#castle-hill — Public Fediverse posts

The #winter is truly here in the South coast of #Finland, too.

Yes, there still is quite a little of #snow, but today the thermometer hit -21 °C here in #Porvoo. In #Lapland it has been even around -40 °C.

#Laika #ÄänislinnanLaika #Linnamäki #Borgbacken #CastleHill #VanhaPorvoo #GamlaBorgå #OldPorvoo #VieuxPorvoo #Borgå #Finlande #koirat #dog #dogs #hund #hundar #chien #chiens #dogstodon #dogsofmastodon #Mondog #hauvantai #lumi #snö #neige #talvi #vinter #hiver

#castlehill in #townsville is a vibe today

Just another grey #Mondog, Oooo-Ooou-O.

#Laika #ÄänislinnanLaika #vallihauta #moat #vallgrav #douve #Linnamäki #Borgbacken #CastleHill #Porvoo #Borgå #VanhaPorvoo #GamlaBorgå #OldPorvoo #VieuxPorvoo #Suomi #Finland #Finlande #lenkillä #koira #koirat #dog #dogs #hund #hundar #chien #chiens #dogstodon #dogsofmastodon #hauvantai #silta #bro #bridge #pont

Vallihautakoira.

#vallihauta #moat #vallgrav #douve #Linnamäki #Borgbacken #CastleHill #Porvoo #Borgå #VanhaPorvoo #GamlaBorgå #OldPorvoo #VieuxPorvoo #Suomi #Finland #Finlande #lenkillä #Laika #ÄänislinnanLaika #koira #koirat #dog #dogs #hund #hundar #chien #chiens #dogstodon #dogsofmastodon

The November greyness with a dash of snow.

Pt. 2.

#snow #snö #lumi #neige #winter #vinter #hiver #talvi #Porvoo #Borgå #VanhaPorvoo #GamlaBorgå #OldPorvoo #VieuxPorvoo #Suomi #Finland #Finlande #lenkillä #Linnamäki #Borgbacken #Castlehill

Educating Children, Bakers and Tourists: the thread about Castlehill Public School

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) have for some reason a particular fascination for me, one which is more profound where they are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about each of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but rapidly snowballed into an intention to cover each, in alphabetical order, on its own and in rather more detail, but not so much that they can’t be posted quite frequently.

The third chapter of our series looking at the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” investigates the life and times of Castlehill School. This occupied the site of the Gordon House, the 17th century residence of George Gordon, 1st Duke of Gordon who was Captain and Constable of Edinburgh Castle and is remembered for surrendering that fortification all too readily to the Protestant Lords during the Glorious Revolution of 1689. His property came later into the possession of the Bairds of Saughtonhall who gave their name to Blair’s Close that forms the western boundary of the school plot.

The school was designed by Robert Wilson, architect to the Edinburgh School Board, and was a radical departure in style from its rather austere Collegiate Gothic contemporaries by the adoption of Scots Baronial Revival; complete with turrets, crowstepped gables and mock battlements. This was seen as more befitting of its prominent location at the head of the Old Town. Another change was the use of red Cornockle sandstone from Lochmaben in Dumfriesshire to add a visual contrast with the more usual yellowy-grey from the local Hailes Quarry.

A third change from its predecessors was the extension from two to three storeys; an attic level, lit by rooflights, providing rooms for teaching specialist subjects such as needlework and drawing. This was done to make the best use of a cramped site which amounted to just quarter of an acre; half that of the contemporary Milton House School in the Canongate and even less than the notoriously cramped Bristo Public School. (The only other three storey board school before this was West Fountainbridge, which had a similarly small plot)

Internally, three original mantlepieces from the Gordon mansion were incorporated into staff rooms as was an old entrance door. To the rear (south), the site dropped steeply away down the slope of the Old Town’s Crag and Tail topography. An additional level was therefore required, originally this was an open colonnade, providing a covered extension to the playgrounds, but later it was enclosed to provide additional teaching areas. A tall retaining wall faced onto Johnston Terrace at the rear, with entrance staircases (separate for boys and girls) up to the playgrounds and a three storey Janitor’s house bridged the two levels.

The school opened on Monday December 3rd 1888. Although there was no formal ceremony to mark the occasion, over 800 pupils were marched out of their old schools (those inherited by the School Board at Brown Square, Borthwick and Old Assembly Close and Victoria Terrace) up the hill to their new home. A formal opening would take place exactly 5 months later on May 3rd 1889.

Interestingly, the legend carved prominently into both the front and read façades reads “CASTLE HILL SCHOOL”, even though it was nearly always officially referred to as one word, just Castlehill, a change that was also reflected in the Ordnance Survey maps around the time.

