Search
1000 results for “plinth”
-
I saw @Raspberry_Pi had these magazines advertised on Mastodon, so I jumped at the chance to buy one.
I’m planning to use it to build a display plinth for Gunpla and miniatures, where I can use the microcontroller to create animated LED patterns.
At least, that’s the idea.
#RaspberryPi #BoughtItOnMastodon #Mastodon #MastoShop #Gunpla
-
bars and restaurants on Lothian Road, on a wet, December evening https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54978502173/in/photostream/lightbox/
Improvised night shot while waiting on a bus home, sitting the camera on a stone plinth outside the Filmhouse to steady it
#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #EdinburghByNight #NightPhotography #photography #photographie #LothianRoad #UrbanNight #LongExposure #Rain #Pluie
-
The thread about the Twelfth Day of Christmas; the Drum and Drum House
This thread was originally written and published in December 2019.
This part in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread is preceded by a post about Pipe Street in Portobello and why it was so named.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; The Drum. Drum is very common in Scottish place names, and comes from the Gaelic Druim meaning literally a “back” and figuratively a ridge of raised ground; in Edinburgh there are examples such as Drum Brae, Back Drum in Leith, Drumdryan (but not Drumsheugh, which is a shortening of Meldrumsheugh). But the Drum to which I am referring is The Drum, an estate and stately home on the outskirts of Edinburgh near Gilmerton.
Drum House, façade. CC-by-SA 4.0 StephenCDicksonThe place name here refers to the “back” of high ground south of the city and is recorded as early as 1406. The earliest map to show it is John Adiar’s 1682 Map of Midlothian, and we can see it occupies the space between Edmonston, Woolmet, Sheriffhall and Gilmerton. The entire area was part of a hunting forest dating from the time of King David I and which was known as the Drumselch, or Willow Ridge.
Adair’s Map of Midlothian, 1682. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe lands of The Drum came into the possession of Sir Walter de Somerville, Lord Somerville of Linton and Carnwath, when he acquired them through marriage to the daughter of the landowner Sir John Herring of Gilmerton. The Somervilles are yet another Norman noble family brought to pacify and civilise Scotland by King David I. A house was first built at The Drum in 1584 for Hugh Somerville, 7th Lord Somerville, after a court case ruled ownership in his favour over another family branch in Cambusnethan. The 11th Lord , James Somerville (who did not claim the title) wrote of it; “the rooms are few, but fair and large; the entire and staircase extremely ill-placed, neither is the outward form modish, being built all in length in form of a church.”
A tragedy befell the Somerville family in 1589 when William Somerville, heir to the Lord, accidentally shot his younger brother John, while drying and cleaning a loaded pistol that had gotten wet. Their father, in a fit of grief and rage swore vengeance upon his older son, who fled before him before the Lord Somerville came to his senses. King James VI on hearing of this, reprimanded the Lord and “commanded him to send for his eldest son, and be reconciled to him, for he knew he was a sober youth, and the very thoughts of his misfortune would afflict him enough, albeit he were not discountenanced by him“. William Somerville, “the Good Master of Drum“, never got over accidentally killing his brother and when he was stricken with fever two years later he suffered with it for 10 months before passing unhappily away.
The original house was replaced in 1720 by the 13th Lord, also James Somerville, who commissioned William Adam – father of Robert and James – to build a fashionable new Palladian country mansion. Writing of Adam’s masterpiece:
Had he never executed another edifice than Drum House, this alone would suffice to merit his distinction… There is an air of refinement about this residence almost equivalent to that which pervades the “Petit Trianon” at Versailles, where Marie Antoinette sought seclusion from the excitement of French Court and the distractions of the later years of her troubled life.
The Architectural Record, Volume 47, Issue 6, June 1920The original house was remodelled into a wing pavilion; a matching reflection on the other side was never completed.
Drum House. CC-by-SA 2.0 Lisa JarvisDrum House rear elevation, a photo of 1951 by S. G. Jackman. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe interior of the new house was as fine as the outside, the stucco being by the Dutch master Josef Enzer, who was also responsible for the interior of another of William Adam’s Palladian masterpieces in the Lothians, Arniston House.
Drum House interior, a photo of 1951 by S. G. Jackman. © Edinburgh City LibrariesDrum House interior, a photo of 1951 by S. G. Jackman. © Edinburgh City LibrariesFrom 1756 to 1866, The Drum was the location of the Edinburgh Mercat Cross after its removal to widen the High Street. An alternative reason for removal was that the Merchants of the city had persisted in meeting around it to do business, rather than using the fine new Royal Exchange built at great public expense only yards away! The cross was subsequently relocated back to a spot near its original in 1885, at the expense of William Ewart Gladstone. It was raised up on a reproduction podium and plinth to the designs of Sydney Mitchell. The head of the cross was replaced with a royal Unicorn, the original having been pulled down by the occupying forces of Oliver Cromwell as symbols of the monarchy when the city was occupied after the Battle of Dunbar.
The Edinburgh Mercat Cross at The Drum, a photograph by Thomas Keith from 1856. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Drum was sold by the 19th Lord Somerville, Aubrey John, in 1800 to James Hay of Bhagalpur, who worked some of its lands for coal at Drum Colliery. He in turn sold it to Robert Cathcart WS around 1809. It then went in 1820 to Gilbert Innes of Stow and on his death to his sister. On his sister’s death it went to Alexander Mitchell of Stow who sold it in 1862 to John More Nisbett of Cairnhill in Ayrshire. More Nisbett bought back the estate park and farm lands at the same time, which had been gradually split up in the earlier part of that century.
Drum House in the time of John More Nisbett, from “Old and New Edinburgh” by James Grant, published 1881More Nisbett’s second son, Hamilton, became an architect, his work mainly being monuments, church alterations and domestic. He succeeded to the estates of Drum and Cairnhill on the death of his older brother, North More Nisbett, in 1939 at which point he moved his practice from George Street to Drum House. He did much of his own work making improvements and alterations to the estate and its buildings and died there in 1955. He designed the Gilmerton Junior Friendly Society Hall, now Gilmerton Village Hall, which appropriately is on Drum Street. The Drum remains in the hands of the More Nisbett family to this day.
Gilmerton Village Hall. CC-by-SA Anne BurgessNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Mr McHattie and Mr Ritchie’s Mechanical Triumph: the thread about the Princes Street Gardens Floral Clock
The Princes Street Gardens floral clock is a fine Edinburgh institution. At the time of writing (June 2023) it was being replanted to celebrate the centenary of the Flying Scotsman steam locomotive (not “the train” of the same name as the tweet below would suggest). But this year is also an anniversary for the clock itself and it will be 120 years old, having first been revealed to the public on this very day (June 11th) in 1903. It was the first floral clock not just in Scotland but also in the UK, and possibly the 3rd in the world (there being earlier examples in Paris and Detroit). The Edinburgh clock was the work of the City Superintendent of Parks & Gardens, John W. McHattie, who enlisted the help of James Ritchie & Son., the famous Edinburgh clockmaker on Leith Street who built and wound the city’s public clocks. It so happened that Ritchies had in their workshop at this time the mechanism from one of the turret clocks from Elie Parish Church in Fife, which was surplus to requirements. This was installed in the base of the Allan Ramsay Monument next to the clock, and a drive shaft was run from the clock mechanism to the time hand in a small passageway under the flowerbeds.
The First Floral Clock, as it was when revealed to the public in 1903. Photo by a Mr Robert Oliver of Murieston Crescent. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThis first clock had a single time hand – an hour hand – which was a large metal planting tray 4 feet 2 inches (127cm) long and was “delicately balanced” on account of the slope but kept time perfectly. It was described as a “beautiful study in carpet bedding, in which American aloes, echevarias, sedums and other plants” were “set out with great taste in a bold geometric pattern.” The clock face was was 12 feet in diameter, the hours delineated by two concentric circles planted of sedums and the numbers picked out in “fresh green pyrethrum“. The centre of the face was split into quarters, each denoting and planted to represent one of the seasons of the year.
The Dundee Evening Telegraph hailed it as “a mechanical triumph“. The Devon Valley Tribune called it “the great wonder of the Gardens“, the Dundee Courier was a bit less generous and went with “the quaintest of horticultural freaks“. The Town Council was so pleased with Mchattie that they voted him a raise of £100 per year (almost £10,000 in 2023 terms. His picture below can be found on the website of the Friends of Saughton Gardens as he was also the man we have to thank for the first planting of that public park, which opened in 1910. The Friends have a good write-up of McHattie and his work at Saughton on their website, here. He died in 1923 when he was still the city’s Head Gardener, after 22 years service.
J. W. McHattieThe clock has, appropriately, changed with the times. By the time the below picture was taken in 1914 it had acquired a minute hand, which was 10 feet long, and accompanied a new 6 foot long hour hand.
The Princes Street floral clock, from the City of Edinburgh Report on Public Parks & Open Spaces, 1914, reproduced by kind permission of Mike Ashworth. © Mike AshworthThe mechanism was modernised in 1936 but still required daily winding, something which took place until its platinum anniversary, when it was electrified in 1973. It was during the 1936 modernisation that a “cuckoo” sound was added to it, the sound being generated by two tuned organ pipes in the base of the Ramsay monument.
Detail of floral clock mechanism in plinth of statue to Allan RamsayIn 1943, the clock’s 40th year, it was given a wartime makeover by the Superintendent of Parks John T. Jeffrey. This featured a large Royal Navy warship decorated with anchors and other naval insignia and a profile picture of Winston Churchill smoking a cigar and surrounded by the legend The Hour, The Man. The planting incorporated beetroots and carrots so as to make an edible contribution to the Dig for Victory campaign.
The 1943 floral clock, The Scotsman, Saturday 17 July 1943In 1947, for the first Edinburgh International Festival, the names of famous composers were added in to the planting, which was repeated in 1948.
The 1948 floral clock, with Chopin, Liszt, Bhrams, Verdi and Grief in the planting. The date of 1848 next to Chopin’s name in the top left commemorates his visit to the city in that year. Picture from an ebay postcard listing.In 1949 it was planted to mark the Scottish Industries Exhibition in Glasgow that year. For 1953, the clock’s 50th birthday, the Parks Superintendent, Mr A. T. Harrison, hit upon the idea of adding a “real” cuckoo to the clock. Thus a wooden bird house was added to accommodate the bird, which popped out when it chimed. The organ pipes were replaced at this time by an electric system of tuning valves connected to a loudspeaker.
The Floral Clock Edinburgh 2017, showing the wooden birdhouse © Jennifer Petrie cc-by-sa 2.0Ritchies would go on to provide the mechanisms for many floral clocks throughout the world (“practically all” of them, claimed the Evening News in 1956), including ones in Salisbury, South Rhodesia (modern day Harare, Zimbabwe) and Sydney Zoo.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
📰 Today's top stories, personally curated for you by Zorz Studios: http://zorz.it/newspaper
- #AI was trained on #RealPhotos: now real photos are being mistaken for AI;
- Top 5 spreadsheet accounting #software for #SmallBusiness;
- A design-forward fusion #wedding at Tenuta Santi Giacomo e Filippo;
- Hat trick: what to wear with a #BaseballCap;
- Massive #BuddhaSculpture by #TuanAndrewNguyen opens on New York’s #HighLine plinth, and more -
Project Caligari
As the days tolled ever onward to All Hallow’s Eve, an opportunity arose to make use of a new creative space on campus – just by our CentR Stage bar and just in time for the Academy’s Halloween party. Despite only receiving full access and equipment on the morning of festivities, a hastily scribbled tribute to the legacy of cinematic horror was set in motion.
Knowing partygoers were there to chill, chat, and indulge appropriately themed cocktails, there was no expectation they would sit down to watch a full film. Instead we planned a minimalist immersive area to relax in, with low-slung sofas encircled by rear-projected screens showing multiple silent movies. A central plinth would hold an object of focus and contrasting colour from the cold scenes on display.
