the property boundary between him and Mr Clerk. Comley Gardens and Clock Mill on Ainslie’s map are old placenames here still recalled by modern street names. The burn here now contains almost the entirety of the effluent of the city of Edinburgh, the Canongate, the burgh of Calton and the village of Abbeyhill.
Ainslie’s Town Plan of 1804, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Orange lines show the course of the Foul Burn eastThe Comely Gardens referred to on the map above were a Tivoli Garden, a sort of Georgian amusement park where – for a fee – one could stroll the gardens and admire the roses, could take tea or coffee or fruits and entertainment such as dances and musicians may be laid on. Comely Gardens is to be forever remembered as the starting point of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon, the first manned aerial flight in the British Isles. In August 1784, James Tytler rode a Montgolfier-style balloon all the way to a crash-landing in Restalrig and his name is recalled in a couple of the modern street names in this area. But back to the matter in hand, following the burn east we have reached the Clock Mill, an old house named for a mill that was driven by the burn. The name came from Clokisrwne Mylne or Clocksorrow; clock is a corruption of the Scots clack, being a specific type of mill, an onomatopoeia based on the noise its mechanism made. Sorrow refers to some form of hollow in various old tongues.
Clockmill House in 1780, from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant. Notice the naval telegraph mast on top of Calton HillIn the vicinity of Clock Mill, two further open sewers joined the burn, adding yet more effluent. The came from the Pleasance (and by extension much of the Southside) and from the Cowgate to its payload. Both of these first drained into a myre just south of Holyroodhouse, marked on Kincaid’s map of 1784 as Common Sewer Kept Stagnate for Manure, i.e. the sewage solids would settle out of the slow moving water and could be collected to fertilise the city’s gardens and orchards. There was good money to be made in such “soil” or “dung”. Before the advent of early industrial fertilisers or the Kelp Boom it was one of the few copious and economical sources of fertiliser for fields and was much in demand – all you had to do was collect it (or pay someone to do this)!
Kincaid’s Map of 1784, showing the “Common Serwer Kept Stagnate for Manure”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAfter Clockmill House, which was demolished in 1859 to landscape its grounds as a military parade ground, the burn passed beneath the main road east out of the city (the London Road would not be built until 1819). The bridge here was known as the Clockmill Bridge. It is the presence of the burn that explains why significant culverts were built here under both the North British Railway and the London Road when each was constructed. Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson, the engineer of the London Road, produced beautiful drawings for the culvert here under his road;
Stevenson’s drawings for the London Road culvert. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (MS.5849, No.54 – 57)By the time the burn passed under this culvert, it was carrying the daily sewage of about 60-80,000 people, not to mention their animals. The Foul Burn Agitation! pamphlet describes it as “a rapid and copious stream… to which [is] added the impure waters that proceed from the houses, streets and lanes of the city“. From there, the effluent of the city should have been a relatively straightforward journey down the broad, shallow natural valley in which Restalrig sits to the sea, at Fillyside (roughly where the Matalan store now is).
The East Foul Burn at Restalrig village, flowing along the foreground and passing under the road in a culvert. From an old post card, early 20th century.However it could not take this natural procession to the sea as its process was interrupted; it was industriously turned over into a series of irrigated meadows, “irrigated by the waters from the City” at Restalrig, Craigentinny and Fillyside.
Kirkwood’s Plan of 1817 showing the irrigated meadows along the Foul Burn. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIn the irrigated meadows, the Foul Burn was intersected by “principal feeders“, ditches cut along the topographic gradient. Water could be admitted to the feeders by means of sluices or damming the outflow. These feeders in turn fed further side-ditches into individual plots. The plots would be subject to controlled flooding from April to November, the fodder growing season. For two or three days a plot would be flooded, saturating the ground with sewage which would settle. The water was then allowed to run off and the plot was given three to five weeks for the grass to grow. It could then be cropped and the process could begin again. The process of flooding and cropping plots was rotated so that there were always fields ready to crop, and there was always a good supply of sewage with which to flood it. The whole object of this exercise was to provide a steady supply of food for the city’s dairy herds – this was a time when milk could not be preserved or transported any great distance, so the cattle had to be kept in and around the immediate vicinity. The system also had dedicated settling ponds where the soil could be collected and sold off by the cartload.
Craigentinny Meadows, James Steuart, 1885. Note the sluice and ditch and the ample crops. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Restalrig Meadows were at the turn of the 19th century the property of the forementioned Sir James Montgomery Bt. and extended to around 30 acres. The Craigentinny and Fillyside Meadows were owned by William Henry Miller of Craigentinny and were the largest at c. 120 acres.
Craigentinny Meadows, photograph by David Sclater, 1895. On the horizon are the “Craigentinny Marbles” (tomb of William Henry Miller) and Wheatfield House on the present day Portobello Road. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThere were further such irrigated meadows at the foot of Salisbury Crags, about 14 acres – the property of the Earl of Haddington – and near Coltbridge (modern Murrayfield) to the west, some 40-50 acres owned by Russell of Roseburn. This latter ground was fed by a much smaller foul burn – the West Foul Burn – which drained the portion of the city around Tollcross, West Port and Lauriston and the west end of the Boroughloch, making its way west via Dalry to Roseburn and then into the Water of Leith.
While the soil of the city had been collected since time immemorial, it’s not clear when this industrial-scale meadow system evolved. The Foul Burn Agitation! recounts testimony of elderly farm workers of Restalrig that they had been in place since at least 1750. However a document from 1561 when the lands of Restalrig Kirk were confiscated during the Reformation records “of certain prebendaries yardis, in Restalrig and Chalmeris pertening to the saidis prebendaris, callit their Mansis and pece of suard Meadow” – the suard here referring to a piece of marshy or boggy ground. The pamphlet states the “practice existed from time immemorial of flooding the Meadow grounds by means of the Foul Burn“. So we can say with some certainty that it was an old and established practice, and indeed the courts agreed with this when Alexander Duncan WS of Restalrig House tried to sue his neighbouring sewage barons, Miller and Montgomery, on account of the smell from the meadows spoiling his quality of life.
Restlarig House, c. 1883Indeed the legal action ended up backfiring on Duncan because in 1833 the Burgh Police Act protected the proprietors from any act “to divert or alter any stream or watercourse, or diminish the ancient and accustomed quantity of rain or other water or soil flowing therein“, guaranteeing their right to operate the meadows and collect the profits. (Side note, this was included in a Police Act because at that time in Scotland the Police had the powers and responsibilities for cleansing the burgh, distributing water and preventing disease).
The East Foul Burn at Craigentinny, WS Reid, 1860. Looking towards Miller’s Craigentinny House. Notice the bridge across the river and that the bank is reinforced – evidence of the extensive river management. Notice that the crops on the left of the picture seem long and those on the right are short, evidence of the constant rotation of cropping in the plots. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe other aspect of the system was the settling ponds. These are recorded as far back as 1738 when Mr Baird of Clockmill was irrigating his fields and “collecting dung“, but by the late 18th century they were beginning to be infilled and had vanished by the 1820s. These are clearly shown on Kirkwood’s 1817 town plan. Appropriately enough parts of it look like a bit like a drawing of the human digestive system! The reason for abandoning the ponds because of two problems; firstly, there was too much sandy sediment washed off the city streets into the burn, and the customers – market gardeners mainly – were loathe to pour sand onto their plots and orchards. More importantly however the sediment was found increasingly to be full of seeds. Without putrefaction (fermentation), these seeds could not be killed, and when the seed-rich manure was spread it was an instant recipe for spreading weeds.
The soil settling ponds around Restalrig and Craigentinny. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAnd so the system concentrated around the production of grass for animal forage; a very productive and profitable system it was. 400 labourers were employed seasonally, and some 3,300 cattle in Edinburgh and 600 in Leith depended on it, mainly pen-fed dairy animals. Most dairies were small concerns, run by the occupation of a “cow feeder“, with 20-40 milk cows each.
The Holyrood Dairy, c. 1830-40. Painting by William Stewart Watson. © Edinburgh Museums & GalleriesThe meadows were estimated to turn a profit for their proprietors of £5,000 per annum (about £600,000 in 2022), with William Henry Miller estimating he made £30,000 (c. £3.4 million) over 2 years. Rents were 20-30/s per acre, or up to double that for the better pasture or during times of food scarcity. Preparing a meadow cost £20-25 per acre and was a sound investment. Miller in 1821 spent £1,000 turning over 40 acres of “sandy wasteland” – the lands of Fillyside were ancient raised beaches – to meadow use. Each acre could provide up to 6 full crops per year.
A Map of Miller’s estate at Craigentinny showing the huge network of feeders and ditches that supported the Irrigated Meadow system. This map was surveyed for Miller in 1847. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAll-in-all, this was a very productive and profitable concern, so much so that in 1834 the Police Commissioners tried to extend the burgh boundary to include the irrigated meadows and to give themselves rights over them. They spent 4,000 of the city’s pounds on the scheme, which the Foul Burn Agitation! describes as “Dung Speculation“. They were unsuccessful though as the proprietors and their one-time adversary Mr Duncan fought the Commissioners off. William Henry Miller (a former MP by this point, wealthy and influential) was quick to defend his profitable scheme. In 1843 when the North British Railway proposed running their line across his meadows, Miller had them shift it about 100 feet west so that it instead skirted around his lands. He then exchanged parcels of his land on the south of the new line with his neighbours – the Dukes of Abercorn – who had parcels trapped by the railway on the north, so each could maintain a contiguous field system. Miller also made thinds hard enough for the NBR that they never built their proposed shorter branch to Leith across his land.
The survey of Miller’s lands in 1847 show the main and sub-feeders, and the direction of flow of the water of the Foul Burn through them. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBut the whole system had a number of problems facing it. Firstly, the woeful sanitation of the Old Town needed resolving – it was recognised by now that waste needed to be piped under the ground, not just run in an open sewer for the benefit of a couple of wealthy landowners. And secondly, in 1817 the Edinburgh & Leith Gas Light Company began building a gas works at New Street, crowned by its great chimney that dominated the Canongate.
