#granton — Public Fediverse posts

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

https://edinburghinformatics.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9LhzQI2slXFtYEK

MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

Please help by completing at the link above!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

https://edinburghinformatics.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9LhzQI2slXFtYEK

MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

Please help by completing at the link above!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

https://edinburghinformatics.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9LhzQI2slXFtYEK

MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

Please help by completing at the link above!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

https://edinburghinformatics.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9LhzQI2slXFtYEK

MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

Please help by completing at the link above!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

https://edinburghinformatics.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9LhzQI2slXFtYEK

MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

Please help by completing at the link above!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

What all the coverage of the proposals to route the #trams from #Granton back towards #Haymarket down the #RoseburnPath are failing to mention is why there is a wide, and fairly level path going between Granton and Haymarket in the first place.

It all becomes pretty obvious when you look at a map of the old Granton branch of the #CaledonianRailway that closed in stages up to 1986… https://www.railscot.co.uk/companies/G/Granton_Branch_Caledonian_Railway/

https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/the-new-edinburgh-tram-route-28539271

What all the coverage of the proposals to route the #trams from #Granton back towards #Haymarket down the #RoseburnPath are failing to mention is why there is a wide, and fairly level path going between Granton and Haymarket in the first place.

It all becomes pretty obvious when you look at a map of the old Granton branch of the #CaledonianRailway that closed in stages up to 1986… https://www.railscot.co.uk/companies/G/Granton_Branch_Caledonian_Railway/

https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/the-new-edinburgh-tram-route-28539271

What all the coverage of the proposals to route the #trams from #Granton back towards #Haymarket down the #RoseburnPath are failing to mention is why there is a wide, and fairly level path going between Granton and Haymarket in the first place.

It all becomes pretty obvious when you look at a map of the old Granton branch of the #CaledonianRailway that closed in stages up to 1986… https://www.railscot.co.uk/companies/G/Granton_Branch_Caledonian_Railway/

https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/the-new-edinburgh-tram-route-28539271

Forgotten Fatalities: the thread about the Granton railway disaster of 1860

Recent threads about the Scotland Street Tunnel and the Granton Breakwater inevitably involved me touching on the history of the railway that ran between these two places and brought to my attention a striking image of a forlorn-looking steam engine lying on its side on the Wardie foreshore. How this locomotive came to be here isn’t “in the books“, so of course I had to find out more.

The answer to this anomaly was that it was the result of an accident which took place on the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway‘s (EP&D) short section of track on the southern side of the Firth of Forth between Trinity Station and Granton Harbour. This event on the evening of Sunday 8th August 1860 would claim the lives of four people, injure six more and cruelly impact upon one family in particular.

The EP&D ran from its start at Canal Street Station (beneath and at right angles to what we now call Edinburgh Waverley), by gravity down the steep incline of the Scotland Street tunnel to a station of that name at its foot. Here, steam engines were attached to trains to haul them the few miles to Granton, via Trinity, or North Leith, via Bonnington. At Granton passengers could continue their journey onward across the Firth of Forth to Burntisland, by connecting paddle steamer. North of the Forth the railway carried on north to Perth and to Dundee (via a further steamer from the harbour at Tayport), explaining the full name of the company.

On Sundays there were usually there were only two passenger trains a day each way to Granton. On the day of the accident the 4:30PM from Edinburgh ran the three mile trip hauled by engine No. 32. At the terminus the driver detached his engine and shunted the carriages back into the platform to where it would later form the 8:10PM return journey. This pattern only took place on the Sabbath; Monday to Saturday there were sixteen trains each way and a much quicker turnaround was required, undertaken in a rather frightening manner known as “fly shunting” whereby the carriages were “slipped” (detached) while the train was in motion and a well-timed throw of the points directed the engine one way and the freely coasting train the other into the platform. The guard at the rear in the brakevan was responsible for bringing the train to a controlled halt by which time the engine was already in the process of re-positioning itself so it could re-attach at the front of the train and haul it back the way it had come.