Implementation demanded a different design – not least a lack of haze, incense, and human remains – with a trio of floor-sat units forward-projecting onto a curve of black drapes. The plinth then sat behind the sofas, adorned with a plastic pumpkin pilfered from the bar – ideally replacing it with the winner of the party’s carving competition.
Vintage horror sourced from archive.org provided the (cunningly Public Domain) vibe, with many films planned for each screen through the night. Technical difficulties, however, meant we had to lock each projector down to a single looping movie – controlled by a laptop behind the curtain running Resolume Media Server going into an HDMI splitter.
The chosen films presented a journey through the early years of macabre movies. An era where the steadfast rules of cinema had yet to be written, inspiring a vibrant visual imagination lost in a later generation of sedate talkies.
The vivid expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was an essential choice. The first feature-length horror committed to celluloid, and one which many have not been aware. Director Robert Wiene’s eye delivers a pioneering dream-like ambience to a tale of grisly murder, with hand painted backdrops accentuating this unreality.
Next, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) – another German Expressionist classic. Despite drawing the ire of the Stoker estate for obvious plagiarism, this film offers its own interpretation. Max Shreck‘s Count Orlak presents an iconic image of vampyric horror as a monstrous being, a presence revisited in subsequent remakes.
Completing the triptych with another tale retold through the generations, James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) was filmed with spoken dialogue. However, the rich gothic design still offers strong visual storytelling, with Boris Karloff‘s taciturn performance as the monster just as captivating in silence. A cornerstone of Universal Studios’ shared monster cinematic universe.
All crew work is collective, and we could not have done this without the aid of veterans Nick and Max, who helped to set up and put the final pieces together while I was embroiled in all-day lectures. Their efforts ensured the project was finished to schedule.
Freshers had their chance to contribute too, with new student Ruby curating a masterful multi-genre playlist to accompany proceedings. Although I was obliged to throw in a few extra tracks at the end, we all agreed to remove ‘Monster Mash’ after the shuffle spookily reprised it over and over.
Nothing can ever happen without some form of improvisation, and the taming of wild ideas into practical necessity manifests many happy accidents. The surreal imagery of early experimental cinema, especially in Caligari’s twisted set design, was thrown further off-kilter by the warp of the drapes. An abstract unease accentuated by the imperfect focus and inconsistent framing. It is important, at times, to let go of perfection so things can simply find their own form.
Overall, it went down very well. Partygoers drifted in and out to watch and take photos, enjoying my eager explanations. The client and crew working in the main studio also popped in to take a look around in appreciation. The only complaint from some was the installation wasn’t ‘scary’ enough…
… but the True Terror was throwing it together on time!
https://heathenstorm.com/2025/11/01/project-caligari/
#academyoflivetechnology #caligari #cinema #expressionism #frankenstein #halloween #horror #immersive #nosferatu #projections #resolume #samhain #vintage
-
And… that’s a wrap! Another #FediPaint wrapped up, so here’s my finalised entry! Lots and lots of personal progress made and some lovely headspace offered along the way.
Very happy with my Dark Elf Noble, I’m sure the arrogant devil is just chuffed with having a plinth of Ice to look down on us all from too.
#Warhammer #PaintingMiniatures #Miniatures #TheOldWorld #PaintingWarhammer #Painting #Hobby #WarhammerFantasy #Minis #Wargames #Wargaming #Miniature #Hobbyodon #Hobbyverse #WHFB
-
Blackburns, BISFs, Orlits and Whitson-Fairhursts. The thread about pre-fabricated, permanent, post-war housing in Edinburgh
This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of permanent, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh between 1945-1950.
In the aftermath of WW2, hundreds of thousands of temporary, prefabricated houses were built across the UK, as part of a national crash-building programme to ease urban slum dwelling, replace war losses and provide housing for men returning from war until the construction of permanent housing could catch up with demand. In Edinburgh, some 4,000 temporary prefabs were built, of four types; AIROHs, ARCONs, Tarrans and Uni-SECOs. But prefab housing wasn’t just temporary, it was also for permanent construction. It was hoped that by mass-manufacturing standard designs of modern houses in factories, they could be rapidly built with limited skilled labour.
A is for Aluminium
Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. These were based on the AIROH (Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing) single-storey, temporary, aluminium cottages – of which some 54,000 were built – but with thicker walls and insulation, designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten. These were developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The Blackburn Aircraft Company of Dumbarton got on board.
Blackburn Aluminium House (Craigour)They have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sections on an aircraft production line, in sections that could be transported by road, and assembled quickly on site by unskilled labour. They came pre-fitted with standard kitchens and bathrooms, all of which just needed connected together on site on a simple brick or concrete plinth. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.
Edinburgh purchased 166 permanent Blackburn Aluminium Houses; 145 for the Craigour Scheme in Moredun and 21 for Muirhouse.
Aluminium House in Craigour, with a porch and extra wing added, re-roofed, insulated and re-clad.These houses are quite easy to identify, as they are small, detached cottages with 3 regularly-sized windows and an offset front door. The shallow-pitched roof has a small brick chimney stack and was originally aluminium sheeting. There were 3 overlapping joints on the façade where the 4 prefabricated modules were joined together. These houses were quite popular, they sit on large plots and have big gardens. They are detached and the frames have not been subject to corrosion. Many have been insulated, re-clad, re-roofed and even extended. Some have been demolished and new houses built on their plots.
B is for BISF
These houses were named after their manufacturer and designer, the British Iron and Steel Federation. The house is of a conventional, semi-detached design, but uses a steel frame with steel window and door surrounds and Critall-Hope steel framed windows. The lower storey was clad in render applied to a steel lath and the upper storey had steel sheeting formed to look like timber. Interior partitions were plasterboard or wooden fibreboard and insulation was glass fibre. Most have been stripped back to their frames, re-insulated and re-clad with pebble-dash, and given modern plastic double glazing units. The fibreboard walls were prone to damp and fire and most were replaced with plasterboard during refurbishments.
In Edinburgh, c. 300 of these houses were built in Southhouse / Buirdiehouse (1947) and Moredun / Fernieside (1949) Schemes and most (if not all) remain to this day. They are somewhat unusual in that they were always intended to be permanent, and have not suffered from the usual structural degradation and corrosion that have plagued other non-standard houses. As such they are one of the few prefab designs that have never been designated as defective (which means you can get a mortgage on one).
B.I.S.F. houses. That on the right is unusual in that it retains its original cladding (Southhouse / Burdiehouse)A “naked” BISF house showing the slender framework next to the completed house. There is a concrete block firebreak between the two houses in the block.Useful identification features for BISF houses are that they are always semi-detached; they have a single, squat, central chimney on a pitched roof; the re-clad houses often have a mix of brick and pebble-dash cladding; the main ground floor window extends almost to floor level; and they lack the heavy reinforced concrete door and window surrounds of the concrete houses.
B is for Blackburn Orlit
These houses were a collaboration between the Blackburn Aircraft Company in Dumbarton and the Orlit Construction Company (see under O). They were designed in 1949 and used an improved, simplified version of the Orlit reinforced concrete frame and wall panel system, combined with the lightweight aluminium roof structure and pre-fabricated internal partitions covered in plasterboard, by Blackburn. Kitchens and bathrooms were also prefabricated “pods” produced by the Scottish Myton Company, based on experience with the Tarran temporary prefab houses. Four houses were built as a prototype in Clydebank in 1949, followed by 214 in 1950-51 on the Saughton Mains Scheme in Edinburgh, as semi-detached and terraces. Around 1,300 were built in total across Scotland.
Blackburn-Orlit (Saughton Mains South)These houses have the usual heavy, PRC door and window surrounds of Orlit houses and the irregularly-spaced concrete “quoins” on the corners. The ground floor front room window is deep (deeper than standard Orlits), but has often been in-filled with a shallower window. They have a shallow-pitched, gabled Blackburn roof (the roofs of Scotcon Orlits and those added to earlier Orlits are “hipped”) and lack the usual Orlit narrow, first-floor window over the front door. Instead they have 3 windows squeezed into the façade upstairs.
B is for Blackburn Mk.IV
Another collaboration between Blackburn and Orlit. These houses were of a more traditional construction, with walls constructed out of pre-cast “no fines” concrete blocks on a concrete slab foundation and Crittal steel-framed windows. I assume given Blackburn‘s involvement there were aluminium internal components used. You will find these in Edinburgh at the West Mains Scheme in Blackford,where 134 were built in 1951 as 4-in-a-block terraces. Nearly all have now been re-rendered, hiding their original concrete blockwork structure. Because they lack the Orlit‘s PRC frame and steel joints, they have not been classed as defective.
Blackburn Mark IV (West Mains)Identification features are the blockwork walls (where you can see them); the lack of the heavy, PRC door and window surrounds of most Orlit houses; the door surround has as small concession to detail (usually absent from such houses) with a moulding line around it; the central bay windows at ground floor level originally had a copper-sheathed roof.
B is for Blackburn Permanent
Also known as the Blackburn Mk.III, as the name suggests, this was a permanent house making use of Blackburn’s prefabricated internal partitioning and shallow-pitched aluminium roof structure, which was originally covered in aluminium sheeting. The form was basically the same as the Blackburn-Orlit house, but without the heavy PRC window and door frames and walls are traditional blockwork. Edinburgh built these as semi-detached and 4-in-a-block terraces, at Moredun in 1949 and the then Midlothian County Council as semi-detached houses in Currie in 1950.
Blackburn Permanent (Moredun)Blackburn Permanent (Currie)Identification features are the shallow roof pitch, squat chimneys, and the strip of 4 windows with brick infill on the first floor. Again there is a very deep sitting room window. These houses are usually harled or pebbledashed.
O is for Orlit
The Orlit System was developed by the Czech architect Erwin Katona, a Jewish refugee who had come to London in the late 1930s. He developed a modular, pre-cast reinforced concrete (PRC) system of construction that could be built in a factory and rapidly assembled on site with limited and unskilled labour. PRC columns and beams slotted together to form the structure, in-filled with an interlocking system of concrete tiles. Floors and roofs were of concrete channels. The roof could be a flat concrete slab covered in bitumen paper or a traditional wooden, pitched structure with tiles. Windows were Critall steel-framed, set within PRC concrete frames of standard sizes. The Orlit System could build a range of buildings, from single-storey cottages and municipal buildings to tenement flats. Usually they were semi-detached houses though.
An Orlit Type 1 House with its original windows and flat roof on Mountcastle Drive South, now demolished. CC-by-NC-SA via Thelma.The System was meant to be for permanent houses, with a 60 year lifespan, but was unfortunately riddled with flaws and weaknesses. Over time, PRC deteriorates, particularly at construction joints and junctions between components, with a gradual reduction in structural effectiveness. It suffers from inadequate thermal insulation, as well as thermal bridging – making houses cold and prone to condensation on the walls. As early as 1949, people in Edinburgh were writing to the newspapers to complain about the flaws in brand new Orlit houses. The original Type 1 system was replaced with the Type 2 to try and remedy the deficiencies. By 1950, they had abandoned the pre-cast frame system almost entirely (except for the window surrounds) and moved on to modular concrete block construction, which eliminated the structural weaknesses at least! All Orlit houses built to the original Type 1 or 2 systems have been designated defective.
Orlits were popular with Scottish local authorities and set up a subsidiary – the Scottish Orlit Company – with its headquarters and factory in Sighthill. Around 6,000 were built across Scotland, of which half have been subsequently demolished. Edinburgh built around 668, 410 of which have been demolished. These were a mix of the usual 2-storey semis and tenement flats; all of the latter were built at Bingham and were demolished in 1985. 134 semis were built at Saughton Mains (in 1948) and 80 at Southhouse / Burdiehouse (in 1947), all of which remain. This post does not cover the later 1950s-built Orlits at Ratho Craigpark, Oxgangs Farm and Gilmerton Dykes.