The gasworks and its chimney, with the Canongate Kirk on the left for scale.At this point, coal gas works had yet to begin extracting their by-products for industrial use, so you can guess where the gas works were dumping all the highly toxic waste chemicals. Coal tar, sulphur and ammonia as well as any other numbers and varieties of hydrocarbons went into the Foul Burn from New Street. The gas works “give forth an abundant stream, the odour of which is no doubt extremely offensive, being the most nauseous of all compounds… …This flows into a principal feeder of the old foul burn at the South Back of the Canongate“. To put it simply, the gas works was poisoning the burn. This was not the first time that the foul burns had been polluted by industry. In 1791, Russell of Roseburn attempted to use the courts to stop the Haig’s distillery at Lochrin from polluting his irrigated meadows at Coltbridge.
The proprietors of the eastern irrigated meadows managed to get fines applied to the gas works, £200 per instance of pollution and £20 per day – this seemed to have the intended effect. Or perhaps the gas works just found it more profitable to begin capturing its by products for commercial gain rather than letting them run away. Whatever the reason, the Foul Burn was “cleared up” and the eastern meadows managed to carry on; the 1888 OS 6 inch Survey shows they still occupy their main extent. In 1901, an attempt was made to bury the entirety of the burn underground as a sere, but this was unsuccessful. The scheme finally commenced in 1921 as a work programme for unemployed men; a £60,000 government grant being secured to provide employment for 400 men for six months. This “draining of the swap” opened up the lands of Lochend, Restalrig and Craigentinny for public housing schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the land of the Fillyside Meadow had already been set aside as Craigentinny Golf Couse, which had been undertaken by Leith Corporation to clear golfing off of the Links. A railway yard was later also laid adjacent, appropriately it was called the Meadows Yard.
Craigentinny Meadows, looking towards Edinburgh, 1930, in the vicinity of what is now the golf course. The dark building in the mid ground is Craigentinny House. An amazingly pastoral scene, unchanged for about 200 years, so late on. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAnd what of the East Foul Burn? Well I can tell you it’s still there but just like many of Edinburgh’s old burns it’s hiding under the ground in its culvert. Very few people who live above it probably know it’s there. We get other reminders of its presence from local place names; the area name Meadowbank? that’s lifted directly off a house known as Meadow Bank, built on the southern of the meadows. And Sunnyside Bank off of Lower London Road? that’s the south-facing (therefore sunnier) bank.
The old house of Meadowbank. An 1854 sketch by William Channing. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThis thread continues with part 2 – The thread about the problem of sewage disposal in 19th century Edinburgh and Leith; and how something ended up being done about it.
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The thread about the East Foul Burn; a long-forgotten Edinburgh stream that was the centre of a vast sewage-based agribusiness
This thread is part one of a series; the link to the next part can be found at the bottom.
We begin our story with the wonderfully verbose cover of a Victorian pamphlet;
FOUL BURN AGITATION!
STATEMENT
Explaining
NATURE AND HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL IRRIGATION NEAR EDINBURGH;
Containing
A REFUTATION OF THE UNFOUNDED AND CALUMNIOUS MISREPRESENTATIONS ON THAT SUBJECT,
In
A PAMPHLET PUBLISHED IN THE NAME OF A COMMITTEE OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF POLICE, IN WHICH THE ANCIENT AND BEAUTIFUL CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND IS FALSELY DESCRIBED AS A RESIDENCE UNSAFE TO THE HEALTH OF ITS INHABITANTS!I say pamphlet, the thing is actually 166 pages long and I spent quite some time reading it (skimming much of it) so that you don’t have to. It is Victorian local politics at its best and wors, and much of it is indeed pure agitation. But it was worth ploughing my way through it as it happens to contain a complete and detailed description of Edinburgh’s largely forgotten East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadow systems of Craigentinny and Restalrig, their history and their method of operation.
Anyway, what is this East Foul Burn of which I speak? Well it’s the principal watercourse that in olden times drained most of the Old Town, the Nor’ Loch and the small suburbs south of the city into the sea; rainfall, sewage and all. We can see it on the below map of 1750 by William Roy. It is the stream which flows from bottom left to top right – the stream originating in Lochend Loch in the centre left is the tail burn of that body of water.
The East Foul Burn’s natural route to the sea via Restalrig and Fillyside (North Mains of Craigentinny). William Roy’s Lowland Map of c. 1750. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIf you examine a old map of the Old Town and consider the topography, it’s obvious that gravity will carry anything liquid downhill. John Slezer’s remarkably accurate 17th century sketches of the city help us to visualise this from a contemporary point of view; any waste discharged on the north side of the ridge on which the Old Town of the city was built is obviously going to drain itself into the Nor’ Loch.
Prospect of the Castle and City of Edinburgh from the Nor’ Loch. John Slezer, 1673, arrows indicate the steep northern slopes of the “tail” of the crag and tail geological formation on which Edinburgh’s Old Town sitsThat loch could only drain eastwards, in the direction of the sea. James Gordon of Rothiemay’s remarkable 1647 bird’s eye view of Edinburgh shows it clearly. After irrigating the pleasant-looking Physic Garden by the Trinity College Kirk, it ran off down the North Back of Canongate (what we now call Calton Road) where it was joined by any runoff from the community nestled below the crags of the Calton Hill and from the streets and closes of the north side of the Canongate itself. The stream (in reality an open sewer) passes a number of round structures; these were wells and water cistern – one of the reasons so many breweries would congregate here. 100 years later, Edgar’s map of 1765 still shows that this open sewer still ran here.
Bird’s Eye View of Edinburgh, James Gordon of Rothiemay, 1647. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandStuart Harris, the late local historian and custodian of Edinburgh place names, refers to the wells here as being along the Tummel Burn (and you will also see it given as Tumble) which is an alternative name for the East Foul Burn, this refers to the water flow, although one imagines it wasn’t so much a pleasant babbling brook as a bubbling cauldron of filth.
The burn worked its way down the North Back of Canongate to the Wateryett (a Scots placename meaning water gate; the word for a gate was commonly port but can occasionally be yett; the word gate or gait meant a roadway e.g. Canongate). The water part of the name refereed as much to this being the route into the Canongate for drinking water from the wells as it was from being alongside a watercourse. The yett part refers to the area at the foot of the Canongate where there was a physical gateway; not a defensive structure, but a civic boundary and customs barrier. This is confirmed by a reference from a title deed in 1635 which describes the Foul Burn as being in a gutter known as the Strand. This latter term is an old Scots word for “an artificial water-channel or gutter, a street gutter” – the Abbey Strand is the name of the old building that stands to this day at the foot of the Canongate, just before you enter the grounds of the Holyroodhouse.
The Wateryett in 1818, a drawing by James Skene. By this time the physical gate had been replaced by a symbolic one for the toll house. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAfter the Water Yett, Edgar’s 1765 map shows that the burn ran in a culvert here, but we can infer its route. This map is the extent of 18th century town plans so to follow the burn we move onto an 1804 plan by John Ainslie to pick up the trail once more. It re-surfaces around Croftangry (corrupted in modern times to the Gaelic-sounding Croft-an-Righ) before disappearing underground again in the property of the Lord Chief Baron (Sir James Montgomery, 1st Baronet Stanhope) only to re-appearing on the property boundary between him and Mr Clerk. Comley Gardens and Clock Mill on Ainslie’s map are old placenames here still recalled by modern street names. The burn here now contains almost the entirety of the effluent of the city of Edinburgh, the Canongate, the burgh of Calton and the village of Abbeyhill.
Ainslie’s Town Plan of 1804, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Orange lines show the course of the Foul Burn eastThe Comely Gardens referred to on the map above were a Tivoli Garden, a sort of Georgian amusement park where – for a fee – one could stroll the gardens and admire the roses, could take tea or coffee or fruits and entertainment such as dances and musicians may be laid on. Comely Gardens is to be forever remembered as the starting point of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon, the first manned aerial flight in the British Isles. In August 1784, James Tytler rode a Montgolfier-style balloon all the way to a crash-landing in Restalrig and his name is recalled in a couple of the modern street names in this area. But back to the matter in hand, following the burn east we have reached the Clock Mill, an old house named for a mill that was driven by the burn. The name came from Clokisrwne Mylne or Clocksorrow; clock is a corruption of the Scots clack, being a specific type of mill, an onomatopoeia based on the noise its mechanism made. Sorrow refers to some form of hollow in various old tongues.
Clockmill House in 1780, from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant. Notice the naval telegraph mast on top of Calton HillIn the vicinity of Clock Mill, two further open sewers joined the burn, adding yet more effluent. The came from the Pleasance (and by extension much of the Southside) and from the Cowgate to its payload. Both of these first drained into a myre just south of Holyroodhouse, marked on Kincaid’s map of 1784 as Common Sewer Kept Stagnate for Manure, i.e. the sewage solids would settle out of the slow moving water and could be collected to fertilise the city’s gardens and orchards. There was good money to be made in such “soil” or “dung”. Before the advent of early industrial fertilisers or the Kelp Boom it was one of the few copious and economical sources of fertiliser for fields and was much in demand – all you had to do was collect it (or pay someone to do this)!
Kincaid’s Map of 1784, showing the “Common Serwer Kept Stagnate for Manure”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAfter Clockmill House, which was demolished in 1859 to landscape its grounds as a military parade ground, the burn passed beneath the main road east out of the city (the London Road would not be built until 1819). The bridge here was known as the Clockmill Bridge. It is the presence of the burn that explains why significant culverts were built here under both the North British Railway and the London Road when each was constructed. Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson, the engineer of the London Road, produced beautiful drawings for the culvert here under his road;
Stevenson’s drawings for the London Road culvert. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (MS.5849, No.54 – 57)By the time the burn passed under this culvert, it was carrying the daily sewage of about 60-80,000 people, not to mention their animals. The Foul Burn Agitation! pamphlet describes it as “a rapid and copious stream… to which [is] added the impure waters that proceed from the houses, streets and lanes of the city“. From there, the effluent of the city should have been a relatively straightforward journey down the broad, shallow natural valley in which Restalrig sits to the sea, at Fillyside (roughly where the Matalan store now is).