From the beginning the school was also used for evening education. But – maintaining the theme of being different – at Castlehill this was not for adults. Instead it catered only for children under 14, pupils given special dispensation by the School Board to attend evening school on account of them needing to work during the school day to help support their families. In 1898 there were 212 boys and girls so registered. In 1890, the school’s first headmaster, John Davidson, resigned on account of poor health. In May 1898 headmaster William C. S. Hunter died and was replaced by James C. Anderson of Leith Walk School. His salary of £340 being equivalent to around £38,400 in 2025 and his “reign” was formally inaugurated with a presentation by Colin G. Macrae, chairman of the School Board, and concert at the school on Wednesday 1st June that year.

The school and its pupils suffered as a result of the harsh social conditions in Edinburgh’s Old Town in the late 19th and early 20th century. Headmaster Anderson was one of a number of his peers in the district who in spoke publicly in 1904 on “how drunkenness [of parents] affects the children“. 150 of his pupils were on the “food roll” due to the inability of their parents to feed then, with a further 30 receiving relief from the district fund. This was almost a quarter of the school and other children of leaving age (14) were being taught with 7 year-olds on account of how much schooling they had missed. Anderson put this down to drunkenness which he said was getting worse, as was thriftlessness. In 1908, under the terms of the Education (Scotland) Act of that year, the School Board instituted a meal scheme for necessitous children, each receiving a bowl of soup and bread during their school day. This was a great success and was expanded in 1911 by converting West Fountainbridge School into a dedicated central cooking centre. One hundred children from Castlehill were among the first recipients to benefit, but as their school lacked a dining hall they went to the Independent Labour Party Hall on Melbourne Place to eat. The tickets for these dinners issued daily at school to encourage children deserving of the meals to actually attend their lessons. They could also be purchased for 6d a week; with a little bit of liberal rounding they became known as “penny dinners“.

Feeding was not the only effort made to improve the lot of the children of Castlehill. In 1908 permission was gained by the School Board to adopt a piece of ground on Johnston Terrace next to the Church of Scotland Normal School (a teacher training college) for use as a playground, that at the school being completely insufficient in size and aspect. In 1909, under the auspices of Patrick Geddes’ Edinburgh Social Union, a patch of wasteland on Johnston Terrace was converted by pupils at the school into a model demonstration garden of their very own. Geddes established numerous such gardens, believing them as living classrooms for teaching both biology and self-improvement. Vegetable plots 150 feet long and 7 feet wide grew potatoes, peas, beans, cauliflowers, cabbages, turnips, leeks, onions, carrots, lettuces and other salad vegetables which were used in cookery classes in the school. This space was used for teaching natural history lessons and the principles of crop rotation. It also allowed the school to apply for a valuable additional grant for teaching gardening from the Education Department.

The next year, 1910, headmaster H. F. Sim brought the first case of its kind in Edinburgh to the City Police Court under the Children Act 1908, when two shopkeepers were charged with and pleaded guilty to selling “smoking mixture” to to children under the age of 16. Sim had caught boys in the school trying to smoke a pipe filled with the ersatz tobacco and confiscated from them their paper bag marked “The Boys’ Smoking Mixture and Pipe: price One Halfpenny“. On questioning, he had found from them where they had acquired it and reported the matter to the city’s Medical Officer of Health. The magistrate admonished the defendants and said “a warning should be given to tobacconists that the sale of such a mixture was an illegal practice, and that in other cases of the kind the offenders would certainly be punished.“

In October 1912, to remedy a lack of accommodation in the school, the adjacent ancient tenement known as Cannonball House – the last block of old Castlehill – being acquired by the Board for £1,925. It had recently been bought by the Cockburn Association with a view to preservation and the Board spent £3,500 thoroughly renovating and converting into additional teaching spaces. Its four principal classrooms could accommodate 180 children and there were special rooms for practical subjects such as cookery. In the basement were “spray baths“; showers for the children, most of whom lacked even basic domestic sanitation in their homes. The building was substantially altered, with one wing and the old Blair’s Close removed to improve ventilation and daylight. A number of original 17th century features were uncovered during restoration and were retained and installed in the fabric in new locations, making the end result something of a chimaera. The east gable is the biggest give-away way that not all is what it seems with this apparently old tenement; look for the tall classroom windows and the Edinburgh School Board emblem high up on the pediment.