One of the last remaining Orlits in Scotland in its original state (excepting windows), at Fintry in Dundee in 2016The Orlit (Southhouse/ Burdiehouse)Orlit (Saughton Mains North)The Orlit System evolved over time, and has a large amount of variety available due to the flexibility of the system, however the best things to look for are the heavy outlines of the pre-cast concrete window surrounds, the narrow windows over the front door and to the side, and the bulky outline of the original concrete flat roof slab to which the later hipped roofs were added to remedy the deficient nature of the structure. I believe all Orlit System houses built in Edinburgh were originally flat roofed.
S is for Scotcon Orlit
Scotcon (from Scottish Construction Company) were a subsidiary of the Scottish Orlit Company, formed expressly to undertake local authority housebuilding in Scotland. While much of their work was prefabricated tower blocks, they also built on the standard Orlit system. 296 Scotcon Orlit houses were built in Edinburgh in 1950-51, a mixture of semi-detached houses and 3-storey tenements. 126 have since been demolished, but 170 remain; in the Niddrie Marischal Scheme (tenements and semis); at Saughton Mains (only 3 semis, perhaps built as demonstration models given their proximity to the Scottish Orlit Co. factory at Sighthill); Dunsmuir Court in Corstorphine (tenements) and at Easter Drylaw (tenements).
Because they use the Orlit system of PRC beams and columns, with pre-cast interlocking concrete block walls and PRC window and door surrounds, they are designated defective. They have traditional timber-framed, pitched roofs.
Scotcon Orlit (Niddrie Marischal)Scotcon Orlit (Saughton Mains)Scotcon Orlits look like other Orlits, with the heavy PRC window surrounds, but that of the ground floor front room is much deeper. They have the trademark narrow window over the front door, and (where they haven’t been covered up with pebbledash), irregular concrete “quoins”. The “hipped” roofs were built as pitched timber and tile structures, so they lack the heavy slab of the early Orlits built with flat roofs (to which a pitched structure was later added).
Scotcon Orlit Tenement (Drylaw Mains)Scotcon Orlit Tenement in the originally finished state, before later pebbledashingThe tenements can be recognised by the heavy PRC window surrounds, with the usual wide and deep front-room window, and narrow windows over the front door. All the Scotcon Orlit tenements in Edinburgh are 6-in-a-block. The ground floor houses have their own entrance doors to the side.
S is for Swedish Timber House
The Swedish government sold 5,000 flat-pack timber houses of a standard design to to the British Government after WW2. Half went to Scotland, particularly for rural housing, and the first 350 arrived as early as October 1945. Similar houses had been built in Glasgow in 1937 by the Swedish Government to demonstrate them to Scottish local authorities. 100 were gifted to Edinburgh Corporation by Sweden as a gesture of post-war good will, with 50 each erected in West Pilton and Sighthill under the supervision of Swedish foremen, as a mix of semi-detached and 4-in-a-block terraces. An additional handful were built by the SSHA at their Sighthill Demonstration Site.
Because they are of traditional timber construction with pitched, slate roofs, they have never been designated defective. Most have been externally insulated, and re-clad with harl or render, but some retain their original timber cladding.
Swedish Timber House (West Pilton)The Swedish Timber Houses at Sightill not long after they were built Cc-by-NC-SA Bill Lamb via ThelmaThe original tongue-and-groove timber cladding of thin strips, with those of the first floor overlapping the ground floor, are the best identification feature. They have a large front room window on the ground floor and a small canopy over the door. Most of those that still retain their timber cladding have been treated with dark brown or red preservatives, but originally they were brightly painted in cream. The roof is tiled and well pitched, with a single, central chimney to the front.
W is for Whitson-Fairhurst
These houses are named after their designers, W. A. Fairhurst and Melville, Dundas & Whitson Ltd. They were of a modular, prefabricated concrete system built by the Scottish Housing Group, a post-war conglomerate of housing builders who had pooled their resources to meet government and local authority contracts for mass construction. They use a system of PRC columns and beams to form the structure of the house, which are in-filled with an outer skin of brick and an inner skin of breeze blocks. Window surrounds and door frames are relatively heavy PRC structures. A traditional timber roof structure was covered in concrete roof tiles and they were harled or pebbledashed. 3,400 Whitson-Fairhurst houses were built in Scotland,. In Edinburgh they were only built in the Southhouse / Burdiehouse Scheme, where 100 semi-detached houses were built. They are designated defective.
Whitson-Fairhurst (Southhouse / Burdiehouse)At first glance they could be confused for an Orlit house, with heavy PRC window surrounds. The biggest difference is that the roof is of the gable-type (when seen from the front, the sides of the house are flat all the way to the top of the roof), not “hipped” as in Orlits (when seen from the front, the sides of the roof are pitched towards the top) The front window is much deeper and they lack the Orlit‘s signature narrow window above the front door.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
This Cabin on the Sázava River Is a Masterwork of Minimal Architecture — and It Started With Ash
Reconstruction is rarely romantic. But when Mimosa Architects rebuilt a small riverside cabin on the banks of the Sázava River in the Czech Republic, they did something quietly radical: they kept the ruins. The original cabin had burned down. What remained was a stone plinth — scarred, load-bearing, and stubborn. Instead of erasing it, the architects built on top of it. That decision set the tone for everything that followed.
The result is a cabin in the woods that manages to feel both ancient and precise. It sits between a river and a limestone cliff face, framed by pines, and clad entirely in charred larch — a material choice that nods, with a certain dark humor, to the fire that destroyed its predecessor. This is not a vacation home that provides relaxation. It simply is restful. And right now, that distinction matters more than ever.
We are living through a moment when small, intentional architecture is having a genuine cultural reckoning. Demand for off-grid cabins, forest retreats, and minimal riverside structures has surged. But most of what gets built looks like an Instagram set. This Sázava River cabin does not. It looks like it belongs exactly where it stands.
A cabin in the woods by Mimosa ArchitectsWhat Makes a Cabin in the Woods Architecturally Significant?
That is actually a serious question. Most small cabins do not earn critical attention. They function as shelter, maybe backdrop, and that is enough. So why does this one deserve closer reading?
Because Mimosa Architects made every constraint work harder. The stone plinth was not just preserved — it was activated. It lifts the wooden structure above flood level and provides a physical threshold between the river environment and the inhabited space above. Architecturally, this is what I call a Threshold Plinth Strategy: repurposing a structural remnant as a boundary-maker between landscape risk and lived experience. The plinth does not simply support the cabin. It frames your relationship to the river before you even step inside.
That kind of layered thinking runs through the entire project. Nothing in this cabin exists for decoration alone. Furthermore, nothing looks like it was borrowed from a catalog of cabin clichés. The material palette — charred larch on the exterior, spruce panels on the interior, black metal throughout — is deliberately unified. The architects call the interior a “cave.” That is not hyperbole. It is a spatial thesis.
The Cave Interior Concept: Shelter as Sensory Calibration
Most interiors aspire to openness. This one aspires to enclosure — deliberately. The dark tones of natural spruce paneling, the matte black woodstove, the blackened steel staircase, and the charred exterior all contribute to what I am calling the Chromatic Continuity Principle: a single-palette approach that eliminates visual noise and forces the eye outward, toward the only light source — the fully glazed river-facing wall.
This is not accidental. When your interior is dark, and your exterior view is bright, the window becomes the entire painting. The Sázava River, the kingfishers, the boulders breaking the current — all of it is composed and framed by the architectural decision to suppress interior contrast. You do not decorate this cabin. The river decorates it for you.
Additionally, the linoleum floor extends the “cave” logic all the way to your feet. It is durable, natural, and continuous — moving freely between the interior and the raised terrace outside. No thresholds interrupt the flow. No materials change mid-sentence. The effect is a kind of spatial grammar that reads cleanly even if you cannot articulate why.
Charred Larch Cladding — Why Burning Wood Is One of the Smartest Decisions in Contemporary Cabin Architecture
Shou sugi ban — the Japanese technique of charring timber — has been trending in Western architecture for about a decade. However, its application here carries a meaning that goes beyond surface aesthetics or trend adoption. The choice to clad this cabin in charred larch is simultaneously functional, symbolic, and slightly sardonic.
Functionally, charring creates a carbonized outer layer that repels moisture, insects, and rot. The larch beneath does not need chemical treatment. It also, the architect’s note with dry wit, makes the cabin “less appealing to uninvited guests.” That is a real security benefit. A burned-looking structure invites less casual curiosity than a bright Nordic wood box.
Symbolically, the charred facade connects this cabin to the fire that erased its predecessor. This is what I call Material Memory Architecture: using a building’s material finish to acknowledge what came before on the same site. The cabin does not perform grief about the fire. Instead, it incorporates the idea of fire into its own skin, permanently.
From an SEO and cultural standpoint, charred larch cabins in the woods currently represent one of the fastest-growing architectural search categories globally. Queries for “black cabin architecture,” “charred wood house exterior,” and “shou sugi ban cabin design” have grown substantially year over year. This project lands precisely in that space — but with intellectual depth that most trend-following projects lack.
Sheet Metal on the Uphill Side: A Quiet Structural Decision
Toward the slope behind the cabin, the architects switched from charred larch to sheet metal cladding. The reason is purely environmental: water flows down the hillside over the roof edge and along that wall. Larch, even charred, would not hold up under sustained water exposure at that angle. Metal does.
This is Contextual Material Switching — changing your cladding based on the directional forces your building faces, rather than imposing a uniform material language regardless of exposure. It is a small detail. But it is the kind of small detail that separates architects who think about buildings as living objects in environments from those who think about them as photographs.
The Stone Plinth as Architecture’s Deepest Root
Let us return to the plinth. It is the oldest element of this project. It predates the current building, predates the fire, and may predate several iterations of human habitation on this particular bend of the Sázava. Stone plinths like this one are common in rural Czech architecture — they were built to outlast the lighter wooden structures above them, and they frequently do.
Mimosa Architects did not just preserve the plinth. They integrated it structurally and programmatically. Inside the plinth sits a wastewater collection tank. The plinth also provides the cabin’s primary flood protection, raising the main living level above the river’s reach during high water. Moreover, it creates the psychological experience of elevation — the sense of looking slightly down at the river, rather than sitting at its edge.
That shift in perspective is worth considering. When you look down at moving water, even slightly, you enter a different cognitive mode. You observe rather than participate. You slow down. Architects rarely talk about plinths in these terms, but the spatial psychology of elevated observation is well-documented in environmental psychology literature. This cabin deploys it intuitively.
The Full-Height Shared Space: Against the Bedroom-First Logic
Most small cabin designs prioritize sleeping capacity. More beds equal more utility. Mimosa Architects inverted this logic. The main shared space spans the full height of the cabin, connecting the river facade to the cliffside rear wall. The sleeping areas — small, attic-level, just large enough for a bed — are minimized almost to the point of afterthought.
This reflects a specific philosophical position about what a cabin is for. The architects state it plainly: “After all, the purpose of going out of the city is to be together.” I agree with that. Most weekend retreats fail because they replicate urban apartment logic — private rooms first, shared space as an afterthought. This cabin refuses that hierarchy. Accordingly, it forces the social behavior it was designed for.
I call this the Sociality-First Floor Plan: a layout strategy that deliberately compresses private space to expand the quality of shared space. You cannot retreat here. You can only gather. For some people, that will be uncomfortable. For the right group, it will be exactly the point.
The Folding Shutter System: Architecture That Changes Its Mind
The river-facing elevation is fully glazed across its entire length. That is a significant transparency for a cabin in a flood-prone riparian environment. The design solution is a folding shutter — a large wooden screen that folds down over the glazing when needed.
When open, the cabin frames the Sázava completely. When closed, the cabin becomes, in the architects’ words, an “impregnable box.” The shutter system performs several functions simultaneously. It provides sun shading during summer afternoons. It offers security during the week when the cabin sits empty. And it creates a dramatic temporal rhythm — the act of opening the shutter on Friday evening and closing it on Sunday is a ritual that marks the beginning and end of the retreat experience.
This is Temporal Architecture: design elements whose primary purpose is to mark transitions in time and use, rather than simply to manage light or security. The shutter is not just practical. It is ceremonial. That distinction is exactly what separates good small architecture from great small architecture.