There was nowhere at Granton for engines to wait for any period of time and so on No. 32 now returned the way it had come to while away the next few hours in the engine shed at Scotland Street. As it departed it began to pick up speed and ascend the gradient up to the embankment along the foreshore and parallel to Lower Granton Road. It crossed the bridge over the footpath access to Wardie Bay and passed over first one and then a second set of points as it rounded a gentle bend in the route. This is where disaster struck: as it approached a second, smaller, bridge (which carried it over the Wardie Burn, marked nowadays by a break in the seawall) the left-hand leading wheel of the engine jumped the rails and the locomotive derailed.

It continued to plough along the trackbed, derailed, for some 30 yards, ripping up tracks and sleepers and partially demolished the bridge. In doing so it was eventually tipped over the side when it hit the stone parapet. It fell a height of 9 feet down the embankment and then slithered 20 yards down the foreshore, coming to rest on its right hand side (not the left, as shown in the engraving, which may have either been reversed or show it during recovery).

There were six people on the footplate when the crash happened of whom four were killed instantly; driver David Mathieson, his 9 year old son William Mackenzie Mathieson (out for an exciting Sunday trip), his brother-in-law and neighbour John Mackenzie and Andrew Morgan, a railway signalman hitching a lift back to Scotland Street. The fireman, James Bowling, had a lucky but painful escape, jumping from the tender as it left the tracks. He broke an arm and dislocated a shoulder amongst other injuries, but lived to tell the tale. A railway porter who was also cadging a lift, George Dall, found himself swimming in the waters of Wardie Bay from where he was pulled, miraculously unhurt.

Blacksmith Thomas Gillies, his wife and two children had been sitting on the sea wall below the embankment, enjoying their day of rest, when the engine came crashing down from above, passing inches away from where they sat. All were badly scalded by escaping steam but survived. A horse cab was summoned to take the injured away to the Royal Infirmary. Sheriff Gordon, Procurator Fiscal Paterson and Chief Constable List were on the spot within the hour. They appointed engineers Mr Hawkins and Mr Jardine to investigate, while the officials of the railway company appointed their own civil engineer, Mr Lorimer, to also make enquiries. The Board of Trade appointed Captain (R.E.) Henry Whatley Tyler, to write a formal report.

None of the investigating engineers found any fault in the permanent way, engine No. 32 or with the manner in which it was driven by Mathieson. Tyler noted that although there were minor defects along the way none “ would have caused a steady engine thus to leave the line“. The type of engine – built locally in Leith by R. & W. Hawthorn – had been used without problem for 15 years and the only derailment it had suffered had been caused by a fractured rail. He did however note that the engine was particularly light at 11½ tons, that it had poor weight distribution and that there was a very short wheelbase of just 6 feet. This made it liable to oscillate at higher speeds and Tyler’s educated guess was that the engine had been travelling fast enough (“but not imprudently so“) to set up such an oscillating motion. Without the weight of a following train to restrain such gymnastics it was able to jump enough to leave the rails at a position where the gauge between the tracks was slightly too wide.

Margaret Stewart Mackenzie, the driver’s wife, lost not only her husband but also her brother and eldest son that day. She was left a widow with three children to support; a 7 year old girl and boys aged 3 and 1 years. She was also four months pregnant and would give birth to a daughter, Sarah Clapperton Mathieson, that December. The members of the Mathieson and Mackenzie family – who all lived next door to each other on Duncan (now Dundonald) Street – were also interred alongside eachother at the Old Calton Burying Ground.