In WW1 the school was requisitioned by to act as a depot and billeting for soldiers of the 5th Royal Scots based out of Edinburgh Castle. The Church of Scotland Young Men’s Guild was given the use of a room the following year to run a canteen and recreation room for them, with a gramophone, games, books, newspapers and writing materials. A teacher at the school, James Bathgate, was injured on war service in July 1915 when serving as a private with the College Company, 4th Royal Scots, in France. In April 1917, Headmaster Sim lost his son, Charles Henry Stuart, who died in hospital having been fatally injured serving with the Royal Field Artillery.

After the war, in April 1922, Headmistress Miss C. E. Anderson retired and was presented with a gold wristlet watch from the parents and her colleagues and a diamond brooch from the pupils. She had been teaching the children of the area since the school opened – a record period of 41 years!

In 1936 a new technological front in teaching was opened up at Castlehill when a room was specifically converted for the use of the Edinburgh branch of the newly instituted Scottish Educational Film Association for the production of educational films. It had been recognised that technology had a part to play in education – in 1931 a group from Canonmills School had been given a trial lesson on the theme of sound recording and reproduction at their local cinema – but further progress was wanting on account of a lack of suitable films for the classroom. The Education Committee thus resolved to make them for themselves: as well as providing the studio for the Association, they also covered the (then) substantial overhead of film costs and in return had a controlling say in the content of films. The first production was a four-part geography film entitled “The Port of London“. The Association would remain at Castlehill until 1957, when they moved to Boswell’s Court.

On the morning of September 1st 1939, children showed to schools all over the city with their coat, a bag or case and a cardboard label – they were being evacuated. Some 200 gathered at Castlehill before heading to Waverley station and destinations unknown. The school remained open for those children that stayed behind and there were still 273 on the roll in September 1940. The logbook records the peculiarities of an education during wartime; there were separate air raid shelters for infants, girls and boys; all children had to carry their gas masks with them; there were weekly gas mask drills and weekly marching drills to and from the shelters.

Additional wartime uses were found for the partially vacant school. A central depot for clothing for evacuees was established in October 1939; donations were received and sorted before being distributed to those in need who had been evacuated and found themselves wanting during their “enforced holiday to the country“. This was organised by Miss Cairns, Superintendent of Domestic Subjects for the Corporation, and she had 50 sewing mistresses from across the city under her direction. The supply of children’s coats proved insufficient and so these “clever-fingered” women picked apart the excess of larger items, cut them down to the required sizes and put them back together again. They were joined by women of the Edinburgh Personal Service League who performed a similar operation for men’s clothing, to be sent via the Red Cross to injured servicemen and prisoners of war. Wartime cookery classes were run in the school by the Corporation’s night school teachers. These were aimed at women to try and instruct them in how to eke out their rations, substitute various items that were off ration to recreate old favourites and how to do so more healthily and with less waste of fuel. Mrs Gray of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) established a group of like-minded women to make soft toys and dolls and clothing for babies and toddlers who were being cared for in public nurseries, their mothers being on war work. Most of these things were no longer being manufactured during wartime. Such was the success of this endeavour that it later relocated to a dedicated workshop at Bristo School as the Nursery Equipment Centre.

Postwar, a shock announcement in May 1951 broke news that the school was to be closed at the end of that term. It had been built for 800 but as a result of the long term urban depopulation of the city it was down to 293 by this point; there was plenty excess capacity to rehouse them at Milton House, Tollcross and South Bridge schools for the same reason.

A secondary reason behind the closure was that the authorities wanted to establish a Central School Of Bakery and Catering where apprentice workers from the city’s important baking industry (as well as more general cookery and catering) could undertake industry-specific further education. Parents protested the decision but the Corporation was unmoved and voted by 14 to 5 for closure. Its only concession was to promise crossing guards to help children navigate the busy roads that they now needed to transit on their way to their new schools.

The bakery school opened on Monday 19th January 1954, Councillor H. A. Brechin performed the honours and stated “these new premises, together with the modern equipment, give Edinburgh one of the most up-to-date baking and catering schools in the United Kingdom“.

It did not last long however and as a result of changes to further education and the city’s industries, it was closed by 1970. While it once again sought a purpose, during the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh that year it served as a temporary museum of regimental history at Edinburgh Castle. In 1971 the main building was converted to offices for the City Engineer’s department and would later be occupied by the Drainage Department of Lothian Regional Council. Between 1972 and 1974 it was also the home for the Theatre Workshop, an arts and drama centre for children, while it was found permanent premises.

In August 1986, Lothian Region accepted an offer for £250,000 from William Muir distillers who proposed to convert the former school it into a whisky museum and heritage centre. £2 million was spent on this project which opened its doors on 3rd May 1988, the building’s centennial year. It was an instant success and is now into its 5th decade of offering a very different sort of education than that the building’s planners had in mind.