Self-Sufficiency as Design Principle
The cabin is connected to the electrical grid. Beyond that, it relies entirely on its own resources. Water comes from an on-site well. Wastewater collects in a tank within the plinth. Heating comes from a woodstove supplemented by electric heaters. There is no gas connection, no municipal water supply, and no dependency on infrastructure that could fail or be interrupted.
This model — minimal grid dependency — is increasingly relevant. Off-grid and near-off-grid cabin design for woodland and riverside settings has moved from fringe preference to mainstream aspiration. However, true off-grid design requires systemic thinking that most architects skip. Mimosa Architects solved it by embedding the utility infrastructure directly into the existing stone plinth. The wastewater tank is invisible. The well is part of the site’s original character. Nothing looks like a technical compromise.
The View Behind the Cabin: The Discovery Architecture Should Save for Last
There is a moment this cabin saves. On the way to the upstairs sleeping loft, the river view disappears. The staircase redirects your gaze. Suddenly, through a rear opening or window, the limestone cliffs that wall the Sázava valley come into view — a reminder of exactly how enclosed this river corridor is, how the water has cut through rock over millennia to create this narrow, intimate valley.
This sequential reveal is what I call Narrative View Architecture: the deliberate orchestration of views in sequence, so that a building rewards movement through it rather than simply revealing everything at once. You earn the cliff view by climbing to bed. That earned quality — that small effort and reward — is what makes architectural experience genuinely memorable, rather than simply visually impressive.
Most contemporary cabins orient entirely toward their primary view. This one gives you two distinct landscape readings that operate in tension: the openness of the river below, the compression of the cliffs behind. Together, they communicate something true about the Sázava valley — that it is a place caught between directions.
Mimosa Architects and the Czech Tradition of Riverside Cabin Design
Czech riverside cabins — chaty, in Czech — have a specific cultural history. They emerged throughout the twentieth century as urban escape valves for city dwellers, particularly in Prague. The Sázava Valley, roughly an hour from the capital, became one of the most densely chatyied river corridors in Central Europe. Most of these structures are informal, improvised, and deeply personal. They are not designed by architects. They grow incrementally over generations.
Mimosa Architects’ intervention on the Sázava engages with this tradition seriously. The cabin does not mimic the vernacular chata aesthetic — it does not reach for the steeply pitched roof, the painted shutters, the garden gnome on the plinth. Instead, it extracts the underlying logic of the chata: compression, self-sufficiency, community, and sensory connection to the river. Then it rebuilds that logic in a contemporary architectural language.
The result is a cabin that is unmistakably Czech in its relationship to landscape and leisure, but internationally legible in its material and spatial intelligence. That is a difficult balance to strike. Mimosa Architects struck it.
Photography by Petr Polák
The documentation of this project was handled by photographer Petr Polák. Polák’s work captures the cabin’s light behavior accurately — the way the charred larch absorbs and holds afternoon light, the reflective quality of the river surface as seen through the full-height glazing, and the textural contrast between the rough stone plinth and the precise wooden frame above it. Architectural photography of this quality is itself a form of critical interpretation. These images do not flatter the building. They read it.
What This Cabin Predicts About the Future of Small Architecture
The Sázava River cabin points toward several directions in which small architecture will continue to develop over the next decade. First, Material Memory Architecture will grow as a practice — especially for buildings replacing structures lost to fire, flood, or demolition. The act of encoding site history into material choices is both ethical and commercially compelling in an era of climate-driven building loss.
Second, the Sociality-First Floor Plan will become more deliberate as designers respond to post-pandemic research showing that people seek shared experience, not just proximity. Compressing private space to expand social space is a testable hypothesis about human behavior, not just a stylistic preference.
Third, near-off-grid design for riverside and woodland settings will stop being a niche specification and become a baseline expectation. As municipal infrastructure faces increasing stress from climate events, clients who once considered grid independence exotic will consider grid dependency risky.
Finally, the folding shutter — and temporal architecture more broadly — will gain critical recognition as a category. Buildings that change their relationship to the landscape over time are more honest about how we actually use them than buildings that perform a single fixed relationship to their site.
The Sázava River cabin is small. But small buildings, when they are thought through completely, have always been where architectural ideas are tested most rigorously. This one passes.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Sázava River Cabin by Mimosa Architects
Who designed the Sázava River cabin?
The cabin was designed by Mimosa Architects, a Czech architecture practice. The project replaces a previous cabin on the same site that was destroyed by fire, retaining and integrating the original stone plinth into the new structure.
What is charred larch cladding, and why was it used on this cabin?
Charred larch cladding is timber that has been surface-burned, typically using a technique derived from the Japanese practice of shou sugi ban. Charring carbonizes the outer wood layer, making it highly resistant to moisture, insects, rot, and fire. Mimosa Architects selected it for both its durability and its symbolic resonance with the fire that destroyed the original cabin on the site.
Is the Sázava River cabin off-grid?
The cabin is connected to the electrical grid for power but is otherwise self-sufficient. Water is drawn from an on-site well, wastewater is collected in a tank housed within the stone plinth, and heating is provided by a woodstove supported by electric heaters. It requires no municipal water supply or gas connection.
What is the folding shutter system on the river-facing facade?
The river-facing wall of the cabin is fully glazed and fitted with a large folding wooden shutter. The shutter closes over the glazing to provide shade during intense summer sun, security when the cabin is unoccupied, and protection during severe weather. When open, it allows uninterrupted views of the Sázava River from the full-length interior space.
Why is the cabin interior described as a “cave”?
The architects used a deliberately unified dark material palette — natural spruce wood panels, black metal elements, and linoleum flooring — to create an interior that absorbs light rather than reflecting it. This enclosing quality suppresses visual noise and directs attention outward toward the fully glazed river view, functioning as a framing device rather than a decorative space.
What is the stone plinth, and what role does it play?
The stone plinth is the surviving foundation of the original cabin that burned down. Mimosa Architects retained and incorporated it into the new structure. It elevates the cabin above flood level, houses the wastewater collection tank, and creates a psychological sense of elevated perspective over the river. It is both a structural and a symbolic element of the project.
Where is the Sázava River located, and what is its architectural significance?
The Sázava River runs through the Bohemian Highlands in the Czech Republic, roughly an hour south of Prague. The Sázava Valley is historically significant as one of Central Europe’s most densely populated recreational river corridors, lined with weekend cabins — known as chaty — that represent a specific Czech tradition of urban escape and riverside leisure culture. Mimosa Architects’ cabin engages critically with this tradition.
Who photographed the Sázava River cabin?
The project was photographed by Petr Polák, whose studio is at petrpolakstudio.cz. Polák’s documentation captures the material texture, light behavior, and landscape relationship of the cabin with precision.
What makes this cabin relevant to contemporary minimal architecture trends?
The Sázava River cabin addresses several of the most active areas of contemporary small architecture: near-off-grid self-sufficiency, charred timber cladding, maximized shared social space over private sleeping capacity, and the use of folding shutters to create temporal shifts in a building’s relationship to its landscape. It also demonstrates how to engage meaningfully with a site’s history without resorting to pastiche or nostalgia.
All images © Petr Polák and Mimosa Architects. Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Architecture section to find other inspiring projects from around the globe.
#architecture #cabin #CzechRepublic #MimosaArchitects #SázavaRiver -
Yuma (@[email protected])
https://gram.social/p/jurma/956806213844460306
> For me visiting my home in Riga means to listen to some music. Well, and to play some music. You cannot take with you all this equipment, mostly DIY, very heavy and from other hand, gentle. I have big collection of vinyl records and play them with Lenco L-75 swiss #turntable placed on monolith heavy plinth. Long Jelco tonearm with Hana SL cartridge (MC). Then uncompromising tube #phono stage with huge overengineered power supply (separate for each stage and channel). Then goes tube preamp with transformer output. Power stage #amplifier is two powerful triode SE mono blocks based on doubled GU-50 tubes. There is no any snake-oil audiophile stuff, by the way. Too much iron to move with you while changing countries.
-
Womanning the Guns: the thread about Edinburgh and Leith’s WW2 aircraft defences
Today’s Auction House Artefact is a German Luftwaffe bombing maps centred on Edinburgh and Leith from WW2. These very maps may have been used in air raids on Edinburgh and Leith during that conflict. They have a deliberate yellow tint to make reading them under the night lighting in an aircraft easier and were printed on plastic-coated fabric to avoid creases and allow the navigator to mark on them in a wax pencil. Water, rivers, roads, railways and forests are all marked as obvious navigation markers. The map dates from 1941 and interestingly all the place names are in English – probably because German maps were basically reprints of captured or purchased British Ordnance Survey maps.
Luftwaffe bombing map of Edinburgh, Lothians and south FifeZiele (targets) were marked in yellow in ink that may have been luminescent so that they would appear brightly at night and account for the major docks and shipyards, airfields, military facilities and power stations along the Forth Coast. Below is my best guess at the full list of target sites (excepting the Forth Bridge, which I mistakenly overlooked).
Targets marked on the Edinburgh, Lothian & Forth mapThe German Naval Command (OKM) at least bothered itself to translate some of the descriptive words on their charts into German, although again they had simply bought up sets of official and readily available Admiralty charts and reverse engineered them. The below OKM coastal chart was printed in 1938 but was already well out of date – entire interwar districts are missing; Craigentinny, Lochend and Restalrig in the east and Wardie, Granton and East Pilton in the north. The Western General Hospital is marked as Armenhaus, the translation of Poorhouse, which it had ceased to be in 1927. The fact that the railway to Leith Central Station is missing and there is no gasworks marked at Granton suggests the map predates 1900 and so was 38 years out of date at the time of issue!
WW2 German naval chart showing Edinburgh. Note that “armenhaus” (poorhouse) on the left side which dated from copying a much older map before the Craigleith Poorhouse became the Western General Hospital in 1927. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandSuch maps show that the German military considered Edinburgh and Leith to be targets of interest. The British authorities were more than a little aware of this and were relatively well prepared when war broke out to defend the city from air attack.
The principle defence was provided by the fighter squadrons stationed at the RAF airfields at Turnhouse, to the west of the city, and Drem in East Lothian. These were the first British home air defences to be tested in the war; on 16th October 1939 a Spitfire of 603 Squadron from Turnhouse piloted by Flt. Lt. Gifford shot down a Junkers 88 bomber, one of 12 that had attacked the Royal Navy anchorages in the Forth. This was the first German aircraft of the war brought down over Britain and one of the four crew, Obergefreiter Krämer, was killed in this action. Spitfires from 602 Squadron from Drem under Flight Lt. Pinkerton brought down another bomber off of Crail, with 3 of the 4 crew being killed.
The German bombs begin to fall over the Forth Bridge from The Illustrated London News, 28th October 1939But it wasn’t just from the skies that the city was defended, it was also protected from the ground by a ring of anti-aircraft gun batteries. This was a far cry from WW1 when Edinburgh and Leith were almost completely undefended when a Zeppelin air raid dropped 44 bombs and left 14 dead. All the anti-aircraft guns in Scotland (and Northern Ireland) were part of a Territorial Army formation called the 3rd Anti Aircraft Division, which was headquartered in Edinburgh.
Formation patch of the 3rd AA DivisionThere were five gun batteries around the city of Edinburgh plus a decoy site (although the one at Silverknowes may have been a decoy too and the others weren’t always armed depending on the phase of the war). The defences of Edinburgh and Leith benefited from their proximity to the Royal Navy Home Fleet’s base at Rosyth and were a component of a wider network defending the Forth anchorages, with thirteen further batteries along the coast. These defences were manned overall by 36th (Scottish) Anti-Aircraft Brigade, with Edinburgh being covered by the 94th Regiment. As the war progressed the organisational structure changed and due to a shortage of manpower mixed units were introduced by incorporating women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) into the gun batteries.