Given the loss of her husband and brother the Mathieson widow and children found themselves without any financial support and a public subscription was set up under the coordination of the Lothian Road United Presbyterian Church for their benefit. In September the Scotsman reported that “a woman who assumes different names and represents herself to the the wife of an elder of Lothian Road U.P. Church” was wanted by the police for fraudulently soliciting for donations to the fund. The 1881 census shows that Margaret Mathieson stayed on at 10 Duncan Street and was living there with her 80 year old mother (Margaret Mackenzie), two sons (David, 24, a clerk and John ,21, a piano tuner) and her daughter (Sarah, 20, a dressmaker). She was working as a laundress. Sarah Clapperton Mathieson married 4 years later to Robert Fotheringham and they moved nearby to Airlie Place and then Deanpark Street, with at least 6 children born. Margaret would join them next door at Airlie Place, where she died in 1911 aged 81, after 51 years a widow.

Marion Mathieson was about 64 years old when her son David died and lost her son and a grandson that day. The Caledonian Mercury reported the agonising news that this was her fourth son to die; one was knocked down in the street near the family home, another fell from Salisbury Crags and a third had drowned off Aberdeen where he was serving an apprenticeship. She was by this time a widow, living in a cottage in the village of Corstorphine where she would die in 1871.

Of the other victim, Signalman Morgan, he was buried at Warriston Cemetery. A correspondent called Fair Play wrote to the Scotsman soon after to ask for subscriptions for the case of “Mrs Morgan, a highly respectable widow“, the mother of the deceased signalman. He had been “her only hope of subsistence since he was 12 years of age” and that the “good feeling of the public” had overlooked her plight.

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.

The Great Storm of 1901: the thread about the tragic loss of the cutter “Active”

On the 12th November 1901 a terrible storm formed over the North Sea and battered the East Coast of Scotland. The Firth of Forth felt its full fury and by the following morning twenty men would lie dead in the cold waters of Wardie Bay, when the Royal Navy cutter Active was driven ashore and wrecked against the Granton Breakwater.

The Active was a 135 ton sailing yawl, built in Kent in 1867. For 20 years she had been stationed in the Forth as tender to the navy’s guardship at South Queensferry, the old battleship HMS Anson. She had recently returned south from secondment to the Revenue Service as a fisheries cutter off of the Shetland Islands. Her captain was Lt. Charles Culley RN, a pious and temperate man who was a “good husband, a good father and a real Christian” in the words of his widow. Culley had started out life as a pit boy in Somerset but had turned to Methodism and joined the Navy. He was therefore somewhat unusual in being a Bluejacket, having come up through the ranks and had recently learned that he was being advanced in the service and would be receiving command of a steam gunboat.

During the day on November 12th the temperature plunged and the wind got increasingly strong. Soon it brought heavy squalls of rain and sleet. The waves ran high along the Forth and were “breaking with great violence against the piers and embankments, doing considerable damage“. At the end of the eastern breakwater at Granton the green marker lighthouse and a gangway were carried away. On the quayside, part of the roof of the North British Railway station was blown off. At Trinity Crescent the sea wall was breached and the road was left impassable. On account of the intensity of the storm in the North Sea the east coast fishing fleet returned home early, boats from as far as Dundee and Aberdeen running for the safety of Granton. The Burntisland ferry was stopped, with the William Muir being kept tied up alongside at Granton. At North Queensferry the Norwegian steamer Dronning Gyda of Kristiansund was driven ashore and the Swedish schooner Tura was wrecked on the island of Inchgarvie, her crew of 7 managing to scramble ashore and seek shelter. Many vessels came into Leith Roads to seek shelter; those that could sought refuge in the harbours; those left out in the Forth were seen to be straining at their anchors. Similar stories were repeated all along the east coast of Scotland and England.

The gale swept across the city early in the afternoon and many a chimney pot came crashing down. A cartload of hay was blown over and several shop windows were blown in. Trees were brought down in the Botanics, at St. Bernard’s Crescent and on Moray Place. At the Usher’s bonded warehouse at St. Leonards the lamplighter, Donald Cormack, lost his life when an external wooden staircase he was climbing collapsed in the wind. At 74 Causewayside, twelve year old Annie Hanlan was killed as she lay in bed when the chimney breast of the tenement collapsed through the roof. A heroic effort on the part of the Sciennes firemen under the command of Lt. Grinton saw her 14 year old sister Mary, who had been sharing the same bed, rescued and taken to the Infirmary suffering from serious injuries. Two others were injured and the tenement was condemned, rendering 12 families homeless.