The East Foul Burn at Restalrig village, flowing along the foreground and passing under the road in a culvert. From an old post card, early 20th century.However it could not take this natural procession to the sea as its process was interrupted; it was industriously turned over into a series of irrigated meadows, “irrigated by the waters from the City” at Restalrig, Craigentinny and Fillyside.
Kirkwood’s Plan of 1817 showing the irrigated meadows along the Foul Burn. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIn the irrigated meadows, the Foul Burn was intersected by “principal feeders“, ditches cut along the topographic gradient. Water could be admitted to the feeders by means of sluices or damming the outflow. These feeders in turn fed further side-ditches into individual plots. The plots would be subject to controlled flooding from April to November, the fodder growing season. For two or three days a plot would be flooded, saturating the ground with sewage which would settle. The water was then allowed to run off and the plot was given three to five weeks for the grass to grow. It could then be cropped and the process could begin again. The process of flooding and cropping plots was rotated so that there were always fields ready to crop, and there was always a good supply of sewage with which to flood it. The whole object of this exercise was to provide a steady supply of food for the city’s dairy herds – this was a time when milk could not be preserved or transported any great distance, so the cattle had to be kept in and around the immediate vicinity. The system also had dedicated settling ponds where the soil could be collected and sold off by the cartload.
Craigentinny Meadows, James Steuart, 1885. Note the sluice and ditch and the ample crops. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Restalrig Meadows were at the turn of the 19th century the property of the forementioned Sir James Montgomery Bt. and extended to around 30 acres. The Craigentinny and Fillyside Meadows were owned by William Henry Miller of Craigentinny and were the largest at c. 120 acres.
Craigentinny Meadows, photograph by David Sclater, 1895. On the horizon are the “Craigentinny Marbles” (tomb of William Henry Miller) and Wheatfield House on the present day Portobello Road. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThere were further such irrigated meadows at the foot of Salisbury Crags, about 14 acres – the property of the Earl of Haddington – and near Coltbridge (modern Murrayfield) to the west, some 40-50 acres owned by Russell of Roseburn. This latter ground was fed by a much smaller foul burn – the West Foul Burn – which drained the portion of the city around Tollcross, West Port and Lauriston and the west end of the Boroughloch, making its way west via Dalry to Roseburn and then into the Water of Leith.
While the soil of the city had been collected since time immemorial, it’s not clear when this industrial-scale meadow system evolved. The Foul Burn Agitation! recounts testimony of elderly farm workers of Restalrig that they had been in place since at least 1750. However a document from 1561 when the lands of Restalrig Kirk were confiscated during the Reformation records “of certain prebendaries yardis, in Restalrig and Chalmeris pertening to the saidis prebendaris, callit their Mansis and pece of suard Meadow” – the suard here referring to a piece of marshy or boggy ground. The pamphlet states the “practice existed from time immemorial of flooding the Meadow grounds by means of the Foul Burn“. So we can say with some certainty that it was an old and established practice, and indeed the courts agreed with this when Alexander Duncan WS of Restalrig House tried to sue his neighbouring sewage barons, Miller and Montgomery, on account of the smell from the meadows spoiling his quality of life.
Restlarig House, c. 1883Indeed the legal action ended up backfiring on Duncan because in 1833 the Burgh Police Act protected the proprietors from any act “to divert or alter any stream or watercourse, or diminish the ancient and accustomed quantity of rain or other water or soil flowing therein“, guaranteeing their right to operate the meadows and collect the profits. (Side note, this was included in a Police Act because at that time in Scotland the Police had the powers and responsibilities for cleansing the burgh, distributing water and preventing disease).
The East Foul Burn at Craigentinny, WS Reid, 1860. Looking towards Miller’s Craigentinny House. Notice the bridge across the river and that the bank is reinforced – evidence of the extensive river management. Notice that the crops on the left of the picture seem long and those on the right are short, evidence of the constant rotation of cropping in the plots. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe other aspect of the system was the settling ponds. These are recorded as far back as 1738 when Mr Baird of Clockmill was irrigating his fields and “collecting dung“, but by the late 18th century they were beginning to be infilled and had vanished by the 1820s. These are clearly shown on Kirkwood’s 1817 town plan. Appropriately enough parts of it look like a bit like a drawing of the human digestive system! The reason for abandoning the ponds because of two problems; firstly, there was too much sandy sediment washed off the city streets into the burn, and the customers – market gardeners mainly – were loathe to pour sand onto their plots and orchards. More importantly however the sediment was found increasingly to be full of seeds. Without putrefaction (fermentation), these seeds could not be killed, and when the seed-rich manure was spread it was an instant recipe for spreading weeds.
The soil settling ponds around Restalrig and Craigentinny. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAnd so the system concentrated around the production of grass for animal forage; a very productive and profitable system it was. 400 labourers were employed seasonally, and some 3,300 cattle in Edinburgh and 600 in Leith depended on it, mainly pen-fed dairy animals. Most dairies were small concerns, run by the occupation of a “cow feeder“, with 20-40 milk cows each.
The Holyrood Dairy, c. 1830-40. Painting by William Stewart Watson. © Edinburgh Museums & GalleriesThe meadows were estimated to turn a profit for their proprietors of £5,000 per annum (about £600,000 in 2022), with William Henry Miller estimating he made £30,000 (c. £3.4 million) over 2 years. Rents were 20-30/s per acre, or up to double that for the better pasture or during times of food scarcity. Preparing a meadow cost £20-25 per acre and was a sound investment. Miller in 1821 spent £1,000 turning over 40 acres of “sandy wasteland” – the lands of Fillyside were ancient raised beaches – to meadow use. Each acre could provide up to 6 full crops per year.
A Map of Miller’s estate at Craigentinny showing the huge network of feeders and ditches that supported the Irrigated Meadow system. This map was surveyed for Miller in 1847. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAll-in-all, this was a very productive and profitable concern, so much so that in 1834 the Police Commissioners tried to extend the burgh boundary to include the irrigated meadows and to give themselves rights over them. They spent 4,000 of the city’s pounds on the scheme, which the Foul Burn Agitation! describes as “Dung Speculation“. They were unsuccessful though as the proprietors and their one-time adversary Mr Duncan fought the Commissioners off. William Henry Miller (a former MP by this point, wealthy and influential) was quick to defend his profitable scheme. In 1843 when the North British Railway proposed running their line across his meadows, Miller had them shift it about 100 feet west so that it instead skirted around his lands. He then exchanged parcels of his land on the south of the new line with his neighbours – the Dukes of Abercorn – who had parcels trapped by the railway on the north, so each could maintain a contiguous field system. Miller also made thinds hard enough for the NBR that they never built their proposed shorter branch to Leith across his land.
The survey of Miller’s lands in 1847 show the main and sub-feeders, and the direction of flow of the water of the Foul Burn through them. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBut the whole system had a number of problems facing it. Firstly, the woeful sanitation of the Old Town needed resolving – it was recognised by now that waste needed to be piped under the ground, not just run in an open sewer for the benefit of a couple of wealthy landowners. And secondly, in 1817 the Edinburgh & Leith Gas Light Company began building a gas works at New Street, crowned by its great chimney that dominated the Canongate.
The gasworks and its chimney, with the Canongate Kirk on the left for scale.At this point, coal gas works had yet to begin extracting their by-products for industrial use, so you can guess where the gas works were dumping all the highly toxic waste chemicals. Coal tar, sulphur and ammonia as well as any other numbers and varieties of hydrocarbons went into the Foul Burn from New Street. The gas works “give forth an abundant stream, the odour of which is no doubt extremely offensive, being the most nauseous of all compounds… …This flows into a principal feeder of the old foul burn at the South Back of the Canongate“. To put it simply, the gas works was poisoning the burn. This was not the first time that the foul burns had been polluted by industry. In 1791, Russell of Roseburn attempted to use the courts to stop the Haig’s distillery at Lochrin from polluting his irrigated meadows at Coltbridge.
The proprietors of the eastern irrigated meadows managed to get fines applied to the gas works, £200 per instance of pollution and £20 per day – this seemed to have the intended effect. Or perhaps the gas works just found it more profitable to begin capturing its by products for commercial gain rather than letting them run away. Whatever the reason, the Foul Burn was “cleared up” and the eastern meadows managed to carry on; the 1888 OS 6 inch Survey shows they still occupy their main extent. In 1901, an attempt was made to bury the entirety of the burn underground as a sere, but this was unsuccessful. The scheme finally commenced in 1921 as a work programme for unemployed men; a £60,000 government grant being secured to provide employment for 400 men for six months. This “draining of the swap” opened up the lands of Lochend, Restalrig and Craigentinny for public housing schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the land of the Fillyside Meadow had already been set aside as Craigentinny Golf Couse, which had been undertaken by Leith Corporation to clear golfing off of the Links. A railway yard was later also laid adjacent, appropriately it was called the Meadows Yard.
Craigentinny Meadows, looking towards Edinburgh, 1930, in the vicinity of what is now the golf course. The dark building in the mid ground is Craigentinny House. An amazingly pastoral scene, unchanged for about 200 years, so late on. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAnd what of the East Foul Burn? Well I can tell you it’s still there but just like many of Edinburgh’s old burns it’s hiding under the ground in its culvert. Very few people who live above it probably know it’s there. We get other reminders of its presence from local place names; the area name Meadowbank? that’s lifted directly off a house known as Meadow Bank, built on the southern of the meadows. And Sunnyside Bank off of Lower London Road? that’s the south-facing (therefore sunnier) bank.
The old house of Meadowbank. An 1854 sketch by William Channing. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThis thread continues with part 2 – The thread about the problem of sewage disposal in 19th century Edinburgh and Leith; and how something ended up being done about it.
If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
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#craigentinny #Fillyside #IrrigatedMeadows #Millers #Restalrig #River #Seafield #Sewage #Written2019
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The thread about the East Foul Burn; a long-forgotten Edinburgh stream that was the centre of a vast sewage-based agribusiness
This thread is part one of a series; the link to the next part can be found at the bottom.
We begin our story with the wonderfully verbose cover of a Victorian pamphlet;
FOUL BURN AGITATION!