Cannonball House was retained by the Education Department when the main building became the bakery school and was used for community education, passing to Lothian Regional Council on the formation of that organisation. In 1984 a Children’s History Centre was opened and the building was later properly converted by the Region for £200,000 for use as a schools education centre modelled on Patrick Grddes’ ideas; the Castehill Urban Studies Centre. It was the first such centre in Britain and I recall school trips there in the early 1990s, the name of the guide was Mrs Quick – I’m not sure why that name stuck with me, but it did!. Between 1999 until the opening of the new Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in 2004, Cannonball House was used as a schools education centre for the temporary parliament housed in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on the Lawnmarket. In 2013, 100 years after it opened as part of the school, it found a new life as a high-end restaurant by the Scottish-Italian Contini family, who themselves had started out in Scotland a century before.

Want to read more about Edinburgh’s Lost Board Schools? The previous chapter was about Canonmills School.

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The thread about the Guse Pye; house of a poet and a painter that’s still there if you know where to look

There is a stunning watercolour landscape painting of Edinburgh in the mid-18th century, observed from the point of view of the Castle looking north to Leith by Paul Sandby (there’s a whole thread on that if you click the link). In the mid-ground of that picture is a prominent and intriguing building: a tall octagonal structure with a wing and portico to its front. This building was Ramsay Lodge or Ramsay Hut, the home of the romantic poet and stalwart figure of the Edinburgh enlightenment, Allan Ramsay.

During his 4 years in Edinburgh, the young Paul Sandby – a military draughtsman engaged in assisting William Roy with his “Great Map” of North Britain – had become well acquainted with Allan Ramsay and a welcome addition to the social circle that redeveloped around him. It is therefore not surprising that his house features so prominently in this and another landscape painting by Sandby.

Ramsay was born in Leadhills, Lanarkshire, the son of the superintendent of the lead mines that gave the settlement its name. As a boy, he was apprenticed to a wigmaker in Edinburgh and it was in this trade that he would first find success, both financial and professional. A man of broad interests and intelligence, in 1720 he entered the book selling trade from his shop on Niddrie’s Wynd and in 1722 he relocated himself and the business to the Luckenbooths – 18th century Edinburgh’s premier retail space. It was from the first floor here,in 1725, that he opened Scotland’s first circulating library. This establishment had over 30,000 titles available to borrow and it became the hangout for city’s literati.

As well as a businessman, Ramsay was something of a wit and a writer, and published his own work. His romantic poetry, exemplified by The Gentle Shepherd brought him critical acclaim and he found himself desiring a “poet’s nest” as befitting a bard of his standing. What he needed was a suburban retreat, at once in the heart of the city’s bustling Old Town but at the same time outwith its confines. He found this such a spot on the northern slopes of the Castle Hill, commanding views over the fields: past the smoky smudge on the shoreline of Leith and across the Forth and Fife beyond to the Highland mountains in the distance.

In September 1733, Ramsay acquired a portion of garden land at this location from Robert Hope, a surgeon. In Memorials of Edinburgh, a story is related that he desired “as much land as he could get” to build a “cage for his burd” (i.e. his wife, of whom he was fond) and that this was the reason for its unusual, tall, octagonal structure. From an architectural point of view, it is thought the house may be inspired either by the Tower of the Winds in Athens or the 1720 Octagon Room of Orleans House in Twickenham by Scottish architect James Gibb for James Johnston, a former Secretary of State for Scotland.

Ramsay wanted the whole town to admire his mansion but the wags of the city derided his hubris and called his octagonal house the Guse Pye, after the shape of the traditional Scottish Christmas dish. Ramsay’s pride was hurt and he complained to Patrick Murray, 5th Lord Elibank, who retorted “Indeed, Allan, when I see you in it, I think the wags are not far wrong“. The ownership of the house was transferred to his son, also Allan Ramsay, in 1741. This Allan Ramsay is as famous as his father, but as a portrait painter, and he had designs on using the building as his studio (although he would spend most of his time away from his native City).

In 1742, Ramsay the Poet retired to his Guse Pye, shutting up his house and bookshop in the Luckenbooths. He intended to spend what would be the final 12 years of his life in “ease and tranquil enjoyment” however his burd, Christian Ross, died the following year. He was not alone in life however, as his company was courted by all ranks of Edinburgh, who sought him out at the Guse Pye. It is said that he preferred instead to be surrounded by his family and their young friends, joining in their fun and games with “hearty life and good humour“. These young friends included the Paul Sandby also painted a very intimate sketch of Ramsay smoking an enormous “Churchwarden’s Pipe” in the house. Surrounded by two young women; with a book on his table; a cup by his side to drink from and a candle burning on the wall, it is a very homely scene. Ramsay was a bit of a closet Anglophile at heart, desiring to be an equal with the London literary wits, and this talented young Englishman would have been a fine addition to his circle.

