#burdiehouse — Public Fediverse posts

The thread about the Fourth Day of Christmas; the Birds, Bards or Bords of Burdiehouse

This thread was originally written and published in December 2019.

This post in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas is preceded by a thread about Little France.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Four Collie Burdiehouses. I thought I had a really clever link here with the old Scots for blackbird, but it was a red (black?) herring. So let’s instead turn our attention to the suburb of Burdiehouse. This name goes back in record to the 17th century, as Burdehouse and other forms such as Burdiehouse, Bordiehouse and Burdihouse. But what does it mean and does it have anything to do with wee birdies?

Burdehouse – James Dorret’s map of Scotland, 1750. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

There is an intriguing and (most probable) dead-end theory that this – like Little France before it – is another one of those Mary Queen of Scots and her French connections; some early references referring to it as Bordeaux. But that does not happen until a century after the mapmakers began to write it down and the confusion may arise because of a simple misunderstanding. Burdeous was one of the principal ways that the French town is spelled in Scots. It’s not a huge leap to imagine a mapmarker removed the “h” by mistake from Burdehous, leaving Burdeous, which inevitably lead to modernisation as Bordeaux.

The “Great” mapmaker William Roy gives us a clue as to another, more likely meaning of the placename in his 1750s Lowland map of Scotland (even though he can’t always be relied on to give accurate place names – the ones he gets wrong are usually pretty obvious and far from the mark); he calls it Bardy Burn.

Bardy Burn – William Roy’s Lowlands map of Scotland, 1750s. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Bardy may be the Scots Borde, from the Anglian Brerd, for a bank or a border, which would be a perfect toponymy for the Burdiehouse Burn that has long defined a boundary here. An alternative may be Bord house; a farm that supplied the laird’s table, although to me the former seems preferable. Anyway, by the time the Ordnance Survey came along and formalised spellings, it was recorded as Burdiehouse in the Name Books for Midlothian of 1852, as was the story about the French connection:.

This name is corrupted from the French word Bordeaux which was given it in the last century when the first house was built.

Ordnance Survey Name Books 1852-3, Midlothian, Volume 17, OS1/11/17/101

Burdiehouse gives its name to a thick and regionally important layer of limestone that was first quarried here, and on the slopes above the village are the remains of its old lime kilns, which were worked right up until the early 1930s.

Burdiehouse Lime Kilns, CC-by-nc-nd Chris Hill on Flickr

These extensive quarries are situated on the farm of Burdiehouse Mains, the property of Mr David Baird who continually keeps about 20 men employed constantly at them. They are of immense depth and present to the the eye prodigious arcades, supported by natural Gothic pillars

Ordnance Survey Name Books 1852-3, Midlothian, Volume 17, OS1/11/17/103

The 1842 Gazetteer of Scotland recoded that Burdiehouse produced 15,000 bolls of lime annually. The landowner and proprietor of the quarries at this time was noted as being Sir David Baird of Newbyth in Haddingtonshire – it might be a reasonable avenue of exploration to see if the place was owned by the Bairds in the 1750s when Roy came along and called it “Bardy House“…

Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet of Newbyth 1757-1829, landowner of Burdiehouse. Portrait by John Watson Gordon in the National Portrait Gallery, London

For much of its existence, the village was a “neat and commodious” little roadside hamlet, with two-storey cottages for farm and limestone workers, a mains (the principal farm of an estate), the lime quarries and kilns to the south, a school and a public house – the romantically named Old Bordeaux. Later, Shale was mined just to the south of the lime workings and nearby at Straiton too by the Clippens Oil Company, but working stopped in the 1890s after a dispute with the Edinburgh & District Water Trust whose pipes ran above the workings and directly underneath the village.

In 1929, as suburban Edinburgh marched ever southwards, the section of what was then known as the Penicuik Road here was renamed as the Burdiehouse Road. New streets were drawn up off of it named for one of the old farms in the area – Southhouse Avenue, Road, Terrace, Broadway – for those typically prim but dreary streets of interwar suburban bungalows. In Burdiehouse itself, Edinburgh Corporation built a small addition of 18 cottage flats arranged around Burdiehouse Square in 1938, completed just before the outbreak of war.

The war put paid to any more bungalows, but the Southhouse scheme was revived post-war as one of permanent, prefabricated council housing. The streets to the north of Southhouse Road kept that name, those to the south of it took the Burdiehouse name. The prefabs were a mix of types provided by the Scottish Housing Group, a portion of which were intentionally temporary until permanent houses could replace them, others were permanent, being a mix of BISF Houses, the Framed Orlits and Whitson-Fairhurst Houses. These all remain to this day, but heavily updated with new insulation and rendering, roofs, windows and doors.

Three types of prefab in Burdiehouse. From left-to-right, a rare BISF with its original steel panel cladding on the first floor, an Orlit with the slab of its original flat roof and concrete window surrounds and the Whitson-Fairhurst.

The vast expansion of housing in 1947 relocated the epicentre of Burdiehouse to the north, with a parade of shops and a new (temporary) school. A modern, permanent school was completed in 1957 ( closing due to falling rolls and council cuts in 2009).

The little village became left behind as Old Burdiehouse; when it was decided to upgrade the Penicuik Road to dual carriageway in the late 1960s, the road was bypassed around it and cut it off as a cul-de-sac, with the road renamed Old Burdiehouse Road. More recently, acres of new-build housing estates have begun to spring up between Burdiehouse and Gilmerton, totally changing the character of the village once again.

The Edinburgh and Leith twelve days of Christmas threads continue with a post about “Fiveways” and Goldenacre.

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.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

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 pebbledashing

The 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 Thelma

The 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.

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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

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 Fife

Ziele (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 map

The 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 Scotland

Such 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 1939

But 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 Division

There 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 31590

Each 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 19092

The 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 cabin

The 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 Libraries

Lastly 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 batteries

Although 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 sites

The 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 BMPG

Along 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 battery

Edinburgh 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.

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