STATEMENT
Explaining
NATURE AND HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL IRRIGATION NEAR EDINBURGH;
Containing
A REFUTATION OF THE UNFOUNDED AND CALUMNIOUS MISREPRESENTATIONS ON THAT SUBJECT,
In
A PAMPHLET PUBLISHED IN THE NAME OF A COMMITTEE OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF POLICE, IN WHICH THE ANCIENT AND BEAUTIFUL CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND IS FALSELY DESCRIBED AS A RESIDENCE UNSAFE TO THE HEALTH OF ITS INHABITANTS!I say pamphlet, the thing is actually 166 pages long and I spent quite some time reading it (skimming much of it) so that you don’t have to. It is Victorian local politics at its best and wors, and much of it is indeed pure agitation. But it was worth ploughing my way through it as it happens to contain a complete and detailed description of Edinburgh’s largely forgotten East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadow systems of Craigentinny and Restalrig, their history and their method of operation.
Anyway, what is this East Foul Burn of which I speak? Well it’s the principal watercourse that in olden times drained most of the Old Town, the Nor’ Loch and the small suburbs south of the city into the sea; rainfall, sewage and all. We can see it on the below map of 1750 by William Roy. It is the stream which flows from bottom left to top right – the stream originating in Lochend Loch in the centre left is the tail burn of that body of water.
The East Foul Burn’s natural route to the sea via Restalrig and Fillyside (North Mains of Craigentinny). William Roy’s Lowland Map of c. 1750. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIf you examine a old map of the Old Town and consider the topography, it’s obvious that gravity will carry anything liquid downhill. John Slezer’s remarkably accurate 17th century sketches of the city help us to visualise this from a contemporary point of view; any waste discharged on the north side of the ridge on which the Old Town of the city was built is obviously going to drain itself into the Nor’ Loch.
Prospect of the Castle and City of Edinburgh from the Nor’ Loch. John Slezer, 1673, arrows indicate the steep northern slopes of the “tail” of the crag and tail geological formation on which Edinburgh’s Old Town sitsThat loch could only drain eastwards, in the direction of the sea. James Gordon of Rothiemay’s remarkable 1647 bird’s eye view of Edinburgh shows it clearly. After irrigating the pleasant-looking Physic Garden by the Trinity College Kirk, it ran off down the North Back of Canongate (what we now call Calton Road) where it was joined by any runoff from the community nestled below the crags of the Calton Hill and from the streets and closes of the north side of the Canongate itself. The stream (in reality an open sewer) passes a number of round structures; these were wells and water cistern – one of the reasons so many breweries would congregate here. 100 years later, Edgar’s map of 1765 still shows that this open sewer still ran here.
Bird’s Eye View of Edinburgh, James Gordon of Rothiemay, 1647. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandStuart Harris, the late local historian and custodian of Edinburgh place names, refers to the wells here as being along the Tummel Burn (and you will also see it given as Tumble) which is an alternative name for the East Foul Burn, this refers to the water flow, although one imagines it wasn’t so much a pleasant babbling brook as a bubbling cauldron of filth.
The burn worked its way down the North Back of Canongate to the Wateryett (a Scots placename meaning water gate; the word for a gate was commonly port but can occasionally be yett; the word gate or gait meant a roadway e.g. Canongate). The water part of the name refereed as much to this being the route into the Canongate for drinking water from the wells as it was from being alongside a watercourse. The yett part refers to the area at the foot of the Canongate where there was a physical gateway; not a defensive structure, but a civic boundary and customs barrier. This is confirmed by a reference from a title deed in 1635 which describes the Foul Burn as being in a gutter known as the Strand. This latter term is an old Scots word for “an artificial water-channel or gutter, a street gutter” – the Abbey Strand is the name of the old building that stands to this day at the foot of the Canongate, just before you enter the grounds of the Holyroodhouse.
The Wateryett in 1818, a drawing by James Skene. By this time the physical gate had been replaced by a symbolic one for the toll house. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAfter the Water Yett, Edgar’s 1765 map shows that the burn ran in a culvert here, but we can infer its route. This map is the extent of 18th century town plans so to follow the burn we move onto an 1804 plan by John Ainslie to pick up the trail once more. It re-surfaces around Croftangry (corrupted in modern times to the Gaelic-sounding Croft-an-Righ) before disappearing underground again in the property of the Lord Chief Baron (Sir James Montgomery, 1st Baronet Stanhope) only to re-appearing on the property boundary between him and Mr Clerk. Comley Gardens and Clock Mill on Ainslie’s map are old placenames here still recalled by modern street names. The burn here now contains almost the entirety of the effluent of the city of Edinburgh, the Canongate, the burgh of Calton and the village of Abbeyhill.
Ainslie’s Town Plan of 1804, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Orange lines show the course of the Foul Burn eastThe Comely Gardens referred to on the map above were a Tivoli Garden, a sort of Georgian amusement park where – for a fee – one could stroll the gardens and admire the roses, could take tea or coffee or fruits and entertainment such as dances and musicians may be laid on. Comely Gardens is to be forever remembered as the starting point of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon, the first manned aerial flight in the British Isles. In August 1784, James Tytler rode a Montgolfier-style balloon all the way to a crash-landing in Restalrig and his name is recalled in a couple of the modern street names in this area. But back to the matter in hand, following the burn east we have reached the Clock Mill, an old house named for a mill that was driven by the burn. The name came from Clokisrwne Mylne or Clocksorrow; clock is a corruption of the Scots clack, being a specific type of mill, an onomatopoeia based on the noise its mechanism made. Sorrow refers to some form of hollow in various old tongues.
Clockmill House in 1780, from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant. Notice the naval telegraph mast on top of Calton HillIn the vicinity of Clock Mill, two further open sewers joined the burn, adding yet more effluent. The came from the Pleasance (and by extension much of the Southside) and from the Cowgate to its payload. Both of these first drained into a myre just south of Holyroodhouse, marked on Kincaid’s map of 1784 as Common Sewer Kept Stagnate for Manure, i.e. the sewage solids would settle out of the slow moving water and could be collected to fertilise the city’s gardens and orchards. There was good money to be made in such “soil” or “dung”. Before the advent of early industrial fertilisers or the Kelp Boom it was one of the few copious and economical sources of fertiliser for fields and was much in demand – all you had to do was collect it (or pay someone to do this)!
Kincaid’s Map of 1784, showing the “Common Serwer Kept Stagnate for Manure”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAfter Clockmill House, which was demolished in 1859 to landscape its grounds as a military parade ground, the burn passed beneath the main road east out of the city (the London Road would not be built until 1819). The bridge here was known as the Clockmill Bridge. It is the presence of the burn that explains why significant culverts were built here under both the North British Railway and the London Road when each was constructed. Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson, the engineer of the London Road, produced beautiful drawings for the culvert here under his road;
Stevenson’s drawings for the London Road culvert. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (MS.5849, No.54 – 57)By the time the burn passed under this culvert, it was carrying the daily sewage of about 60-80,000 people, not to mention their animals. The Foul Burn Agitation! pamphlet describes it as “a rapid and copious stream… to which [is] added the impure waters that proceed from the houses, streets and lanes of the city“. From there, the effluent of the city should have been a relatively straightforward journey down the broad, shallow natural valley in which Restalrig sits to the sea, at Fillyside (roughly where the Matalan store now is).
The East Foul Burn at Restalrig village, flowing along the foreground and passing under the road in a culvert. From an old post card, early 20th century.However it could not take this natural procession to the sea as its process was interrupted; it was industriously turned over into a series of irrigated meadows, “irrigated by the waters from the City” at Restalrig, Craigentinny and Fillyside.
Kirkwood’s Plan of 1817 showing the irrigated meadows along the Foul Burn. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIn the irrigated meadows, the Foul Burn was intersected by “principal feeders“, ditches cut along the topographic gradient. Water could be admitted to the feeders by means of sluices or damming the outflow. These feeders in turn fed further side-ditches into individual plots. The plots would be subject to controlled flooding from April to November, the fodder growing season. For two or three days a plot would be flooded, saturating the ground with sewage which would settle. The water was then allowed to run off and the plot was given three to five weeks for the grass to grow. It could then be cropped and the process could begin again. The process of flooding and cropping plots was rotated so that there were always fields ready to crop, and there was always a good supply of sewage with which to flood it. The whole object of this exercise was to provide a steady supply of food for the city’s dairy herds – this was a time when milk could not be preserved or transported any great distance, so the cattle had to be kept in and around the immediate vicinity. The system also had dedicated settling ponds where the soil could be collected and sold off by the cartload.
Craigentinny Meadows, James Steuart, 1885. Note the sluice and ditch and the ample crops. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Restalrig Meadows were at the turn of the 19th century the property of the forementioned Sir James Montgomery Bt. and extended to around 30 acres. The Craigentinny and Fillyside Meadows were owned by William Henry Miller of Craigentinny and were the largest at c. 120 acres.
Craigentinny Meadows, photograph by David Sclater, 1895. On the horizon are the “Craigentinny Marbles” (tomb of William Henry Miller) and Wheatfield House on the present day Portobello Road. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThere were further such irrigated meadows at the foot of Salisbury Crags, about 14 acres – the property of the Earl of Haddington – and near Coltbridge (modern Murrayfield) to the west, some 40-50 acres owned by Russell of Roseburn. This latter ground was fed by a much smaller foul burn – the West Foul Burn – which drained the portion of the city around Tollcross, West Port and Lauriston and the west end of the Boroughloch, making its way west via Dalry to Roseburn and then into the Water of Leith.
While the soil of the city had been collected since time immemorial, it’s not clear when this industrial-scale meadow system evolved. The Foul Burn Agitation! recounts testimony of elderly farm workers of Restalrig that they had been in place since at least 1750. However a document from 1561 when the lands of Restalrig Kirk were confiscated during the Reformation records “of certain prebendaries yardis, in Restalrig and Chalmeris pertening to the saidis prebendaris, callit their Mansis and pece of suard Meadow” – the suard here referring to a piece of marshy or boggy ground. The pamphlet states the “practice existed from time immemorial of flooding the Meadow grounds by means of the Foul Burn“. So we can say with some certainty that it was an old and established practice, and indeed the courts agreed with this when Alexander Duncan WS of Restalrig House tried to sue his neighbouring sewage barons, Miller and Montgomery, on account of the smell from the meadows spoiling his quality of life.