Edinburgh Anti-Aircraft Battery designations and locations.The gun batteries were of a standard design known as HAA sites (Heavy Anti-Aircraft) and the remaining structures of site EDG2 at Alnwickhill can still be clearly seen in aerial photography (and from the ground), underneath the equestrian paraphernalia from its modern-day use as a horse farm. The gun battery was composed of four QF (Quick Firing) guns – the pink dots – on concrete plinths with protective walls of brick and earth. These were arranged in an arc around a control bunker (white arrow). Each gun had ready-to-use ammunition lockers arranged around its inner walls, with more stored in two magazines (orange arrows) nearby. The distinctive circular feature to the north of the battery was a large calibration mattress for the site’s gunnery radar.
Google Earth aerial photography of Alnwickhill battery.Most such batteries were armed with the QF 3.7-inch gun (the inches refers to the calibre, or diameter of the gun bore) that were sited at these batteries could fire an explosive shell weighing 28lbs (13kg) to an effective height of about 25,000ft (7,600m). They could shoot higher than this, but this was the maximum height to which they were able to accurately track and engage a target and was sufficient to engage all but the highest-flying enemy aircraft at this time. A photograph of one of Edinburgh’s 3.7″ guns is shown below
Gunners and their QF 3.7-inch gun in April 1942. Notice the size of the weapon behind them and the two men holding the large, fixed round. IWM (H 19090)Each gun could fire 10-20 rounds a minute, depending on how well drilled the crews were and how physically fit they were to man-handle the heavy ammunition for any extended period of firing. The performance of the guns was therefore directly proportional to how fit the crew were and one of the principal responsibilities of battery commanders was to keep the men active. Interestingly the only other wartime photos I can find of the gun batteries around Edinburgh – at West Pilton – show physical training in progress.
Gunners of an anti-aircraft battery at the start of a cross-country run at West Pilton battery. They are being watched by the ATS women. Imperial War Museum IWM (H 30227)The large protective shields around the guns in the background indicates that this site was actually armed with the less common QF 4.5-inch guns that were based on a Royal Navy design. They fired a heavier projectile (54lb or 24kg) to a greater height but the rate of fire was much reduced as a result, to about 8 rounds per minute.
The ATS women watch the men at Tug-of-War at West Pilton, 30th July 1943. It looks like they are dressed to compete too. Imperial War Museum H 31590Each gun battery was controlled by a mechanical computer known as a predictor, which would be located at the central building marked with the white arrow on the aerial photo. This box of tricks had various dials into which its operators could dial input parameters about the target and ambient conditions (measured or guessed). The internal electro-mechanical innards of the box would calculate the direction and elevation in which each gun should be pointed and the guns followed its lead; the crews just had to keep on loading them.
The ATS women who “man” the Predictor of an unidentified Edinburgh battery. Two of the guns can be seen in the background, and camouflage netting appears to be strung over their positions. Notice the cable trailing from the arm in the foreground, which transmitted commands computed by the Predictor to the guns. IWM H 19092The distance to the target and its height was calculated using a device known as a Rangefinder. The static HAA batteries used a huge 18-foot wide Barr & Stroud UB-10 device.
ATS women with their UB-10 rangefinder at an unidentified Edinburgh battery. IWM (H 19093)Hitting a tiny, fast moving target moving in three dimensions – like an aircraft – with a projectile fired by a gun mounted miles away and tens of thousands of feet below was a tall order: so tall in fact that it was actually fundamentally impossible. As a result the projectiles were not actually expected to hit their target, rather they were to explode in its vicinity, close enough to do damage. Each projectile therefore had a clockwork fuse in its nose which was set to explode when it reached its target, a setting calculated by the Predictor which sent its outputs to another machine called the Fuse Setter. As part of the loading drill, each shell would be placed nose-first into the Setter which automatically adjusted the timer, before the loader shoved the projectile into the breach of the gun. Despite all this mechanical sophistication it was still a monumentally complicated mathematical problem that could be thrown out by tiny variations in the predictor inputs, or the weather, or the ambient conditions, or the target manoeuvring. It was calculated that it would take 41 thousand rounds fired from 3.7″ guns to bring down a single aeroplane! To put this into context, the five batteries of 4 guns around Edinburgh could fire up to 320 rounds per minute at best: if you could keep that up without running out of ammunition, it would take 2.2 hours to bring down an enemy plane – which by then was halfway back home. The role of these guns therefore was less actually shooting aircraft down and more just making sure they flew high enough and took enough avoiding action to make dropping their bombs a far more challenging and less accurate task.
To improve the accuracy of the inputs to the Predictor, the HAA batteries were progressively equipped with Gun-Laying (GL) radar sets which could accurately measure the range to target with an accuracy of about 50 metres. But these early GL radar sets were primitive by even the standards of the day and used a long wavelength which was susceptible to ground interference which caused false returns. To negate this issue the ground around each radar set was “calibrated” using an enormous wire mattress; this is the circular platform visible in the aerial photograph above of Alnwickhill. A 120 metre diameter ring of ground was flattened off, with the radar antennae positioned at its the centre on a raised platform. This area was laid with a 13,000m2 mattress of ½-inch chicken wire mesh, suspended on a wooden frame at a height of 1.5m from the ground. This required 230 rolls of wire mesh, 4 feet wide by 50 yards (1.2x46m) long; 650 miles (1,050 km) of wire per site plus a further 10 miles (16km) in the supports. Such was the scale of and priority given to these calibration mattresses that they consumed the nation’s entire supply of chicken wire at the time!
Gun-laying radar GL Mark II transmitter cabinThe anti-aircraft defences of Edinburgh also included more exotic weaponry; there were two Z-Batteries, reinforcing the regular guns at Craigentinny and West Pilton. These sinister sounding devices were batteries of 64 twin-barelled rocket launchers that fired projectiles which deployed a 500ft long cable suspended by a parachute, with a grenade attached at the other end. The theory was that the launchers would unleash their 128 rockets across the flightpath of an oncoming enemy aircraft which would hopefully snag one or more cables and then draw the dangling grenade towards itself. These were a rather makeshift, emergency weapon to try and make up for a lack of proper weapons and were rarely effective. They did at least create a decent fireworks display to give the public the impression that they were being defended and could be manned by older members of the Home Guard up to an age limit of 60 as the rounds were much lighter than the heavy 3.7″ and 4.5″ gun rounds – the age limit for which was 40. An Edinburgh Evening News report of 25th September 1944 reports that the 101st (City of Edinburgh) Home Guard Ant-Aircraft Rocket Battery at Craigentinny had been on operational service for 820 consecutive nights, i.e. since June 1942 and was the first such battery to become operational in Scotland. At the time of reporting, each of the Edinburgh rocket batteries had fired their weapons in anger once, both on the night of 24th March 1943, and each was credited with the shooting down of an enemy aircraft, which they shared with the regular gun batteries of the city.
Demonstrating one of the twin-rail launchers of a Z-battery to the Scottish press. This demonstration was in suburban Edinburgh and the bungalow housing in the background suggests this may be Craigentinny. Imperial War Museum credit.For night-time actions there were powerful searchlights to try and identify targets for the guns to fire at – a largely fruitless task. I have so far identified two recorded locations and suggestions of more. The first is a photograph taken in April 1942 which shows a visit to a searchlight position near Hunter’s Tryst, looking towards the Pentland Hill. The visitor is the Rev. Ronnie Selby Wright, formerly minister of the Canongate Kirk and by then senior Padre to the Army’s 52nd (Lowland) Division. He acquired the nickname “Radio Padre” after a series of popular radio broadcasts he made for the BBC.
Rev. Selby Wright chatting to a Search-light detachment at Hunter’s Tryst. Photography by Lt. Lockeyear, 26th April 1942. Imperial War Museum, IWM (H 19086)I have also found a Home Guard sketch map in the City Libraries collection that shows a portion of the south of the city at Southhouse, with X marking the spot of a searchlight position.
A sketch of Home Guard positions around Burdiehouse in the south of Edinburgh. © Edinburgh City LibrariesLastly I have in my possession a little book that is an account of the Home Guard activities in this district of the city during the war and it has an illustration of two searchlights being visible from the Braid Hills. This is the earliest days of the war, note the men are still wearing their LDV (Local Defence Volunteers) armbands, lack an official uniform and carry a variety of weapons.
“A Blasted Heath – 02:00”The last fatal air raid in Edinburgh occurred on 6th August 1942. After that, there was local peace in the skies until the night of 24-25th March 1943 when there were scattered attacks across Fife and the Lothians that saw some incendiary bombs dropped harmlessly on farmland near Balerno beyond the then outskirts of the city. In “This Present Emergency: Edinburgh, the river Forth and south-east Scotland and the Second World War“, Andrew Jeffrey suggests that three German Ju-88 bombers were downed by the defences of Edinburgh during this raid, with one crashing on Hare Hill in the Pentlands and two others ending up in the Forth. Newspaper reporting at the time credits a kill each to both Z-batteries, the 102nd battery at West Pilton sharing theirs with the guns. The online database of wartime Luftwaffe losses records the loss of a plane crashing into Hare Hill outside Balerno killing pilot Fritz Foerster, gunner Willi Euler, observer Heinz Kristall and radio operator Horst Bluhm. This was the aircraft that had jettisoned its bombs in the field shortly beforehand. The other two aircraft losses that night were one that crashed on a hillside in Northumberland while being attacked by an RAF Bristol Beaufighter and another that hit a hillside near Earlston in Peeblesshire.
Through improvements in training, organisation and the technology of radar and predictors, as the war progressed the number of rounds the guns would have to fire to bring down an aircraft was reduced by an order of magnitude, to just 4,100. For Edinburgh’s defences this equated to a much more realistic 10-15 minutes of firing to get a “kill“. The last German aircraft to fly over the city likely did so on May 5th 1944, but by this time the course of the war itself had also progressed and by mid-1944 most of the UK’s heavy anti-aircraft defences, including those around Edinburgh, were redeployed to the south coast of England to counter V-1 flying bombs. The more mobile parts of Scotland’s 3rd Anti-Aircraft Division also went south and were attached to the Allied invasion forces, fighting with them across mainland Europe. By this point further technological advance had brought the number rounds required for a “kill” down by another order of magnitude to about 100.
With their guns removed the anti-aircraft defences of the city were mothballed, but we can clearly see their distinctive ground layouts in post-war aerial photography. Each gun battery is accompanied by rows of huts and buildings to house and support the personnel and all the required stores. These photographs suggest that battery EDG4 at West Pilton was fitted with radar as we can see the large circular footprint of the radar calibration mattress (the photo below of Sighthill is censored, but an uncensored version also shows the outline of the mattress). They also hint that battery EDG5 at Silverknowes was either never finished or was purely a decoy.
EDG3 Battery, SighthillEDG1 Battery, CraigentinnyEDG5 Battery, SilverknowesEDG4 Battery, West PiltonPost war aerial photography showing four of the Edinburgh HAA batteriesAlthough the sites were out of use by the war’s end they remained military property and a state secret. They are missing from detailed 1:1250 Ordnance Survey town plans made in 1944 and on some versions of the above aerial photos they have been censored; crudely scratched out or in the case of Alnwickhill and Sighthill, more subtly removed.
EDG1 battery, CraigentinnyEDG4 battery, West PiltonEDG2 battery, AlnwickhillPost-war censorship of the AA battery sitesThe defences of were officially stood down in 1948 and each site had a different fate after that. Sighthill was soon cleared away and the land returned to civilian use when the new industrial estate was laid out there post-war. The huts and structures of West Pilton were used as a Territorial Army (TA) training centre before being turned over to a rather grim-looking and latterly notorious housing estate. The huts at Craigentinny were also re-used, given over to emergency post-war housing as Craigentinny Camp before being returned to their pre-war use of a golf course. The camp at Alnwickhill was kept on by the army before later being used by Ferrantis at East Pilton for testing military electronics and weapons. One of its uses was for testing Bloodhound anti-aircraft missiles in the 1950s, demonstrated wonderfully by the below photograph showing such a missile pointing towards the distant Arthur’s Seat.