When the Jacobites routed the Hanoverian Army under Sir John Cope at Prestonpans in September 1745, Ramsay the Poet – despite his known Jacobite sympathies (or perhaps because of them) – retired a safe distance to Mavisbank in Midlothian, the home of his correspondent and friend Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 2nd Baronet. The Highland army of Charles Edward Stuart soon occupied the city, without resistance, where Ramsay the Painter, happened to be present on one of his infrequent sojourns north. Word was soon sent to him from the Palace of Holyroodhouse, desiring him to come at once and paint a picture of the Prince who hoped to be his King: which he did.

During this period, the Guse Pye found itself damaged by the cannons of Edinburgh Castle and then ransacked by the garrison, who damaged many of the buildings on the Castle Hill to try and stop them being occupied by the Jacobite pickets. The latter were under direct orders from the Young Pretender to prevent – on pain of death – supplies and communications from reaching the Castle. As the last building between the city and the Castle, Ramsay’s house was directly in the firing line. By November however the Prince and his army were gone south – as had Ramsay the Painter too – but unlike the Former, the latter would make it to London.

The Ramsays continued to extend their landholding on the Castle Hill; acquiring the portion further down the slope from the house in 1748 from the Hopes and adding a new frontage, new wing and a proper entryway as befitting a house of its status. In 1754, workmen improving the garden accidentally broke through into a subterranean chamber some 14 feet square. In amongst the rubble and detritus they found a statue of white stone with a crown upon its head – supposed to be a Virgin Mary – two brass candlesticks, a dozen old Scottish and French coins and two cannon balls. It was supposed that this space dated to the middle of the 16th century when a large fortification, known as the Spur, was built out of the castle by its French garrison under the Regent Mary of Guise. Another theory was it was the remains of a supposed medieval chapel to St. Andrew which had once stood on the castle hill.

When Ramsay the Poet died in 1757, his son the Painter succeeded to it and let it out. By 1759 it was occupied by William Johnston, an advocate and a member of Ramsay’s Select Society.

In 1765, Ramsay junior was granted permission to build two town houses – known as Ramsay Street – to the east of the Guse Pye, on the site of the town’s old Bell Foundry which he had acquired from the City. It was his intention that these houses, to designs by the family friend Robert Adam, should be “in the English fashion, fit to accommodate two small families of distinction“. These houses were never built and instead in 1768 he erected a terrace of three, four-storey houses, known as Ramsay Garden. One of these houses was occupied by Ramsay’s widowed mother-in-law and his sister in law.

Ramsay the Painter spent little time in Scotland in the later years of his life and was appointed Principal Painter to His Majesty in London in 1767. But he continued to consolidate his land on the north slopes of the Castle Hill, acquiring the last portion of the Hope’s holding in 1773. He died in 1784, the lands and houses of Ramsay Garden now passing to his only surviving son, Captain (later General) John Ramsay.

John had accompanied his late father on a “Grand Tour” of Italy in 1782, and despite a career as a soldier, he found time to take up painting himself. He died without issue and as a result the house and his fortune passed to a distant relative: Lord Murray of Henderland (for whom the district of Murrayfield is named). An 1850s plan to build a large terrace infront of the Guse Pye for the statue of Allan Ramsay senior, which now resides in West Princes Street Gardens, came to nothing.

The houses of Ramsay Lodge and Ramsay Garden were let out, until the former was purchased in 1890 by the sociologist, philanthropist and pioneering town planner Patrick Geddes.

Geddes engaged the architect Stewart Henbest Capper to design a 5-storey, arts and crafts fantasia around the Guse Pye. His intention was to establish a mixed community, composed of artisans and students alongside private dwellings, to promote regeneration in the decrepit Old Town of the City. Capper’s 1892 development was extended two years later by Sydney Mitchell, who incorporated, extended and redeveloped the Guse Pye and the original Ramsay Garden into the structure as a hall for residence for students, the first of its kind in Edinburgh.

The end result – which we’ll pluralise as Ramsay Gardens – was a striking complex, high up on the Castle Hill, a curious mix of late medieval and early modern Scottish architectural style and (then) modern ideas about construction and planning and one which rendered the original house almost unrecognisable. This rambling, highly ornamented and colourful building was in radical contrast to the prevailing, conservative architecture of Edinburgh at the time:

The grey old metropolis of the North had been getting greyer year by year with freestone and slate, when suddenly on the east slope of the Castle Hill, a bright-hued pile arose, shocking the devotees of drab.