Restlarig House, c. 1883Indeed the legal action ended up backfiring on Duncan because in 1833 the Burgh Police Act protected the proprietors from any act “to divert or alter any stream or watercourse, or diminish the ancient and accustomed quantity of rain or other water or soil flowing therein“, guaranteeing their right to operate the meadows and collect the profits. (Side note, this was included in a Police Act because at that time in Scotland the Police had the powers and responsibilities for cleansing the burgh, distributing water and preventing disease).
The East Foul Burn at Craigentinny, WS Reid, 1860. Looking towards Miller’s Craigentinny House. Notice the bridge across the river and that the bank is reinforced – evidence of the extensive river management. Notice that the crops on the left of the picture seem long and those on the right are short, evidence of the constant rotation of cropping in the plots. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe other aspect of the system was the settling ponds. These are recorded as far back as 1738 when Mr Baird of Clockmill was irrigating his fields and “collecting dung“, but by the late 18th century they were beginning to be infilled and had vanished by the 1820s. These are clearly shown on Kirkwood’s 1817 town plan. Appropriately enough parts of it look like a bit like a drawing of the human digestive system! The reason for abandoning the ponds because of two problems; firstly, there was too much sandy sediment washed off the city streets into the burn, and the customers – market gardeners mainly – were loathe to pour sand onto their plots and orchards. More importantly however the sediment was found increasingly to be full of seeds. Without putrefaction (fermentation), these seeds could not be killed, and when the seed-rich manure was spread it was an instant recipe for spreading weeds.
The soil settling ponds around Restalrig and Craigentinny. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAnd so the system concentrated around the production of grass for animal forage; a very productive and profitable system it was. 400 labourers were employed seasonally, and some 3,300 cattle in Edinburgh and 600 in Leith depended on it, mainly pen-fed dairy animals. Most dairies were small concerns, run by the occupation of a “cow feeder“, with 20-40 milk cows each.
The Holyrood Dairy, c. 1830-40. Painting by William Stewart Watson. © Edinburgh Museums & GalleriesThe meadows were estimated to turn a profit for their proprietors of £5,000 per annum (about £600,000 in 2022), with William Henry Miller estimating he made £30,000 (c. £3.4 million) over 2 years. Rents were 20-30/s per acre, or up to double that for the better pasture or during times of food scarcity. Preparing a meadow cost £20-25 per acre and was a sound investment. Miller in 1821 spent £1,000 turning over 40 acres of “sandy wasteland” – the lands of Fillyside were ancient raised beaches – to meadow use. Each acre could provide up to 6 full crops per year.
A Map of Miller’s estate at Craigentinny showing the huge network of feeders and ditches that supported the Irrigated Meadow system. This map was surveyed for Miller in 1847. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAll-in-all, this was a very productive and profitable concern, so much so that in 1834 the Police Commissioners tried to extend the burgh boundary to include the irrigated meadows and to give themselves rights over them. They spent 4,000 of the city’s pounds on the scheme, which the Foul Burn Agitation! describes as “Dung Speculation“. They were unsuccessful though as the proprietors and their one-time adversary Mr Duncan fought the Commissioners off. William Henry Miller (a former MP by this point, wealthy and influential) was quick to defend his profitable scheme. In 1843 when the North British Railway proposed running their line across his meadows, Miller had them shift it about 100 feet west so that it instead skirted around his lands. He then exchanged parcels of his land on the south of the new line with his neighbours – the Dukes of Abercorn – who had parcels trapped by the railway on the north, so each could maintain a contiguous field system. Miller also made thinds hard enough for the NBR that they never built their proposed shorter branch to Leith across his land.
The survey of Miller’s lands in 1847 show the main and sub-feeders, and the direction of flow of the water of the Foul Burn through them. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBut the whole system had a number of problems facing it. Firstly, the woeful sanitation of the Old Town needed resolving – it was recognised by now that waste needed to be piped under the ground, not just run in an open sewer for the benefit of a couple of wealthy landowners. And secondly, in 1817 the Edinburgh & Leith Gas Light Company began building a gas works at New Street, crowned by its great chimney that dominated the Canongate.
The gasworks and its chimney, with the Canongate Kirk on the left for scale.At this point, coal gas works had yet to begin extracting their by-products for industrial use, so you can guess where the gas works were dumping all the highly toxic waste chemicals. Coal tar, sulphur and ammonia as well as any other numbers and varieties of hydrocarbons went into the Foul Burn from New Street. The gas works “give forth an abundant stream, the odour of which is no doubt extremely offensive, being the most nauseous of all compounds… …This flows into a principal feeder of the old foul burn at the South Back of the Canongate“. To put it simply, the gas works was poisoning the burn. This was not the first time that the foul burns had been polluted by industry. In 1791, Russell of Roseburn attempted to use the courts to stop the Haig’s distillery at Lochrin from polluting his irrigated meadows at Coltbridge.
The proprietors of the eastern irrigated meadows managed to get fines applied to the gas works, £200 per instance of pollution and £20 per day – this seemed to have the intended effect. Or perhaps the gas works just found it more profitable to begin capturing its by products for commercial gain rather than letting them run away. Whatever the reason, the Foul Burn was “cleared up” and the eastern meadows managed to carry on; the 1888 OS 6 inch Survey shows they still occupy their main extent. In 1901, an attempt was made to bury the entirety of the burn underground as a sere, but this was unsuccessful. The scheme finally commenced in 1921 as a work programme for unemployed men; a £60,000 government grant being secured to provide employment for 400 men for six months. This “draining of the swap” opened up the lands of Lochend, Restalrig and Craigentinny for public housing schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the land of the Fillyside Meadow had already been set aside as Craigentinny Golf Couse, which had been undertaken by Leith Corporation to clear golfing off of the Links. A railway yard was later also laid adjacent, appropriately it was called the Meadows Yard.
Craigentinny Meadows, looking towards Edinburgh, 1930, in the vicinity of what is now the golf course. The dark building in the mid ground is Craigentinny House. An amazingly pastoral scene, unchanged for about 200 years, so late on. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAnd what of the East Foul Burn? Well I can tell you it’s still there but just like many of Edinburgh’s old burns it’s hiding under the ground in its culvert. Very few people who live above it probably know it’s there. We get other reminders of its presence from local place names; the area name Meadowbank? that’s lifted directly off a house known as Meadow Bank, built on the southern of the meadows. And Sunnyside Bank off of Lower London Road? that’s the south-facing (therefore sunnier) bank.
The old house of Meadowbank. An 1854 sketch by William Channing. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThis thread continues with part 2 – The thread about the problem of sewage disposal in 19th century Edinburgh and Leith; and how something ended up being done about it.
If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
These threads © 2017-2025, 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.
#craigentinny #Fillyside #IrrigatedMeadows #Millers #Restalrig #River #Seafield #Sewage #Written2019
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When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a single body of the magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.
Nor is there liberty if the power of judging is not separate from legislative power and from executive power. If it were joined to legislative power, the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be the legislator. If it were joined to executive power, the judge could have the force of an oppressor.
All would be lost if the same man or the same body of principal men, either of nobles, or of the people, exercised these three powers: that of making the laws, that of executing public resolutions, and that of judging the crimes or the disputes of individuals.
[Lorsque, dans la même personne ou dans le même corps de magistrature, la puissance législative est réunie à la puissance exécutrice, il n’y a point de liberté ; parce qu’on peut craindre que le même monarque ou le même sénat ne fasse des loix tyranniques, pour les exécuter tyranniquement.
Il n’y a point encore de liberté, si la puissance de juger n’est pas séparée de la puissance législative, & de l’exécutrice. Si elle étoit jointe à la puissance législative, le pouvoir sur la vie & la liberté des citoyens seroit arbitraire; car le juge seroit législateur. Si elle étoit jointe à la puissance exécutrice, le juge pourroit avoir la force d’un oppresseur.
Tout seroit perdu, si le même homme, ou le même corps des principaux, ou des nobles, ou du peuple, exerçoient ces trois pouvoirs; celui de faire des loix, celui d’exécuter les résolutions publiques, & celui de juger les crimes ou les différends des particuliers.]Charles-Lewis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political philosopher
Spirit of Laws [The Spirit of the Laws; De l’esprit des lois], Book 11, ch. 6 (1748) [tr. Cohler/Miller/Stone (1989)]More info about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montesquieu/80796/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #montesquieu #checksandbalances #executive #judiciary #laws #legislature #separationofpowers #tyranny
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The town that bricks built: the thread about some history of Portobello and why it has a road for a king
This thread was originally written and published in February 2021.
If you go down to the beach today, you’ll be in for a big surprise… No, the teddy bears are not having a picnic, but the sea and/or Figgate burn have performed one of their semi-irregular uncoverings of the old Portobello Harbour from the sand.
Edge of the pier revealed © SelfEdge of the pier revealed © SelfThe harbour was built in 1787 for local “brick baron” William Jameson, who had hit the big time when he fued land to the east of the Figgate Burn on which to build a house and instead hit clay, kicking off the town’s brick (and later, pottery) industry.
William Jameson (centre), with Orlando Hart (left) and Archibald McDowall (right). Sir James Hay and Sir James Hunter Blair are labouring in the background. From a caricature by John Kay, 1785. CC-by-NC-ND, © National Portrait Gallery, LondonThe other thing needed for brick and pottery kilns – coal – was readily available in the vicinity at Niddrie, around Musselburgh and along the coast at Prestonpans and beyond. Here is the harbour on Wood’s 1824 town plan of Portobello; it lies just east of the Figgate Burn, on the shore, in front of the new flats by the bottle kilns.
Plan of the Town of Portobello by John Wood, 1824. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe stone pier extended some 100 feet, and a basin was excavated out of the beach between the burn and the wall; but it was doomed to fail thanks to the effects of sand transport along the beach consistently silting it up. Portobello really owes its existence to Jameson and the clay. Before that, there wasn’t much except a few small cottages and hostelries strung along the road from Edinburgh to Berwick. The brickworks drew in workers and a village began to form.
Taylor & Skinner Road Strip Map, 1776. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe nascent workers village was known as the Figgate Village.