A Bloodhound missile at Alnwickhill pointed directly at Arthur’s Seat. Credit likely BMPGAlong with the well-preserved structures at Alnwickhill, the dummy battery at Hilltown near The Wisp survives largely intact as it was returned to the farmer’s field from where it sprung and left too the odd cow to shelter in. From the air its layout is still unmistakably a very close copy of one of the active batteries.
Modern aerial imagery of the Hilltown dummy batteryEdinburgh and Leith were mercifully spared most of the horrors of aerial bombing meted out to other cities during WW2. Altogether there were 21 civilian deaths and about 210 injuries caused directly by aerial bombing during the war. Further details can be read in the thread about the air raids on Edinburgh and Leith during WW2 and the civilian loss of life they caused.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Après un an dans l'appart je réorganise enfin mon bureau; #JeVends à #PrixLibre une armoire-penderie Ikea PAX blanche de 75x58x236, avec trois tablettes et une tringle KOMPLEMENT.
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/pax-caisson-darmoire-blanc-90458235/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tringle-a-habits-blanc-40256895/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tablette-blanc-90277961/ * 3Il y a quelques trous qui traversent les panneaux de chaque côté (l'armoire était vissée à une autre d'un côté, et à une plinthe verticale de l'autre côté), voir photo (c'est pareil de l'autre côté, des trous visibles près de l'avant du meuble).
À venir chercher, démontée (avec tous les petits bitonios bien rangés dans un sachet), à Ivry-sur-Seine, dans mon appart au 4eme étage sans ascenseur. (Les planches sont trop grandes pour être stockée dans la cave, donc elle reste stockée dans l'appart).
À prix libre, premièr.e arrivé.e premièr.e servi.e.
#Ikea #Pax #Armoire #Penderie #IvrySurSeine #Paris13 #PrixLibre #ÀVendre
-
The thread about the coming of the Union Canal, what became of its “Ports” and why its bridges moved around
This thread was originally written and published in October 2021.
A nice set of three pictures was tweeted by the City of Edinburgh Council today (October 17th 2021).
The lift bridge, now at Leamington, in its original position on FountainbridgeThe original drawbridge at Leamington, looking towards Viewforth ChurchLochrin Basin, looking towards the lum of the Tollcross Tramway powerhouseThe Union Canal, c. 1920, Francis M. Chrystal photographs. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe first shows the familiar “Leamington” Lift Bridge, but not at Leamington – instead it is in its original location on Fountainbridge. Pictures two and three show the original lifting drawbridge that existed at Leamington and the Lochrin Basin with the lum of the Tollcross Tramway Depot winding engines towering over the scene, respectively. Not long after these pictures were taken, in 1922 the Union Canal was cut back to its current terminus. The hydraulically powered lifting bridge that carried the Fountainbridge roadway across the water was surplus to requirements and so was relocated to its current home. Here it replaced a diminutive wooden drawbridge and has long been a familiar landmark, known since as the Leamington Lift Bridge.
Leamington Lift Bridge in 2009, CC-BY-SA 2.0 Kim TraynorThe below photograph shows the lift bridge in its original location – the street of Fountainbridge runs left to right along it. The photographer would have been standing where the modern office block which in recent memory contained the AKVA bar is. The baronial style block on the right was the headquarters building of the St. Cuthbert’s Co-operative Association and still stands in this location. In front of the bridge we can see a canal barge and the small building to its right housed the machinery for lifting the bridge deck and the weighbridge office.
Fountainbridge lift bridge, c. 1910. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe lift bridge had a relatively short life here, it was opened only in 1908 in a ceremony performed by Councillor William Fraser of St. Bernard’s Ward, convenor of the Streets and Buildings Committee. A feature of the structure is the raised steps to one side that allowed pedestrians to cross it when the deck was lifted (and still do, to this day). Prior to this, a much simpler drawbridge crossed the canal and was long a bottleneck to traffic and a danger to pedestrians. The newspapers are full of stories of drownings in this locality and in 1906, the father of Gordon Crawford, age 6, sued the City for £250 on account of injuries the boy received when the bridge was lowered on his toes while closing it, resulting in the loss of three toes.
Fountainbridge, pre-1890. The Fountainbridge Free Church and school can be seen on the left, they were hidden from view when the Co-op building went up. The crenelated structure on right was the weight bridge and bothy for the bridge operator © Edinburgh City LibrariesIf you are in this neighbourhood these days, and go along the landlocked street called Port Hamilton to the rear of number 90-98 Fountainbridge, you will see that it has a distinctive and unusual curving rear wall.
Rear elevation of 90-98 Fountainbridge, the former St. Cuthbert’s Co-Operative Association building.Such unusual features in a building are usually explained by a property boundary, which in this case is where this plot meets the former route of the Union Canal, where it turns right (east) after passing under Fountainbridge to its terminal basins. These were called Port Hamilton and Port Hopetoun and the former obviously explains the source of this modern street name.
Fountainbridge in 1893, showing the canal turn towards its terminus, resulting in the curved property boundary. OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandWell before there was a canal here, around which soon grew the densely packed 19th century industrial district of Fountainbridge, the scene here would have been far more pastoral, starkly illustrated by this 18th century scene painted by Patrick Nasmyth.
Looking towards Edinburgh Castle from the vicinity of Fountainbridge in the 1790s. CC-BY-NC National Galleries Scotland.But the illusion here is of course (deliberately) spoiled by the clouds of smoke and steam emanating from the Haig’s Lochrin Distillery. This facility operated on and off in the boom-bust cycles of the grain distillation industry from the 1760s through to the 1860s. The steam engine shown on the map below was likely the first one in Edinburgh, probably a Newcomen-type “atmospheric engine” for pumping water (thanks to Mark Watson for this information). The Cameo cinema is now the approximate location of the site. The wiggly line of running through the middle of the map and distillery is the burn / ditch / drain variously known as either the Dalry Burn or the Lochrin. This historically drained the Boroughloch (to the east, or right, of the map) west towards the Water of Leith at Roseburn. The name Lochrin, which lent itself to the neighbourhood, streets and later canal basin, a Rin (the Scots form of the English Run) being a “small stream, a rivulet, a water-channel“.
Haig’s Lochrin Distillery. Ainslie’s 1804 Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe workers had been digging for over 4 years when the 28 mile long Union Canal opened in its entirety from the Forth and Clyde Canal at Falkirk to its terminus at the basin of Port Hopetoun in May 1822. This is pre-emptively shown in Kirkwood’s town plans of 1817 and 1821, below – you can slide the handle in the middle of the maps to compare the overlay. The town maps or “plans” of this time had a habit of mixing what was built with what was intended to be built (as we can see from the pink washed planned buildings along Lothian Road). Note that the final route of the canal was more direct and curvaceous than that sketched out in 1817 – it simply cut straight through existing properties of Mr Robert Blair, Mr Hunter, Miss Grin(d)lay and Messrs Miller, Morison and Durie into the Inner Basin, which would be named Port Hopetoun. That land marked “Chisholm of Chisholm“, refers to William Chisholm, 24th Chief of Clan Chisholm, and was an area of open ground known as Grindlay’s Park. Notice at this time, Morrison Street isn’t named as such at the east, instead it’s Tobago Street and then the ancient Castle Barns.
Overlay of Kirkwood’s 1821 (left) and 1817 (right) town plans showing the Union Canal entering Edinburgh at Fountainbridge. Slide the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe Grindlay’s Park land was aquired by the Union Canal Company to build the basin. In John Wood’s town plan of 1831, published 10 years after Kirkwood’s later map above, we can see that their portion of land to the east (right) has been developed into the gushet1 block defined by Fountainbridge to its south, Bread Street to its north and Downie Place to its west. The latter street was so named in for the first director of the Union Canal Company, Robert Downie of Appin, and lasted as the street name until Lothian Road took over in 1886.
- Gushet, a Scots term for a triangular portion of land. ↩︎
Compared to the modern streetscape, it can be hard to get your head around where the ends of the Union Canal were at this time. The below map of 1848 shows the two terminal basins – the original Port Hopetoun to the east (right) and the slightly later Port Hamilton to its west (left). These sit between the elegant curve of Gardener’s Crescent on the left, Morrison Street to the top and Downie Place on the right. This end of the town was in a period of flux at this time, rapidly changing from the medieval suburb to the west of the old city limits to the new Victorian. Even in 1849 the place had changed enormously since the canal arriving just under 30 years previously as Georgian suburbs gave way to Victorian industry.
OS 1849 Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandPort Hopetoun was named for the John Hope, 4th Earl of Hopetoun (that stately looking fellow on the plinth in the Royal Bank of Scotland’s garden at 36 St. Andrew Square). Coal was the reason that the canal was built, it was estimated the city residents and industries (including Leith) needed 214,000 tons of coal a year, and that the canal could capture at least 2/3 of this market. And thus it was coal that was the reason John Hope invested: he stood to profit heavily by getting coal from his collieries in West Lothian directly to the city.
John, Earl of Hopetoun’s statue outside the Royal Bank of Scotland in St. Andrew Square. PD by Delta-NCSuch was the initial success of the canal, Port Hopetoun was at capacity in a few years so Port Hamilton followed in 1826. Again it was named after an aristocratic coal master and investor; Alexander Hamilton, 10th Duke of Hamilton. Prior to the opening of the canal, the Scots Magazine gives the price of coal in Edinburgh at either 15-18s per ton if it was brought by cart from the Lothians or 18-21s per ton for the better quality coal that came by sea from Fife, Alloa or Northumbria. The canal brought this down to 11s 6d per ton and from its opening until the arrival of the railways from Midlothian into the city, these men enjoyed a near monopoly on the transport of coal into the city along their canal.
Alexander Hamilton, 10th Duke of HamiltonI don’t have a more authoritative source other than the master of one of the local canal boats, but it is my understanding that the current colour scheme of the canal bridges in Edinburgh is symbolic;
- blue for water
- black for the coal it brought
- gold for the prosperity it was to bring
- red for the blood (metaphorical and literal) shed building it
We know what things looked when the canal arrived in the city thanks to a wonderful Lizar’s engraving of a John Wilson Ewbank drawing of 1825 for Picturesque Views of Edinburgh, reproduced in watercolour by Dukinfield Swarbeck in 1827. This view, looking east towards the Castle, shows the bridge that defined the entrance to Port Hopetoun basin. The trees on the left are the remains of the gardens of Miss Grindlay and others that were cut through by the canal.
Dukinfield Swarbeck’s watercolour view of the Union Canal looking towards Port Hopetoun, 1827We can see the steeple of the High Kirk of St. Giles in the distance and to its right the prominent, tall tenement of Downie Place. This was just one building, the first, in what is now a seemingly nondescript corner to a much larger block.
The Downie Place tenement.The basin of Port Hopetoun was quite sophisticated, with a grand, 3-storey warehouse with rather spectacular cantilevered wooden overhangings on each side from where loads could be lifted directly out of (or dropped directly in to) boats sitting beneath. The building seen on the left of the image was an old house dating from at least 1780, which latterly became known as Hopetoun House. In 1898 this was one of the sites suggested for the location of what would become the Usher Hall, but nothing further came of this.
James Kinnear, 1905, “Port Hopetoun, Edinburgh”, a watercolour looking north. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe later Port Hamilton was a simpler affair, just a long basin with a quayside and quite basic sheds around it for the coal merchants’ use. Notice in the distance the lum of the Dewar Place electric power station – dating this to after 1895.
James Kinnear, 1906, “Port Hamilton, Edinburgh”, a watercolour looking north. Picture from auction listing.A further photo by Francis Chrystal shows Port Hamilton from the other side of the basin, looking south. If you look closely at the quayside on the right you can see stacks of coal sacks; even by 1920 obviously someone was able to scrape some sort of profit by bringing coal into the city by canal. The modern brick building under construction is a motor engineering works for Alexander Brothers.