Margaret Armour, writing in “The Studio”, 1897

Geddes part-financed the project himself and when it was complete took up residence in one of its main apartments and established a co-operative publishing company from there. He also incorporated into it an art school, the Old Edinburgh School of Art, where the Celtic revival painter John Duncan led classes in design, metalwork, leatherwork, woodwork etc. in the spirit of the arts and crafts movement. It was Geddes who commissioned Duncan to design the Witches’ Well, which is installed nearby on the Castle Hill as a monument to those executed near that spot for witchcraft.

Geddes had further plans for the redevelopment, including arts studios and a sculpture gallery built into the slopes below, a gatehouse – crowned with a full-scale replica of the city’s old Netherbow Port – spanning Ramsay lane to link it into the quadrangle of the New College buildings and a new public hall next door atop the Castle Hill Reservoir. His various schemes financially overstretched him however and he was declared bankrupt, owing £60,000, in 1896, putting an end his ambitions. His friends and supporters set up a philanthropic company, the Town and Gown Association, to take over Ramsay Gardens and run it in the spirit with which he had intended it.

Ramsay Gardens was sold by the Town and Gown Association in 1945 to the Commercial Bank of Scotland, who used it as a residential building for staff and a training centre. It has subsequently passed into private hands and is a mix of exlusive residential homes, pieds-à–terre and holiday lets. The original houses of the two Allan Ramsays are still there in plain site, within this most famous of skylines, even if you’d hardly know it to look at them.

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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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.

The thread about a remarkable view of Edinburgh in 1750; what we can see of a cityscape that was about to change forever

This thread was originally written and published in October 2020. It has been lightly edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

The British Library has done great things for the accessibility of the images in their collection by putting many of them at high resolution on Flickr, with a rights-free access. One such image is an absolutely glorious 1750s watercolour painted from the Castle Hill in 1750 by Paul Sandby, showing Edinburgh on the cusp of the great transition which would drain the Nor Loch, build the New Town and North Bridge, and change the city forever. One of the main things is just how big Calton Hill appears, as it’s been built upon and what we think of now as the hill is just the top poking out. Also the Castle Esplanade has not yet been landscaped

https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/50263334808

The young Paul Sandby had a position first in the Military Drawing Department in London, and then as a draughtsman with the Board of Ordnance under Lt. Col. David Watson. At this time Watson was engaged in surveying and mapping almost the whole of the country of Scotland in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. It was Watson who headed up the military survey of Scotland and who was involved in appointing William Roy as its cartographer.

Sandby was employed to translate Roy and Watson’s surveying triangulations onto the paper as maps, and in summer he would join some of the surveying expeditions to make detailed and accurate landscape illustrations of important military features such as castles. He was not just a very good draughtsman, he turned out to be an exceptionally talented landscape artist. These watercolours show a striking accuracy and an attention to detail for the topography and lighting that make them particularly realistic. In his down time, Paul started making quick sketches and watercolours of the Scottish landscape and its people, documenting the country around him at the time.

He left military employ in 1751 to become an artist and became known for making “real views from nature in this Country“. Paul’s older brother, Thomas, was also an artist and surveyor. He was the personal draughtsman to the Duke of Cumberland (or Butcher Cumberland, depending on your point of view), and it may have been his influence that secured Paul his position and from whom Paul got his early artistic training. He also made good sketches and illustrations of Scotland, including a few of Edinburgh.

So let’s immerse ourselves on a little tour of this part of Edinburgh in 1750; I’ll try and highlight some of the interesting features in it, concentrating on the things you can no longer see. Before we get going, two of the most striking topographical features are; just how big Calton Hill appears as it’s been built upon (what we think of now as the hill is just the top poking out) and that the Castle Esplanade has not yet been levelled and landscaped, instead it was fairly rough ground, an extension of the Castle Hill and a favoured place to promenade by the city’s upper classes.

Let’s start on the left. First up we see the “North Flanker” of the Castle’s outer defences, one of a pair of arrowhead bastions defending the outer gatehouse still there (in a remodelled manner) to this day.

An earlier image, from about 60 years previous, by John Slezer – a Dutch or German surveyor who made a number of sketches and stylistic maps of the City – shows where Sandby’s vantage point was (red arrow). Also shown are the West Kirk or St. Cuthbert’s (orange arrow) and the Castle wellhouse tower remains (blue).

On the shores of the Forth we can see North Leith and Newhaven (yellow), South Leith (green), St. Mary’s Kirk (blue) and the first of the glassworks cones (red), which had relocated to this spot only 2 or 3 years previously from North Leith. Not marked to the right of the glass cone is a windmill – used for crushing lead ore (a key ingredient in making crystal glass) – and the long, low sheds of the roperies – the principal, shore-based industry of Leith at the time. Sandby made other sketches and watercolours overlooking Leith too.