Figgate Village; the remains of Georgian workers housing as late as 1934, when the site was cleared to make way for the open air bathing pool. this courtyard of cottages and houses were associated with a brickworks at Rosebank opened by a Mr. McEwan in the early 19th century. The works seen behind them are the Rosebank Potteries, with the Portobello Paper Mill on the right. © Edinburgh City LibrariesLong before it was Portobello, the area was know as the Figgate Muir; an expanse of muirland (Scots for moor) along the Figgate Burn which ran down to the sea. The Figgate Whins (whins in Scots are gorse) bordered the old road above the beach from Leith and Edinburgh to Musselburgh. “Figgate” is referenced as early as 1466 as “Fegot”, part of Duddingston Kirk parish. Fegot possibly comes from the norse Fé (cattle or sheep) and Gata (a “way”, as in the Scots Gait, but also pasture). You can also see it spelled Freegate, Frigate, Figate, Figgot, Thicket, etc. on older maps.
John Adair’s map of the area in 1682 shows it to be nameless and uninhabited, the Figgate Burn being the sole feature to help us orientate where Portobello is today. There is a vague suggestion of a track and stippling indicating the muir and whins. E. Didstoun is Easter Duddingston farm, where the King’s Manor Hotel is now.
Adair’s Map of 1682 showing nothing where Portobello now is, beyond the Figgate Burn. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandRoy’s Lowland map of c. 1750 shows the area clearer, but it still appears uninhabited; nothing more than a road, muir and whins. The road was notorious for banditry; in 1762, the Scots Magazine records that the master of a fishing boat, Alexander Henderson, was attacked on the road across the Figgate Whins when making his way between Musselburgh to Leith and relieved of 12s 6d in money, hit on the head with a broadsword and left for dead. Travellers apparently preferred the open beach rather than the track through the whins, or took the longer route more inland from Jock’s Lodge to Duddingston to Musselburgh (via what is now Willowbrae).
A cottage on this road between Leith, Edinburgh and Musselnurgh (now the High Street) built in 1742 was named Portobello, in honour of the victory of Admiral Vernon at Porto Bello in 1739 (its builder, George Hamilton, by legend having served there.) A Court of Session record of has testimony that Portobello House or Hut was built by one Peter Scott. Adverts in 1753 record it as a tavern, proprietor George Hamilton, from where he ran a cobbler’s shop and also horse racing on the shore. Stuart Harris thinks the direct link to Admiral Vernon at the Battle of Porto Bello may just be a “sailor’s yarn”, and the name may just be fanciful, as was the trend at the time. The house was cleared around 1862 when the town hall was built.
Portobello near Edinburgh, c. 1834, unknown artist, possibly James Skene. Could this be the original “Portobello Hut?” © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn 1814, what was by now being referred to as the area of “Portobello” was detached from the parish of Duddingston to form a parish in its own right, the “chapel of ease” being raised to parish kirk. By the time the town became a burgh in 1833, it had adopted the name formally.
Portobello by Robert Scott, 1838. CC-BY-NC National Galleries ScotlandBack to William Jameson. He built himself a mansion to the south of Portobello on his land called Rosefield in the 1760s. You can still see some of the garden walls (built, of course, in Portobello brick) and a few lumps of dressed stone from it in Rosefield Park.
The Portobello brick of the Rosefield House walled garden can be seen in Rosefield Park. © SelfJameson took on the feu of what would become a significant part of Portobello in 1763, from Baron Muir of the Exchequer. Jameson’s brickworks developed in 1765, and contemporary accounts refer to the area as “Brickfield or Portobello“. There was a Brickfield on Leith Links too where there was an earlier brickworks. Jameson’s clay pit provided the feedstock for the local brick and pottery industry. Part of it would later be filled in and flattened to form the Craigentinny sidings and depot, another part was flooded and landscape to become the Figgate Pond.
The “brickfield”; the land were clay was excavated for brick making. This photo was taken as late as 1922 when the Abercorn Brickworks was still in operation. The top of the Ramsay Technical Colelge can be seen peeking out in the top right. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAround 1785, a lawyer from Edinburgh by the name of John Cunningham feud a parcel of ground near the beach from Jameson and had built for himself a most curious villa upon it. Portobello Tower was built in red Portobello bricks, but to the beach side of it was attached a great folly tower; a battlemented octagon with a square stair tower adjoining.
The Tower, Portobello by Thomas Bebgie, 1887. © Edinburgh City LibrariesIt is in-filled with all kinds of curious bits of masonry tracework that were collected by Cunningham from old Edinburgh churches and houses (including parts of the original Mercat Cross and allegedly from the Cathedral of St. Andrews). An 1864 rebuild of the structure consolidated it somewhat from its more ruinous original form as a belvedere into accommodation.
“The Village of Figget” or Portobello in 1783, from the Annals of Portobello. Cunningham’s property has a “summer house” at the end, possibly the Tower, and Porto Bello and Rosefield are marked.The draw of the sea and the sand of Portobello has long been a draw for Edinburgh residents. Writing in 1806, Sir John Carr in Caledonian Sketches says “Portobello is a beautiful village, embellished with many genteel houses, and stands close to the sea shore… It is much frequented in the season by fashionable families and by respectable citizens of the capital, from which it is but a very short distance, as a delightful sea-bathing place“. In that year, a bath house was built with hot and cold salt water baths at what is the foot of the appropriately named Bath Street.
Portobello from the beach, showing the tower and in the distance the smoking chimneys of Joppa Pans 1845 by J. Greenwood. © Edinburgh City LibrariesBy the middle of the 19th century, Portobello was a fashionable suburb of large villas that were being built along the High Street in the direction of Joppa. We can get an idea of what it looked like from the below print of 1845. Coillesdene House (where the tower block now is) is the large house on the right, the spire on the left is the old Parish Kirk. It can be seen that the land immediately to the south is still fields and hedgerows.
Portobello from the southeast, 1845 by J. Greenwood. © Edinburgh City LibrariesOn Portobello High Street stands the remains of one of the town’s Georgian villas; that of Shrubmount, the last residence of the geologist and evangelist Hugh Miller (1802-1856). The house has since been rebuilt into a Victorian row on the High Street – confusingly what we see of it from “the front” is actually the gable end of it, the pillars of the original portico entrance are buried within the back of a kebab shop now. (Thank you to Fraser Macdonald for correcting the location of Shrubmount, which is mispositioned in a couple of books). Miller had a geological museum in the house, but was tormented by mental illness and committed suicide when Victorian medicine failed him and he feared he might harm his family.
The remains of Shrubmount on Portobello High Street, the building faced east, what we are looking at is the original side.The gentlemen cavalry of the Royal Edinburgh Light Dragoon Volunteers, who counted Sir Walter Scott in their ranks, used to drill on the beach in the early 19th century. They were somewhat lampooned in the contemporary press in the manner of a well meaning Dad’s army that was more of a horseriding, dressing up and drinking club. John Kay caricatured the Edinburgh yeomanry in his typically acerbic style.
John Adams of the Royal Edinburgh Light Dragoons, 1797. © National Portrait Gallery, LondonIn 1822 on his state visit to Scotland, King George IV reviewed the Scottish yeomanry cavalry and a “picturesque force of Highland clans that had come to Edinburgh in honour of his visit.” On Friday, 23 August, the King reviewed 3,000 volunteer horse and “clansmen” on Portobello sands from his carriage, which had approached down a road that we now call the King’s Road for that reason. In the painting by Turner below, the King is on a silver horse dressed as a Field Marshall in the centre of the canvas. The crowds assembled on the sands include many men drinking from glasses and the east coast fishwives in their distinctive striped dresses and garb.
King George reviews the yeomanry at Portobello. Those on the left, behind the pavilion, are standing on Jameson’s short lived Portobello harbour pier. 1822, WIlliam Turner de Lond. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland.And if you are to wander around the modern housing that occupies the site of the former Buchan’s Pottery in Portobello, you can find all sorts of street names that relate to an earlier time: William Jameson Place, Brickfield, The Pottery, Harbour Place and Pipe Street and Lane.
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Finally Friday Reads: Ain’t that some Shit?
With Trump/Epstein back in the news, here’s a snippet from a cartoon I drew a few days ago. ” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Some of my friends have been blaming the craziness I’ve been feeling lately on the huge Mercury Retrograde that started on the 9th. It’s really unnerving to read the unbelievably scattered graft and madness coming out of Orange Caligula’s regime, which seems like peak madness, too. I’ve spent the last two days trying to talk people down, as well as crying over a friend whose essential surgery just got cancelled because his insurance company refused to pay for it. Then, there are all the Epstein headlines. I’m glad to get glimpses of justice, but it’s also tough to deal with all the stories of abuse and indifference that always come from the way men treat women and children like junk in their toy box.
This story in HuffPo absolutely tore my heart to pieces this morning. It’s reported by Ron Dicker. This may trigger you, so please take this trigger warning seriously. “Epstein Email About Giving Girlfriend To Trump Enrages Model’ Groped’ By Him. The former Sports Illustrated model said Epstein, whom she dated in the early 1990s, “delivered” her to Trump.”
A newly released email in which Jeffrey Epstein bragged about giving a girlfriend to Donald Trump angered a former model who dated Epstein and claimed he once “delivered” her to the future president to be “groped” by him.
The note showed how “deeply misogynistic” the two men were, Stacey Williams told CNN on Thursday. (Watch the video below.)
Williams, who was featured in several Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues in the ’90s, appeared on “Erin Burnett Outfront” after numerous emails involving the late sexual predator Epstein were shared this week. Congress is poised to vote on the release of files unviewed by the public, but Trump has continued to push back at what he now calls a “hoax.”
Burnett brought up Epstein’s correspondence in which he wrote about a Norwegian businesswoman and heiress: “my 20 year old girlfriend in 1993, , that after two years i gave to donald.”
“It screams about, you know, the mindset of these men,” Williams said. “You know, the same two men who did what they did to me when Jeffrey Epstein walked me into Donald Trump’s office to be groped by him. Clearly, we are these objects, these trophies, and it’s deeply misogynistic. It’s horrifying.”