Port Hamilton, c. 1920 © Edinburgh City LibrariesWhen these Ports closed in 1922 they were infilled to create new development land. Progress was not rapid however and Port Hopetoun was a sorry void in the city centre before eventually being selected in 1935 to be the site of a new block of offices by the Ministry of Works for the Inland Revenue. This grand Art Deco development included shops and houses, and in the basement was located a swimming pool and the auditorium of the Regal cinema (later the ABC and now a sorry excuse for an Odeon). Much controversy was caused in the newspapers in June 1935 when the name of Somerset House was unveiled. The outraged letters to the editor clearly had the intended effect as this was completed as the more appropriately named Lothian House.
Lothian House from Lothian Road. CC-BY-SA 4.0 StephencdicksonThe façade of this fine building is decorated with cast iron reliefs of figures representing industry and nature. If you look up you can also find a memorial carving to Port Hopetoun in the form of a canal boat and tow horse, with the civic crests of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the cities linked by this waterway.
Port Hopetoun memorial carving.The site of Port Hamilton was acquired by the St. Cuthbert’s Co-op and became a modern industrial dairy, bakery and transport workshops. In 1943, aged 13, one Thomas Sean Connery took up a job on a milk float for St. Cuthbert’s from here. He would later go on to make something of a name for himself in cinema. There are lots more great photos on the Edinburgh Libraries and Museum website – Capital Collections of Port Hamilton and Port Hopetoun if you follow these links. All of them are high resolution and so you can zoom right in to all the wonderful details.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Another postcard from our #allotment... kinda went a bit long with this one. Not a lot of tasks ticked off, but a good bit of hard yakka. My arms and legs ache!
The octagonal shed is now upright on cinderblock plinths.
We have a #polytunnel rat!! 😐 As captured by CCTV...
Something has eaten a bunch of our polytunnel crops! 😭 (The rat?? 🤔)
-
#genuary2023 Art Deco. In 2013/4 I (over)worked on one of the largest and most exhausting #GenerativeArt projects of my life: Co(de)factory was an interactive installation piece for the Digital Revolutions/DevArt exhibition, commissioned by Google & The Barbican Centre London. The centerpiece was a DIY 3D resin printer used to publicly fabricate objects designed by visitors via a custom WebGL-based visual programming environment (which was pain to get running on Chrome on the Nexus tablets embedded in the plinths). This design tool (written in back then still pre-mature #ClojureScript) was based around my https://thi.ng/morphogen DSL which defines 8 basic tree operators (e.g. reflection, subdivision, skewing, tapering etc.) to generate complex geometries via recursive transformations of a single arbitrary seed box. Not going to talk much more about the project here (maybe another time), other than to say the large 3D printed canopy structure/sculpture (3 meters tall, 2.4m diameter) surrounding the printer, as well as the cladding for the plinths were all created from hundreds of small modules designed with the Morphogen DSL and used the "golden era" of 1920s American Art Deco as main inspiration... You can find the entire source code for all components (incl. the design tool, server backend, fabrication files etc.) on GitHub:
-
Purgatorio
A #poetry threadi.
To rest, to sleep,
perchance to dream
in the unending deeps
of stained glass moonbeams.To feel less than cold stone
and have a skin of granite —
to not fear being alone
on a crowded planet…I lie on my cool plinth
and bathe in the soft light
of wavering colorful myths
glowing in my soul-night.🧵👇🏼
#poem #poemaday #poetry #windows #windowwednesday #gothic #cathedral #photography #mentalhealth #depression
-
Purgatorio
A #poetry threadi.
To rest, to sleep,
perchance to dream
in the unending deeps
of stained glass moonbeams.To feel less than cold stone
and have a skin of granite —
to not fear being alone
on a crowded planet…I lie on my cool plinth
and bathe in the soft light
of wavering colorful myths
glowing in my soul-night.🧵👇🏼
#poem #poemaday #poetry #windows #windowwednesday #gothic #cathedral #photography #mentalhealth #depression
-
Purgatorio
A #poetry threadi.
To rest, to sleep,
perchance to dream
in the unending deeps
of stained glass moonbeams.To feel less than cold stone
and have a skin of granite —
to not fear being alone
on a crowded planet…I lie on my cool plinth
and bathe in the soft light
of wavering colorful myths
glowing in my soul-night.🧵👇🏼
#poem #poemaday #poetry #windows #windowwednesday #gothic #cathedral #photography #mentalhealth #depression
-
Purgatorio
A #poetry threadi.
To rest, to sleep,
perchance to dream
in the unending deeps
of stained glass moonbeams.To feel less than cold stone
and have a skin of granite —
to not fear being alone
on a crowded planet…I lie on my cool plinth
and bathe in the soft light
of wavering colorful myths
glowing in my soul-night.🧵👇🏼
#poem #poemaday #poetry #windows #windowwednesday #gothic #cathedral #photography #mentalhealth #depression
-
Purgatorio
A #poetry threadi.
To rest, to sleep,
perchance to dream
in the unending deeps
of stained glass moonbeams.To feel less than cold stone
and have a skin of granite —
to not fear being alone
on a crowded planet…I lie on my cool plinth
and bathe in the soft light
of wavering colorful myths
glowing in my soul-night.🧵👇🏼
#poem #poemaday #poetry #windows #windowwednesday #gothic #cathedral #photography #mentalhealth #depression
-
S. Maria Maggiore station is the highest point on the #Vigezzina 🇮🇹 #Centovalli🇨🇭narrow gauge railway line. Pictured here is today’s 15:26 #Domodossola to #Locarno “Diretto” service, worked by a 1950s #SSIF ABe8/8 unit. Meanwhile, a plinthed tramcar seems to enjoy the autumn sun.
-
Après un an dans l'appart je réorganise enfin mon bureau; #JeVends à #PrixLibre une armoire-penderie Ikea PAX blanche de 75x58x236, avec trois tablettes et une tringle KOMPLEMENT.
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/pax-caisson-darmoire-blanc-90458235/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tringle-a-habits-blanc-40256895/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tablette-blanc-90277961/ * 3Il y a quelques trous qui traversent les panneaux de chaque côté (l'armoire était vissée à une autre d'un côté, et à une plinthe verticale de l'autre côté), voir photo (c'est pareil de l'autre côté, des trous visibles près de l'avant du meuble).
À venir chercher, démontée (avec tous les petits bitonios bien rangés dans un sachet), à Ivry-sur-Seine, dans mon appart au 4eme étage sans ascenseur. (Les planches sont trop grandes pour être stockée dans la cave, donc elle reste stockée dans l'appart).
À prix libre, premièr.e arrivé.e premièr.e servi.e.
#Ikea #Pax #Armoire #Penderie #IvrySurSeine #Paris13 #PrixLibre #ÀVendre
-
Après un an dans l'appart je réorganise enfin mon bureau; #JeVends à #PrixLibre une armoire-penderie Ikea PAX blanche de 75x58x236, avec trois tablettes et une tringle KOMPLEMENT.
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/pax-caisson-darmoire-blanc-90458235/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tringle-a-habits-blanc-40256895/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tablette-blanc-90277961/ * 3Il y a quelques trous qui traversent les panneaux de chaque côté (l'armoire était vissée à une autre d'un côté, et à une plinthe verticale de l'autre côté), voir photo (c'est pareil de l'autre côté, des trous visibles près de l'avant du meuble).
À venir chercher, démontée (avec tous les petits bitonios bien rangés dans un sachet), à Ivry-sur-Seine, dans mon appart au 4eme étage sans ascenseur. (Les planches sont trop grandes pour être stockée dans la cave, donc elle reste stockée dans l'appart).
À prix libre, premièr.e arrivé.e premièr.e servi.e.
#Ikea #Pax #Armoire #Penderie #IvrySurSeine #Paris13 #PrixLibre #ÀVendre
-
Après un an dans l'appart je réorganise enfin mon bureau; #JeVends à #PrixLibre une armoire-penderie Ikea PAX blanche de 75x58x236, avec trois tablettes et une tringle KOMPLEMENT.
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/pax-caisson-darmoire-blanc-90458235/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tringle-a-habits-blanc-40256895/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tablette-blanc-90277961/ * 3Il y a quelques trous qui traversent les panneaux de chaque côté (l'armoire était vissée à une autre d'un côté, et à une plinthe verticale de l'autre côté), voir photo (c'est pareil de l'autre côté, des trous visibles près de l'avant du meuble).
À venir chercher, démontée (avec tous les petits bitonios bien rangés dans un sachet), à Ivry-sur-Seine, dans mon appart au 4eme étage sans ascenseur. (Les planches sont trop grandes pour être stockée dans la cave, donc elle reste stockée dans l'appart).
À prix libre, premièr.e arrivé.e premièr.e servi.e.
#Ikea #Pax #Armoire #Penderie #IvrySurSeine #Paris13 #PrixLibre #ÀVendre
-
Après un an dans l'appart je réorganise enfin mon bureau; #JeVends à #PrixLibre une armoire-penderie Ikea PAX blanche de 75x58x236, avec trois tablettes et une tringle KOMPLEMENT.
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/pax-caisson-darmoire-blanc-90458235/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tringle-a-habits-blanc-40256895/ * 1
- https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/komplement-tablette-blanc-90277961/ * 3Il y a quelques trous qui traversent les panneaux de chaque côté (l'armoire était vissée à une autre d'un côté, et à une plinthe verticale de l'autre côté), voir photo (c'est pareil de l'autre côté, des trous visibles près de l'avant du meuble).
À venir chercher, démontée (avec tous les petits bitonios bien rangés dans un sachet), à Ivry-sur-Seine, dans mon appart au 4eme étage sans ascenseur. (Les planches sont trop grandes pour être stockée dans la cave, donc elle reste stockée dans l'appart).
À prix libre, premièr.e arrivé.e premièr.e servi.e.
#Ikea #Pax #Armoire #Penderie #IvrySurSeine #Paris13 #PrixLibre #ÀVendre
-
Et voilà, double éclairage, le premier en lumière du jour pour avoir un éclairage adéquate pour juger un tirage, le second en lumière inactinique (rouge) pour faire les tirages. Il me reste à installer la prise de la sécheuse à films, et ce sera fini avec l'électricité. A faire demain :
- prise de la sécheuse
- joint le long des plinthes
- joint de l'évierCe week-end :
- fermeture du coffrageProchainement :
- installation de la ventilation#DarkRoom #LaboPhoto #FaitMaison #EssaiLumière #LaFeeElectricite
-
Pas une grosse motivation aujourd'hui, j'avais des trucs à acheter au magasin de bricolage et puis, l'appel de la forêt par ce temps... RAH ! je résiste pas.
Du coup, je n'ai fait que poser le chant du plan de travail "chimie", fini de peindre le support de l'évier, que j'ai installé (après séchage), et que j'ai jointé. Et j'ai aussi posé les plinthes le long du mur sous l'évier.Reste à faire :
- pose de l'évier
- joint autour de l'évier
- joint le long des plinthes et meubles
- électricité (prises et lumière)Semaise prochaine :
- claies de séchage
- fermeture du coffrageA voir avec le plombier :
- la ventilation -
Cammo: the thread about the curious and curiouser tale of its eccentric, reclusive residents
One thing that always fascinates me, as you probably know by now, is how a place name evolves over time, from century to century and map to map, and how the local pronunciation of the name either leads this or follows it. This morning my eye was caught by Cammo. Cammo was formerly a grand house and estate to the west of Edinburgh, now a local park / nature reserve finding itself being swallowed up by suburbification where the fields are replaced by car dependent new build estates with evocative names like Cammo Meadows and streets named after flowers that once grew here (such as yarrow, poppy and meadowsweet) and birds that once nested here (such as goldcrests and sparrowhanks).
Cammo and Cammo Meadows, 2022 Open Street MapCammo almost sounds biblical to my ear. You can imagine it sitting alongside Canaan or Jericho in the old testament – and why not, there’s a whole district of biblical placenames in the south of Edinburgh. It’s an old name indeed, but not quite that old, and is recorded on a charter in 1296 as Cambo or Cambok. Those of you familiar with the East Neuk of Fife will recognise Cambo also as the Snowdrop capital of Scotland; that place too is initially recorded, in the 12th century, as Cambok.