The maximum average wind speed during the storm would be recorded at 67mph. Beyond the city boundaries nearly all telegraph and telephone cables came down. There was no communication north, only three wires to Glasgow left intact and a single each to Newcastle and Leeds for all southwards communications. A huge backlog of messages piled up in the telegraph offices, unsent. Within the city, the telephone network was “very much out of order“, hampering the emergency response. Out in the Forth, Lt. Culley and the Active had been sent from their mooring at South Queenferry to seek shelter in Leith Roads in the time honoured way, in the lee of the island of Inchkeith. Culley had three anchors put down to secure his charge and during the day it was seen by observers on the shore to be riding out the storm as comfortably as could be expected.

Around 3 O’clock in the morning the Active was seen to be dragging her anchors. Her tiller was smashed, and orders were given to bring the spare up from below decks. Her foresail was raised to try and sail out of trouble, but it jammed and had to be hauled back down. Attempts by a Granton-based tug to reach her were futile and what few onlookers were present watched helplessly as she was soon being driven uncontrollably towards the shore. Culley let off his distress rockets to try and summon assistance and mustered the remaining men from their sleep on deck. However, before any attempt to save lives could be made, the little ship was dashed against the breakwater and “smashed to match-wood“. Observers saw her two blue marker lights disappear from view at about 4:15AM. In the last moments before disaster, Culley had ordered his men to climb the rigging in the hope of safety but of the twenty-five souls on board, only three were spared. Such had been the haste of her demise that only three men had managed to put on their cork life jackets and Ordinary Seamen W. Travis, G. Dady (or Peady) and G. Pearce would be the only men who made it off. Two of them were washed completely over the breakwater and into the harbour, being picked up by the steamer Bele who had heard their cries.

The third, dressed only in his string vest and life jacket, managed to cling to the breakwater and “through dogged persistence” crawled along it to safety. The other two survivors of the ship’s complement were Quartermaster Walsenham (or Wakenham) and the Second Mate, Boatswain John Donovan, both of whom had been allowed shore leave in Leith the day before and had been unable to rejoin ship on account of the weather.

With the telephone and telegraph systems being out of order, news had to be carried on foot to the police office at Gayfield Square from where 10 constables and two doctors were dispatched under the command of Superintendent Lamb , Inspector Cruickshanks and Sergeant Ford. By 11AM, only three bodies had been recovered, the vessel having been driven ashore on an ebb tide, which meant that most of the victims’ bodies were carried away from the shore and out into the Forth. The local fishermen, intimately in tune with the currents and habits of the Firth, pronounced that bodies would be carried to the vicinity of Elie.

All morning on the 13th, dense crowds lined the Wardie foreshore to gaze on at the macabre spectacle of wreckage and flotsam being tossed around in the bay and of policemen combing the shore with boathooks looking for survivors (or, more realistically, bodies). Rifles, cutlasses and uniforms were brought up on the slipway at Granton and large quantities of Rum had to be secured by the Customs men before they found their way into jacket pockets. Sergeant Bain of the Police was able to pull ashore the ship’s colours from the breakwater at considerable risk to his life.

On Thursday 14th, the newspapers reported that the foreshore along the coast was being searched for bodies and that divers had arrived to scour the seabed around the wreckage. The gunboats HMS Redwing and Cockchafer arrived to trawl up and down the Forth. In the aftermath, observers with the benefit of hindsight said that the Active had been anchored too close to the shore and not far enough north to be safely sheltered in the lee of Inchkeith. Some were of the opinion that she should have been brought into the safety of the harbour, however it was noted in the papers that this would have been against Culley’s instructions. Others still wrote to the Scotsman bemoaning the lack of a coastguard watch or lifeboat at Granton, Leith or Newhaven.