Burnett also mentioned Williams’ previous account claiming Trump molested her as Epstein watched at Trump Tower, and how their smiling at each other revealed the pair’s “weird and twisted game.”
Williams added, “I clearly was delivered there for the groping.” She said that she had a reputation for standing up to inappropriate men, so “when I froze and didn’t respond, you know, I think Jeffrey got very upset about it. He expected a fight.”
Trump was the only male friend Epstein consistently talked about, according to Williams. “It’s just so maddening to me that Donald Trump ran on, you know, cleaning up the swamp,” she continued, “and all this time and energy is being spent on covering up information about the biggest swamp monster who’s ever existed.”
From the halls of Mar-a-Lago to the ruins of Ukrainian hospitals, the toxic bond between Trump, Putin, and Epstein may have reshaped the world and cost the lives of countless children…hartmannreport.com/p/did-epstei…
— Thom Hartmann (@hartmannreport.com) 2025-11-14T16:16:52.669Z
Even the Queen of the Fox News Bleached Blondes, a mother of teenagers, couldn’t show kindness, awareness, and sympathy to victims of Trump and Epstein’s Ephebophilia, which is the preference for mid-to-late adolescents. This is from Mother Jones as reported by Julianne McShane. “Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define. When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for.
There was her insistence that Santa Claus is white, for example, and her claim that wearing blackface used to not be so bad (that one got her fired from NBC News). Wednesday, on her eponymous SiriusXM show, Kelly picked another hill to die on: She implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “into the barely legal type” of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as “like, 15-year-olds”—who look like they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Department of Justice said he abused and exploited dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14.
But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows “somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything,” and “this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”
Kelly continued: “This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
Kelly said the characterization from her unnamed source—that Epstein was “not a pedophile”—”is what I believed…until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged…child sexual abuse material on his computer that for the first time, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he was an actual pedophile.’ I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. [Bondi has] never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.”
“Or anything else,” added Ungar-Sargon.
“Yeah,” Kelly replied, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came within his purview.’ You can say that’s a distinction without a difference.”
“No, it’s not,” Ungar-Sargon says.
“I think there is a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”
In fact, we don’t know.
Gaslighting is a Fox News feature. It’s also a hallmark of MAGA surreality.
Heather Cox Richardson writes about this on her Substack, Letters from an American.
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.
That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.
Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.
The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.
Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.
Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.
On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.
Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.
As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”
The cruelty of Orange Caligula and his psychopathic sidekicks knows no bounds. This is from the source of authentic investigative journalism, ProPublica. “Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts, The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.”
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”
Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.
The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.
No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.
The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.
Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.
“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.
“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.
Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”
“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.
Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”
As in everything recent, we’ve seen this administration chant, once again, it’s the Democrats’ fault. This is from the New York Times. “Trump Administration Live Updates: President Wants Federal Inquiry Into Epstein’s Ties to Prominent Democrats.” You’d think this approach would’ve grown old and stale already.
President Trump announced on Friday that he wanted the Justice Department to investigate high-profile Democrats — including former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and megadonor Reid Hoffman — who he alleged had ties to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump blasted Democrats for “using the Epstein Hoax” to distract from the recent government shutdown, and said that federal law enforcement would order investigations into members of their party, who he insinuated were involved in Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking of girls.
“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his “Island.” Stay tuned!!!”
Mr. Trump said that he would be asking Attorney General Pam Bondi, “and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI,” to conduct the investigation into the “involvement and relationship” between Mr. Epstein and the Democrats.
Mr. Trump also wrote that it would also include “J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions.”
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
If you want to punish your eyes by reading all the released Epstein items, COURIER has a link to the entire, searchable dump provided by the U.S. House Oversight Committee. Paul Krugman’s SubStack post today turns its eyes to the Heritage Foundation. It’s an interesting read. “The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation. Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable.”
There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.
As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.
So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?
It was clearly a surprise to Roberts that his defense of Carlson provoked a widespread backlash. And displaying the complete refusal to accept responsibility we’ve come to expect from leading conservatives, Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” He explained his ignorance by saying “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I consume a lot of sports.”
Yeah, right.
Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.
Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.
Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.
And, just think about this one for a bit.
Further proof of corruption, grift, and just plain autocratic bullshit can be found at these links.
- Brian Slodysko / Associated Press: Top Fannie Mae officials ousted after sounding alarm on sharing confidential housing data
- ProPublica: FBI Director Kash Patel Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Dan Bongino, Two Other Senior Staff
- NBC News: GOP senators distance themselves from provision allowing them to sue over phone record searches
- The Harvard Crimson: Harvard Faculty Disturbed by Revelations of Summers’ ‘Cozy Friendship’ With Epstein
There are so many of these things posted as a memeorandum today that I can’t possibly fit them all into one short post. We are seriously and truely fucked if we do not get all these criminals out of government and other pubic institutions.
What’s on your reading, action, and blogging list today?
#corruption #cultureOfMisogyny #EpsteinFiles #LifeLlKillYa #OrangeCaligula
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Finally Friday Reads: Ain’t that some Shit?
With Trump/Epstein back in the news, here’s a snippet from a cartoon I drew a few days ago. ” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Some of my friends have been blaming the craziness I’ve been feeling lately on the huge Mercury Retrograde that started on the 9th. It’s really unnerving to read the unbelievably scattered graft and madness coming out of Orange Caligula’s regime, which seems like peak madness, too. I’ve spent the last two days trying to talk people down, as well as crying over a friend whose essential surgery just got cancelled because his insurance company refused to pay for it. Then, there are all the Epstein headlines. I’m glad to get glimpses of justice, but it’s also tough to deal with all the stories of abuse and indifference that always come from the way men treat women and children like junk in their toy box.
This story in HuffPo absolutely tore my heart to pieces this morning. It’s reported by Ron Dicker. This may trigger you, so please take this trigger warning seriously. “Epstein Email About Giving Girlfriend To Trump Enrages Model’ Groped’ By Him. The former Sports Illustrated model said Epstein, whom she dated in the early 1990s, “delivered” her to Trump.”
A newly released email in which Jeffrey Epstein bragged about giving a girlfriend to Donald Trump angered a former model who dated Epstein and claimed he once “delivered” her to the future president to be “groped” by him.
The note showed how “deeply misogynistic” the two men were, Stacey Williams told CNN on Thursday. (Watch the video below.)
Williams, who was featured in several Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues in the ’90s, appeared on “Erin Burnett Outfront” after numerous emails involving the late sexual predator Epstein were shared this week. Congress is poised to vote on the release of files unviewed by the public, but Trump has continued to push back at what he now calls a “hoax.”
Burnett brought up Epstein’s correspondence in which he wrote about a Norwegian businesswoman and heiress: “my 20 year old girlfriend in 1993, , that after two years i gave to donald.”
“It screams about, you know, the mindset of these men,” Williams said. “You know, the same two men who did what they did to me when Jeffrey Epstein walked me into Donald Trump’s office to be groped by him. Clearly, we are these objects, these trophies, and it’s deeply misogynistic. It’s horrifying.”
Burnett also mentioned Williams’ previous account claiming Trump molested her as Epstein watched at Trump Tower, and how their smiling at each other revealed the pair’s “weird and twisted game.”
Williams added, “I clearly was delivered there for the groping.” She said that she had a reputation for standing up to inappropriate men, so “when I froze and didn’t respond, you know, I think Jeffrey got very upset about it. He expected a fight.”
Trump was the only male friend Epstein consistently talked about, according to Williams. “It’s just so maddening to me that Donald Trump ran on, you know, cleaning up the swamp,” she continued, “and all this time and energy is being spent on covering up information about the biggest swamp monster who’s ever existed.”
From the halls of Mar-a-Lago to the ruins of Ukrainian hospitals, the toxic bond between Trump, Putin, and Epstein may have reshaped the world and cost the lives of countless children…hartmannreport.com/p/did-epstei…
— Thom Hartmann (@hartmannreport.com) 2025-11-14T16:16:52.669Z
Even the Queen of the Fox News Bleached Blondes, a mother of teenagers, couldn’t show kindness, awareness, and sympathy to victims of Trump and Epstein’s Ephebophilia, which is the preference for mid-to-late adolescents. This is from Mother Jones as reported by Julianne McShane. “Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define. When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for.
There was her insistence that Santa Claus is white, for example, and her claim that wearing blackface used to not be so bad (that one got her fired from NBC News). Wednesday, on her eponymous SiriusXM show, Kelly picked another hill to die on: She implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “into the barely legal type” of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as “like, 15-year-olds”—who look like they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Department of Justice said he abused and exploited dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14.
But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows “somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything,” and “this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”
Kelly continued: “This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
Kelly said the characterization from her unnamed source—that Epstein was “not a pedophile”—”is what I believed…until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged…child sexual abuse material on his computer that for the first time, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he was an actual pedophile.’ I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. [Bondi has] never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.”
“Or anything else,” added Ungar-Sargon.
“Yeah,” Kelly replied, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came within his purview.’ You can say that’s a distinction without a difference.”
“No, it’s not,” Ungar-Sargon says.
“I think there is a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”
In fact, we don’t know.
Gaslighting is a Fox News feature. It’s also a hallmark of MAGA surreality.
Heather Cox Richardson writes about this on her Substack, Letters from an American.
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.
That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.
Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.
The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.
Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.
Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.
On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.
Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.
As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”
The cruelty of Orange Caligula and his psychopathic sidekicks knows no bounds. This is from the source of authentic investigative journalism, ProPublica. “Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts, The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.”
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”
Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.
The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.
No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.
The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.
Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.
“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.
“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.
Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”
“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.
Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”
As in everything recent, we’ve seen this administration chant, once again, it’s the Democrats’ fault. This is from the New York Times. “Trump Administration Live Updates: President Wants Federal Inquiry Into Epstein’s Ties to Prominent Democrats.” You’d think this approach would’ve grown old and stale already.
President Trump announced on Friday that he wanted the Justice Department to investigate high-profile Democrats — including former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and megadonor Reid Hoffman — who he alleged had ties to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump blasted Democrats for “using the Epstein Hoax” to distract from the recent government shutdown, and said that federal law enforcement would order investigations into members of their party, who he insinuated were involved in Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking of girls.