Where Princes St. now runs, is a narrow, walled roadway, the Lang Dykes or Lang Gait (Scots for the long walls or long road – marked in red). In green is the little village of Picardy, established in 1730 to accommodate French weavers brought in to improve the local industry. Also, houses belonging to Sim (blue) and Hogg of Moultrieshill (yellow).

About 40 years after Sandby, the prolific watercolourist John Clerk of Eldin made a good illustration of Picardy, taken from the north slopes of the Calton Hill. We can see it is something of a model village, to its right is the house of the amusingly named Mr Spankie.

South of the Lang Gait is the area of fields and parkland (green) known as the Barefoot’s Park, and south again the blue area of the Nor’ Loch. At this point it would have been a partially drained swamp, and we can see this in the image with a lot of marshy ground breaking its surface. In orange is an area of quarrying where the Waverley “Mall” now sits. Poking out at the bottom in yellow is a collection of buildings around the old Castle wellhouse fortifications, which were used by skinners and tanners in the dirty business of processing the hides of the animals slaughtered at the eastern end of the Loch in the fleshmarkets.

In yellow is the collection of houses around Moutrie’s or Multer’s Hill (now styled Multrees), roughly where the Register House was soon to be built. In red, the tenements along Leith Wynd of the High and Low Calton. And on the hill (green) the Old Calton Burial Ground, later cut through by Waterloo Place. This cemetery was for the citizens of the Burgh of the Calton, most of whom were – for reasons of historical land ownership patterns – actually in the parish of South Leith, which was inconvenient for burial purposes.

At the head of the Nor’ Loch, below the medieval dam which held back its filthy waters, was the Physick Garden, where medicinal herbs and plants were cultivated. This institution was a direct fore-runner of the Royal Botanic Garden, it had moved here from the grounds of the Palace of Holyroodhouse in 1675 and would move again, to a location alongside Leith Walk, in 1763, before its final journey to Inverleith. By it are Trinity College Kirk (yellow) and Hospital (blue) and behind (red) is Paul’s Work, a charitable poorhouse which by this time had evolved into a “house of correction” or workhouse.

On the north slopes of the Castle Hill, is Alan Ramsay’s house and garden (no guesses where they took the name Ramsay Garden for the Victorian fantasia which now occupies this site from – Ramsay’s house was incorporated into it). Ramsay’s original house was built about 1740 and was known as the Guse Pye (Goose Pie) on account of its tall, octagonal form.

On the right in blue are the tall tenements (at least 9 or 10 storeys tall) of the Castlehill. The lower structures are clearly damaged, most likely from the brief siege of the ’45 when the Castle’s guns were turned on the Jacobites and the castle garrison sallied forth to burn the closest buildings to deny them as cover to the Jacobite pickets. Note in this image and the previous there are groups of well attired women and men promenading on the footpaths where the Esplanade would later be constructed.

Less distinct – but take my word for it they are there! – we can make out Pilrig House (red) in the lands between Edinburgh and Leith, and down by Leith Links are two big houses, probably Coatfield Mains and Hermitage House (in yellow).

Sandby’s work (like Slezer before him) is an invaluable record of what Edinburgh and Leith looked like at this time, when there are relatively few artists active in documenting what this part of the world looked like. They are an accurate reference point to compare with the maps of this time and also the plethora of Victorian engravings which frequently fill in the gaps with romantic speculation. If you’d like to see more of Sandby’s extensive back catalogue, look no further than the National Galleries of Scotland’s online collection.

n.b. this thread was originally written a full 9 days before a very similar article about the same picture coincidentally appeared in the Edinburgh Evening News. You read it on Twitter first!

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

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A fox, hare, swan, peewee and a cannonball: the thread about Edinburgh’s first piped water supply

Comiston is an old placename, stretching back to 1337 in records. It comes from Coleman’s tun in Old English; or the farm of a man called Coleman. You may know that it is the site of the Comiston Springs, the source of Edinburgh’s first public water supply, and if you are interested in such things then the National Library of Scotland Map Library is your friend as it shows them all.