The first funerals took place on Saturday 16th, with a cortège leaving the City Mortuary on Infirmary Street with full naval honours on its way to the Admiralty’s plot at Seafield cemetery. The procession was led by the officers and men of HMS Anson and the band of the shore base HMS Caledonia. Thousands turned out to line the streets and pay their respects to seamen John (or Herbert) Walker, R. Pearson and E. Farrow, Carpenter’s Mate H. Williams and Ship’s Boy J. Mulvaney. The same day, a requiem mass was held for James Donovan at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea R.C. Church in Leith. All six were interred side-by-side at Seafield, the men from the Anson firing a salute over the graves. That same day, a remarkable event occurred; a glass bottle was recovered on the shore at Granton, containing a message: “H.M.C. Active, Sinking Fast. From Captain Culley. Good-bye.” Mrs Culley identified the handwriting as that of her late husband.

On Tuesday 26th of November, a further body was recovered from the mud in Granton harbour, Ordinary Seaman James Lyall could only be identified from his names stitched inside his clothing. On the 29th, tugs brought the remains of the Active to a position in Wardie Bay where they could be hauled ashore and broken up. The following day, a benevolent fund was opened for the families of the deceased by Captain William Fisher CB of the Anson and his officers, with the Lifeboat Institution making an opening contribution of £2,000. Lieutenant Culley alone left behind 6 children, the eldest being 17.

Bodies were slowly recovered in November and by the 20th, seventeen had been recovered. On 27th November, Ordinary Seaman James Lyall was buried at Seafield. A court martial into the disaster was held in distant Chatham on 3rd December. Four of the five survivors (George Pearce was still in hospital recovering) appeared, but were not charged or asked to plead. Captain Fisher of the Anson gave witness, confirming that he had ordered Culley not to risk his ship on any account, and to anchor her in Leith Roads. He did however say that Culley had not done so in the exact position he had been shown on the chart. The survivors stated that the loss of the tiller and jamming of the sails had prevented them for seeking safety, and that the Granton tugs had not approached close enough to offer assistance. The court exonerated the survivors from all blame, but noted – with the benefit of hindsight – that Culley should have “shown better judgement had he either weighed or slipped anchors and run for safety” but that when the disaster was inevitable “he appeared to have maintained discipline and done all possible to save life.” Culley’s body was not recovered until late in January 1902, and he was buried with full naval honours near his men in Seafield Cemetery.

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.

“As unthinkable as to bulldoze Arthur’s Seat”: the thread about the 1980s scheme to infill Wardie Bay

I like to be asked questions about some matter of local history or knowledge, because they usually create a “happy accident” whereby I go down a particular rabbit hole and end up finding a tangent to follow about something I never knew about. Today was one such case, I found something I could hardly believe: a 1987 scheme by Forth Ports to fill in Wardie Bay! In case you didn’t know, Wardie Bay is that pleasant little haven of sand, sea, seals and (sometimes) sun, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years as a sport for swimming and other water sports. I wrote about the origins of the bay and its name on this thread.

Forth Ports, the harbour authority for Leith and Granton, created a subsidiary company – Edinburgh Maritime Ltd. – with Glasgow developers GA Group, to front this outrageous, £400m scheme. The overall architects were Hind Woodhouse, with individual large buildings by RMJM and Cochrane McGregor. It was all backed by the Scottish Development Agency.

Their plan would include the infill of most of Granton Harbour, the Victoria Dock and much of Western Harbour at Leith, and everything inbetween – i.e. Wardie Bay. This was to “reclaim” 500 acres of land from the Firth of Forth, and would have obliterated the coastline from Seafield to Granton. 8,000 jobs were promised (from where, it was not said), with 1,895 houses, offices, a cinema, an industrial zone, new supermarkets and cultural attractions such as a Granton marina village planned. It was said without a certain amount of chutzpah that the site would rival San Francisco’s or Sydney’s waterfront and be 5x the size of the Glasgow Garden Festival.

The scheme was met with much scepticism, and local outrage. The Wardie Bay Action Group, chaired by John Horsburgh QC, was set up to resist the scheme.