“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his “Island.” Stay tuned!!!”
Mr. Trump said that he would be asking Attorney General Pam Bondi, “and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI,” to conduct the investigation into the “involvement and relationship” between Mr. Epstein and the Democrats.
Mr. Trump also wrote that it would also include “J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions.”
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
If you want to punish your eyes by reading all the released Epstein items, COURIER has a link to the entire, searchable dump provided by the U.S. House Oversight Committee. Paul Krugman’s SubStack post today turns its eyes to the Heritage Foundation. It’s an interesting read. “The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation. Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable.”
There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.
As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.
So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?
It was clearly a surprise to Roberts that his defense of Carlson provoked a widespread backlash. And displaying the complete refusal to accept responsibility we’ve come to expect from leading conservatives, Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” He explained his ignorance by saying “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I consume a lot of sports.”
Yeah, right.
Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.
Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.
Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.
And, just think about this one for a bit.
Further proof of corruption, grift, and just plain autocratic bullshit can be found at these links.
- Brian Slodysko / Associated Press: Top Fannie Mae officials ousted after sounding alarm on sharing confidential housing data
- ProPublica: FBI Director Kash Patel Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Dan Bongino, Two Other Senior Staff
- NBC News: GOP senators distance themselves from provision allowing them to sue over phone record searches
- The Harvard Crimson: Harvard Faculty Disturbed by Revelations of Summers’ ‘Cozy Friendship’ With Epstein
There are so many of these things posted as a memeorandum today that I can’t possibly fit them all into one short post. We are seriously and truely fucked if we do not get all these criminals out of government and other pubic institutions.
What’s on your reading, action, and blogging list today?
#corruption #cultureOfMisogyny #EpsteinFiles #LifeLlKillYa #OrangeCaligula
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The Tyee: Why Calgary Is Split on Its Housing Affordability Recommendations https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/08/16/Calgary-Split-Housing-Affordability-Recommendations/ #bcnews #TheTyee - via @[email protected] #ByronMillerprofessorofurbanstudiesattheUniversityofCalgary #UniversityofBritishColumbia’sHousingAssessmentResourceTool #AlisonGrittnerCalgaryhousingandaffordabilitytaskforce #CanadaMortgageandHousingCorporation(CMHC) #CalgaryHousingandAffordabilityTaskForce #Calgarycitycouncilhousingtaskforce
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Dans le Fue de la Passion Mix 🎧 🎛️💿
#SmoothJazz #music #playlist #Jazz #JazzMusic #romance #saxophone #guitar #piano #pianist #saxophonist #guitarist #lovemusic #vocals #vocalist #JazzFusion #FusionJazz #DaveKoz #BoneyJames #GeraldAlbright #Najee #WalterBeasley #KirkWhalum #NormanBrown #JackiemJoyner #ByronMiller #EveretteHarp #AndreWard #PhilDavis #EugeGroove #KerryWilkins #MichaelVince #MarcusJohnson #BrianONeal #MichaelFields #StanleyAbernathy #Kem
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Dans le Fue de la Passion Mix 🎧 🎛️💿
#SmoothJazz #music #playlist #Jazz #JazzMusic #romance #saxophone #guitar #piano #pianist #saxophonist #guitarist #lovemusic #vocals #vocalist #JazzFusion #FusionJazz #DaveKoz #BoneyJames #GeraldAlbright #Najee #WalterBeasley #KirkWhalum #NormanBrown #JackiemJoyner #ByronMiller #EveretteHarp #AndreWard #PhilDavis #EugeGroove #KerryWilkins #MichaelVince #MarcusJohnson #BrianONeal #MichaelFields #StanleyAbernathy #Kem
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Dans le Fue de la Passion Mix 🎧 🎛️💿
#SmoothJazz #music #playlist #Jazz #JazzMusic #romance #saxophone #guitar #piano #pianist #saxophonist #guitarist #lovemusic #vocals #vocalist #JazzFusion #FusionJazz #DaveKoz #BoneyJames #GeraldAlbright #Najee #WalterBeasley #KirkWhalum #NormanBrown #JackiemJoyner #ByronMiller #EveretteHarp #AndreWard #PhilDavis #EugeGroove #KerryWilkins #MichaelVince #MarcusJohnson #BrianONeal #MichaelFields #StanleyAbernathy #Kem
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Dans le Fue de la Passion Mix 🎧 🎛️💿
#SmoothJazz #music #playlist #Jazz #JazzMusic #romance #saxophone #guitar #piano #pianist #saxophonist #guitarist #lovemusic #vocals #vocalist #JazzFusion #FusionJazz #DaveKoz #BoneyJames #GeraldAlbright #Najee #WalterBeasley #KirkWhalum #NormanBrown #JackiemJoyner #ByronMiller #EveretteHarp #AndreWard #PhilDavis #EugeGroove #KerryWilkins #MichaelVince #MarcusJohnson #BrianONeal #MichaelFields #StanleyAbernathy #Kem
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Dans le Fue de la Passion Mix 🎧 🎛️💿
#SmoothJazz #music #playlist #Jazz #JazzMusic #romance #saxophone #guitar #piano #pianist #saxophonist #guitarist #lovemusic #vocals #vocalist #JazzFusion #FusionJazz #DaveKoz #BoneyJames #GeraldAlbright #Najee #WalterBeasley #KirkWhalum #NormanBrown #JackiemJoyner #ByronMiller #EveretteHarp #AndreWard #PhilDavis #EugeGroove #KerryWilkins #MichaelVince #MarcusJohnson #BrianONeal #MichaelFields #StanleyAbernathy #Kem
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Lots of new music added to our playlist, including the latest by #KeikoMatsui with help from #LalahHathaway. Comedian #TommyDavidson continues his journey as a vocalist with a new single, bassist #ByronMiller and trombonist #JeffBradshaw. Listen at smoothjazzandmore.com, or download the free radio app from #Tunein.
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Lots of new music added to our playlist, including the latest by #KeikoMatsui with help from #LalahHathaway. Comedian #TommyDavidson continues his journey as a vocalist with a new single, bassist #ByronMiller and trombonist #JeffBradshaw. Listen at smoothjazzandmore.com, or download the free radio app from #Tunein.
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The Tyee: Why Calgary Is Split on Its Housing Affordability Recommendations https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/08/16/Calgary-Split-Housing-Affordability-Recommendations/ #bcnews #TheTyee - via @[email protected] #ByronMillerprofessorofurbanstudiesattheUniversityofCalgary #UniversityofBritishColumbia’sHousingAssessmentResourceTool #AlisonGrittnerCalgaryhousingandaffordabilitytaskforce #CanadaMortgageandHousingCorporation(CMHC) #CalgaryHousingandAffordabilityTaskForce #Calgarycitycouncilhousingtaskforce
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The Tyee: Why Calgary Is Split on Its Housing Affordability Recommendations https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/08/16/Calgary-Split-Housing-Affordability-Recommendations/ #bcnews #TheTyee - via @[email protected] #ByronMillerprofessorofurbanstudiesattheUniversityofCalgary #UniversityofBritishColumbia’sHousingAssessmentResourceTool #AlisonGrittnerCalgaryhousingandaffordabilitytaskforce #CanadaMortgageandHousingCorporation(CMHC) #CalgaryHousingandAffordabilityTaskForce #Calgarycitycouncilhousingtaskforce
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The Tyee: Why Calgary Is Split on Its Housing Affordability Recommendations https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/08/16/Calgary-Split-Housing-Affordability-Recommendations/ #bcnews #TheTyee - via @[email protected] #ByronMillerprofessorofurbanstudiesattheUniversityofCalgary #UniversityofBritishColumbia’sHousingAssessmentResourceTool #AlisonGrittnerCalgaryhousingandaffordabilitytaskforce #CanadaMortgageandHousingCorporation(CMHC) #CalgaryHousingandAffordabilityTaskForce #Calgarycitycouncilhousingtaskforce
-
The Tyee: Why Calgary Is Split on Its Housing Affordability Recommendations https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/08/16/Calgary-Split-Housing-Affordability-Recommendations/ #bcnews #TheTyee - via @[email protected] #ByronMillerprofessorofurbanstudiesattheUniversityofCalgary #UniversityofBritishColumbia’sHousingAssessmentResourceTool #AlisonGrittnerCalgaryhousingandaffordabilitytaskforce #CanadaMortgageandHousingCorporation(CMHC) #CalgaryHousingandAffordabilityTaskForce #Calgarycitycouncilhousingtaskforce
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Ik moest aan de Romeinen denken en het museum Castellum Hoge Woerd. Daar staat een scherm opgesteld dat draaibaar is om je een inkijkje te geven in hoe het was toen de Romeinen er zaten.
Dit hieronder is next level: Het kijkt naar de toekomst.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A02MlzisAQc
Bron:
https://troet.cafe/@Geisseltierchen/114816360192108870Terzijde:
Miniatur #Wunderland (https://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/) is een bezoek waard ook zonder doemschermen.
En Castellum Hoge Woerd (https://www.museumhogewoerd.nl/) ook. -
Ik moest aan de Romeinen denken en het museum Castellum Hoge Woerd. Daar staat een scherm opgesteld dat draaibaar is om je een inkijkje te geven in hoe het was toen de Romeinen er zaten.
Dit hieronder is next level: Het kijkt naar de toekomst.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A02MlzisAQc
Bron:
https://troet.cafe/@Geisseltierchen/114816360192108870Terzijde:
Miniatur #Wunderland (https://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/) is een bezoek waard ook zonder doemschermen.
En Castellum Hoge Woerd (https://www.museumhogewoerd.nl/) ook. -
Ik moest aan de Romeinen denken en het museum Castellum Hoge Woerd. Daar staat een scherm opgesteld dat draaibaar is om je een inkijkje te geven in hoe het was toen de Romeinen er zaten.
Dit hieronder is next level: Het kijkt naar de toekomst.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A02MlzisAQc
Bron:
https://troet.cafe/@Geisseltierchen/114816360192108870Terzijde:
Miniatur #Wunderland (https://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/) is een bezoek waard ook zonder doemschermen.
En Castellum Hoge Woerd (https://www.museumhogewoerd.nl/) ook.