It’s a Brythonic language placename [cam(b) + ōc] meaning a crooked place, referring to land in the bends of a river or stream. The Camb– part of the word finds its way into Gaelic names, also meaning “crooked” e.g. Cameron (Cam sròn, crooked nose) or Campbell (Cam beul, crokked mouth). It’s also the root of the Fife place name of Kemback, but that’s by the by, we’re going to concentrate on looking at the Edinburgh Cambo or Cambok here.
The first map to record Cammo is Timothy Pont’s survey of Scotland of the 1600s, which was never published for the Lothians in its original form. Pont’s incomplete Survey and Atlas was completed by Robert Gordon of Straloch in the 1640s, but Gordon omits it from his map of the Lothians. However it emerges a decade later in Dutch imprints as Kammock (e.g. Janssen in 1646, Blaeu in 1654).
Kammock, on Cornelius Blaeu’s atlas of Scotland, 1654, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandCammo finally appears as Cammuck in a Scottish map, next to Lenie in John Adair’s map of 1682 (which is both charming in its style and cartographically excellent). We can see he renders Lenny with an extra tower and trees, suggesting it is the larger and more important house of the two and set in a park. Cammo House was rebuilt around 1693 by John Menzies.
Lenie and Cammuck, John Adair’s map of 1682, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBig improvements were made to the house and its gardens in the early part of the 18th century when a new owner, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 2nd Baronet (better known as Baron Clerk), had the place landscaped in a fashionable style, in what may be the first example of a formal landscaped country garden in Scotland. He bought Cammo in 1710, moving to Mavisbank in Midlothian on the death of his father in 1722. He sold it to John Hog in 1726, who had the renowned architect William Adam draw up plans to expand and modernise the house, but these were never completed although various details may have been.
Plans for Cammo House, from Vitruvius Scoticus by William AdamBy the time the mapmarker William Roy comes along to do the lowland section of his “Great Map” in the 1750s, he goes for Cummock, which you can imagine is how the place Kambock was being pronounced. Again, Lenny is the more important looking of the two at this time.
Leny and Cummock, Roy’s Lowland map c. 1755, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandHowever if Roy or his surveyors had knocked on the door at the time, they would have found its (then) new owners, the Watsons of Saughton, had renamed the place New Saughton in 1741 when they bought it from the Hogs! Like all Scottish placenames that begin Saugh– or Sauch-, the reference is to a willow tree. James Dorret makes the same “error” in his 1750 map. We get out first view of Cammo House at the end of the 18th century thanks to a coloured etching in 1794 by an unknown artist. The Watsons inherited Sir John Clerk’s landscaped gardens, parkland and arboretum and set about improving it further in their 131 years of ownership – by the start of the 19th century they employed 9 gardeners and 7 labourers to tend the grounds.
Cammo / New Saughton in 1794. Unknown artist and creditBy 1807 the maps have caught up with the name and Aaron Arrowsmith (determined to be first in every phone book and school register!) marks it down as New Saughton. Note it is now set in its parkland and Lenny has ceased to be important enough to map it is reduced to a farm.
John Thomson in his 1832 atlas of Scottish shire maps shows Saughton as a grand house set in ample landscaped gardens and parklands – probably the evolution of those set out by Sir John Clerk a century earlier. It is at this time still owned by the Watsons (note Watson Esq. underneath the name Saughton).
Saughton, Thomson’s map of 1832, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAnd a grand house it was, 3 storeys plus basement, 5 bays wide and 4 deep, set on a raised plinth. It had been considerably extended since that 1794 image; the 3rd floor attic level has been expanded into a complete storey, the wing to the right hand side has been raised up by one floor and a new wing has been built to the rear. This 1887 picture shows the house when owned by Archibald Campbell (Crooked Mouth of Crooked Place!), of Archibald Campbell, Hope & King brewers, who had bought it with his beer fortune. It was the Campbells who renamed the place Cammo when they bought it from the Watsons in 1837.
Cammo House, 1887, © Edinburgh City LibrariesArchibald Campbell, Hope & King, or Campbell & Co., marketed themselves as Brewers to Her (or His) Majesty by Special Appointment and brewed from the Argyle Brewery on what is now Chambers Street (if you like your Scottish history, all the Argyles seem to end up being called Archibald Campbell!) As a fun fact, fun fact – Campbell’s town house in Edinburgh was 6 Charlotte Square, now Bute House, official residence of the First Minister of Scotland.
Capbell & Co’s Edinburgh Ales. Advertising mirror.Something odd happens to Cammo in 19th century OS map when it is reverts to its original name from New Saughton; a spelling mistake is made! Some cartographer or another, having spent too long staring at the fine detail of a map and the scribbles in the Ordnance Survey’s place name books, mis-transcribes Cammo as Camino, by separating the left leg of the 2nd “m” into an “i” and an “n”.The mistake seems to be a one off however, and the OS did not repeat it in subsequent maps.
Camino! OS 1 inch survey, 1895The history of Cammo House and estate then goes a bit weird. In 1898 it was bought from the estate of Archibald Campbell by a wealthy heiress, Margaret Maitland-Tennent, and her husband, David Bennet Clark. Be clear it was Margaret who bought the house, and they had a “pre-nup” agrement which meant that Clark was not entitled to her money, which she had inherited from her father – an Australian sheep farmer – in 1890. The marriage was reputedly tempestuous and Clark left in 1909 and sued for divorce in 1911 on the grounds of desertion. The court agreed that “the pursuer had proved that the defender had, without reasonable cause, been guilty of wilful non-adherance and desertion of the pursuer for 4 years“. Lord Dewar, presiding, was highly critical of Margaret when summing up:
…in most unsuccessful marriages there were faults on both sides, the present case was exception. The pursuer was considerate and affectionate, devoted to his wife and children, and for years displayed remarkable forbearance in trying circumstances, but he appeared to have been weak, and was not always wise.
The defender was also devoted to her children, but she did not pretend that she ever had any affection or respect for her husband. She was exacting and overbearing, and apparently vindictive in the manner in which she treated him. She suspected and distrusted him from the beginning. His Lordship did not think that she had good grounds for her suspicion. She was subject to delusions regarding him, and these delusions were the real source of their unhappiness.
She never allowed him to interfere with her income, and there was no evidence that he ever desired to, but she insisted on scrutinising his bank-book to see that he was not misspending the balance of his income. She suspected his fidelity. She watched him, and employed others to watch him. She asked him account for his movements when he was out her sight. She constantly accused him, and urged him to make a full confession. She became restless and unsettled. Finally he wrote out and signed the confession produced in the proceedings. His explanation was that there was no truth in what the document contained; that he wrote it to her dictation; and signed it because he was afraid that she would lose her reason, and hoped that would set her mind at rest, and enable them to live harmoniously together. She preserved the confession; she registered it in the Books of Council and Session; and she frequently used it to the pursuer’s disadvantage.
That document had been judicially considered in the action of divorce at the defender’s instance, and Lord Salvesen preferred Mr Bennet Clark’s account. Lord Dewar agreed with that opinion. It was a strange story, and difficult to understand, how a man could be induced to sign such a document, or hope that any good could result from it; but the pursuer was weak and emotional, devoted to the defender, and anxious to live with her; and it was not surprising that he was apprehensive as to her mental condition, for she was undoubtedly subject to delusions as to her husband’s wickedness.
Dundee Courier, Thursday June 1st 1911They divorce granted, Margaret and her sons Percival and Robert stayed on at Cammo, Clark getting himself far away to England. In 1915 Margaret and the boys went travelling to the Orient during which time Clark died. Something then went badly wrong in the east however, as Robert refused to return home and instead took himself off to the USA. His mother returned to Cammo with Percival and in 1934 disinherited her wayward son. She then rented much of the estate’s farm land out to the Cramond Brig Golf Club, dismissed much of her staff and she and Percival apparently moved into a caravan together on the site and locked up the house, replete with all its lavish furnishings, paintings, their clothes and possessions. The gates to the estate were chained shut and the whole place was fenced off with barbed wire. They had no telephone and there was no doorbell. Signs around the perimeter read “Private Property, No Admittance, By Order“. Dogs patrolled the grounds. In 1935 she took the City Assessor to court over the valuation of the golf course which was by now vacant and successfully had the amount owed reduced from £300 to £150.
From then on they were only seen in public rarely, and always together. She dressed all in black and was known locally as the “Black Widow” or the “Dark Lady of Cammo“. They would leave the seclusion of Cammo to go shopping together at Jenners, where they were given a private room and had items brought to them to peruse, picking what they wanted and having it delivered back to Cammo. Their car reputedly had blinds fitted in the rear so that the passengers could not be seen. In 1947, Margaret was sued in a court in Los Angeles by the disinherited Robert who claimed that there was a 32 year old contract between the pair worth £100 a year and that she now owed him £1,515.
Cammo House in 1880; happier times before the Maitland-Tennents took over. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe house slowly rotted away, but not for want of money as Margaret was still a wealthy woman. Indeed she was taken to court and briefly jailed in 1951 for failing to declare to the treasury how much she had in oversees bank accounts; the treasury suspected it was over £117,000 in Canadian and American dollars! She died in 1955 and was buried in the grounds of the house, special permission had to be granted by the Edinburgh Corporation and apparently this was the last private internment in Scotland. The burial took place in secret and under a police escort. A gamekeeper armed with a shotgun patrolled the grounds to keep the press at bay; Percival arrived in a car with a coat over his head claiming to be the gatekeeper when met by the press.
Margaret left an estate of over £300,000 (£9.4 million in 2022). After tax this left £255,064 or (£7.0 million in 2022). When the lawyers came to unwind her murky finances it was found that she had £128,281 in Canadian banks, £88,879 in US banks and only £7,022 (or just over 2% of her total funds) in the UK. Percival inherited everything; while Robert did have a claim under Scottish law, he never publicly challenge for it.
Percival, every bit as reclusive as his mother, retired to his two loves in life; his cars and his dogs. He would thrash his car into the ground around the estate until they would no longer run and then abandon them behind the house and buy another. He kept some 30 dogs and they got the run of the house which apparently ended up covered in a thick layer of dogshit; hence the saying “gone to the dogs“. There are pictures of the dilapidated inside of the house in its later days here. He upgraded himself from a caravan to living in the gate house, with a lodging family, and both he and the estate were tormented by looters and vandals for the rest of their lives. On his death in 1975 the ruinous property passed to the National Trust for Scotland according to his will, but they didn’t know where or how to begin. They were able to salvage a significant collection of art and a number of pieces of furniture, many of which were tourn and covered in a film of mould. In February 1977 they went to auction, the artworks fetching c. £25,000 (£183,000 in 2022) and the furniture £3,600. An Italian art dealer flew in especially from Rome and paid £6,000 for a single piece.
The NTS had the future of Cammo House taken out of their hands however when the arsonists stepped in however, as they often do, and burnt it down later that year. It had to be partially demolished for safety reasons in 1979. The NTS passed it on to Edinburgh District Council for £1 in 1980 who turned it into a country walking park for the public. The council pulled down the house to its lower courses which were stabilised as a sort of ruinous folly feature.
The ground floor and basement remains of Cammo House, CC-by-SA Mike Pennington via GeographThe fine Georgian stables, built for Sir John Clerk, are much more intact.
Cammo Stables with the late winter’s snowdrops. CC-by-SA Calum McRoberts via GeographFor the full story of Cammo’s weird and wacky history, there’s a great book by Simon Baillie called The Private World of Cammo.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
On the #SSIF 🇮🇹 Valle Vigezzo narrow gauge line earlier today, at (and around) S. Maria Maggiore (📷 1,2,3) and Masera (4). Pictured is the 08:48 morning service from #Locarno to #Domodossola, worked by the ABe8/8 unit #21 “Roma” (plus a plinthed tramcar).