There are multiple natural springs in this area and given its relative proximity (about 3 miles) and the elevation to allow water to flow under gravity, it was an obvious place for the city to look for its first reliable source of clean drinking water in the 17th century. It had the right to do so since 1621 when an Act of Parliament was passed authorising the Magistrates of the city to bring in water “from a distance” and to carry out necessary works in the land though which it passed. They eventually bought the rights to the springs and water of Comiston from Lady Comiston for £18. A Dutch or German engineer resident in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Peter Bruschi or Brusche, was contracted to bring the water into the city. The springs were captured by pipes that led to a central cistern house, marked on the map above. One source says it had been built as early as 1674 (although that was perhaps just referencing the date when Brusche was contracted. At their fullest flow the springs could provide 23 to 36 cubic feet of water per minute, dropping to 9 to 10 cubic feet in the depth of summer.

This was the source of clean drinking water that was led to the city reservoir on the Castle Hill, where it arrived in 1681, which could contain 9,070 cubic feet of water. Brusche was able to defy the doubters and make water run “uphill” to the Castle Hill as it was 44 feet lower than the Comiston cistern. His lead pipe was three inches in diameter and he was paid £2,950 to lay it. It would remain the sole source of piped water in the city until 1722, when an engineer called Desaguilon laid an additional pipe of 4.5 inches diameter. This was joined in 1787 by a 5 inch cast iron pipe.

From there it ran downhill under gravity to public wells along the High Street and Canongate where it could be collected for free.

The Comiston cistern house is still where it always ways, although suburban sprawl means it is now in the middle of a housing estate and down a lane off the appropriately named Swan Spring Avenue in south suburban Edinburgh.

So why Swan Spring? Well the four springs that led to the central cistern house in four conduits were each named for an animal; the swan, the fox, the hare and the peewee (the Scots term for a lapwing). The Fox Spring also has streets named for it. In cistern house, where the four conduits arrived, there are (or perhaps now, were) four lead statues of all the animals to denominate the pipes.

These statues (or it may be copies of them, I am not clear) are now kept in the museum of Edinburgh.

Interestingly, I have found a 1976 photo that shows the animals in different positions. Which is right? I suspect the statues may have just been taken in and posed in these images for the photographer, then returned to safe keeping.

And here they are 10 years previous to that in the Water Board offices in Cockburn Street, so it seems they’ve been in the habit of taking them out and putting them back at least twice!

I can recall learning this story as a schoolchild when once or twice you got to go to the council-owned Cannonball House on the Castlehill where the tour guide, Mrs Quick, would regale you with local history. She was obviously very good at this as it has stuck with me all these years. A formative experience clearly! Cannonball House is that old tenement at the top of the Castle Hill, which the story says is named for the cannonball lodged in its walls that this was shot out of the castle at Bonnie Prince Charlie during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Right? Well, personally I think no.

Eighteenth century cannon were not peashooters, they were high velocity weapons. A cannonball like the one in the wall would have tore straight through the building, not lodged gently in the wall protruding out slightly. Given the size, it’s likely to be a “42pdr” (i.e. a “full cannon”, firing a 42lb shot with a diameter of 6.7 inches). This would have had an initial muzzle velocity of 1,200 feet per second and a kinetic energy sufficient to turn a domestic masonry wall to dust. The source of the story is the antiquarian James Grant in his book Old & New Edinburgh. Although Grant is usually reliable, we cannot rely 100% on what he collected in his books as being just local fable or hearsay – writing in 1947, local historian George Scott-Moncrieff says it is “not very convincingly reputed“.

So, if it’s not a relic of the ’45 what is it? Well there’s two theories. The obvious one is that it was just a convenient piece of material to fill a hole in the wall, but at 42lbs it’s a very heavy piece to lift all that way up. The nicer theory is that it’s a levelling marker for the gravitation feed from Comiston Springs – although it isn’t quite high enough for that as the Castle Hill reservoir is 44 feet below the Comiston cistern house.

I have a third, purely conjectural, explanation of my own. The first mentions of it being called Cannonball House in the local newspapers are only in 1909 when it came up for sale, the name was given in quotation marks so if not official, certainly had local recognition. It was purchased by the Edinburgh School Board to serve as a teaching annexe for the overcrowded Castlehill Public School next door (now the Scotch Whisky Heritage Centre). They even stuck this name on the facade in stone to commemorate the completion in 1913! So perhaps the story of it being hit by a cannonball in the ’45 is true. We do know that there was intermittent and at some times quite intense exchanges of gunfire between the Castle garrison and the Jacobites. Perhaps some humorous builders found a suitable round stone (it may even have been a cannonball) in the demolition rubble during the alterations and decided to include it as they rebuilt the western gable, to fit the name of the building? Certainly during the works some significant alterations were made to both the inside and outside of the building, and antiquarian additions were made to the façade from bits and pieces recovered from other parts of the building. Ultimately, who knows…

There’s a nice BBC article on the subject of these springs but it does overlook that the engineering was German.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

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.