Wardie Bay is a recreational asset equivalent in value to Holyrood Park. In both cases their accessibility is th emajor factor in their value to the citizens. To infill Wardie Bay is as unthinkable as to bulldoze Arthur’s Seat.

The above quotation comes from a £3,000 counter-report they produced in 1988, for which the below artists impression was also commissioned. This shows an 80 acre “loch” between the sea wall and the new development, and which would have retained the harbour of Newhaven, accessible to the loch. It is not clear if the loch was connected to the sea or not.

In August 1988, Edinburgh Maritime tried to sweeten the deal with plans for an Opera House, but it farcically collapsed when the Trust for an International Opera Theatre for Scotland made their public announcement too early, resulting in back-pedalling counterstatements being issued by Edinburgh Maritime Ltd.

By 1989 however, Lothian Regional Council had made it be known that they would refuse the plans on the basis of the strong local opposition, so they were hastily redrawn to exclude Wardie Bay. But they still included Granton Harbour and parts of Western Harbour. It was this scheme that was approved in May 1990 and that led to the Ocean Terminal development (which for years has sat half empty, and is about to be partially demolished), to the Scottish Office at Victoria Quay and to the infilling of the western portion of Granton Harbour, of Leith’s Western Harbour. The planned boom in housing on these latter two sites has only materialised in fits and starts, and their painfully slow housing projects are still incomplete 30 years later. Multiple “marina village” ideas have come and gone for Granton, and there has never been a flourishing of industry on the western side.

We have a lot to thank the Wardie Bay Action Group for in their successful counter-campaign. Planned in a fit of late-1980s capitalist optimism, multiple economic downturns since the 1990s would probably have created nothing more than a vast foreshore wasteland had it gone ahead, with none of the projected “benefits” being realised.

It was, however, never quite clear just where the money was going to come from to develop the scheme as originally planned. Environmental destruction aside, it was a project for which there was no real need. There were vast swathes of brownfield land around Granton and Leith that wouldn’t require expensive reclamation, and more pressing investment needed in the existing housing schemes in this area. The privatisation of Forth Ports in 1992 saw the authority turn its attention to instead acquiring the competition and focussing on land-banking its existing reclamation.

This was not the first such proposed act of mass environmental vandalism proposed for the Forth. Some 60 years previously, a scheme was put forward to construct a vast tidal barrier across the estuary just upstream of North and South Queensferry. Fortunately this came to nothing, but you can read about it over on its own thread.

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.

Which is it? The thread about the name of Wardie Bay; or the thread about the name of Granton Beach?

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

Wardie Bay; an increasingly popular little spot of accessible coastline in the north of Edinburgh, where you can dip your toes – or your whole body – in the “bracing” waters of the Forth, and watch the seals and seabirds. Or is it Granton Beach? Let’s see if we can’t find out.

First we must get something straight, whatever this bay and beach is called, it is not a natural bay, it is man made. The sandy beach itself extends all of 150m eastwards from the Granton Eastern Breakwater (construction of which was not completed until about 1860) and the wider bay itself is bookended to the east by the Western Breakwater of Leith Docks, some 1,350m distant (constructed between 1938 and 1942).

Surveying undertaken by the eminent engineers Robert and Alan (his son) Stevenson in the 1830s when planning Granton Harbour shows that at this time, there was no sandy beach at Wardie, it was only rock and gravel (there was, however, sand to the west of where the pier is marked below).

Once we accept this, it means we don’t need to look for a name for this bay that is older than that, because it didn’t exist, it was just the shoreline of the Firth of Forth.

Our two competing names for the bay come from the estates and big houses of Granton and Wardie.

• Granton as a placename goes back to 1478 and a “castle” or tower house existed here. The estate was later split into two farmsteads (Easter Granton (or Royston) and Wester Granton). Under the ownership of Andrew Logan, the castle was replaced by a mansion house, which was called Royston House. This was rebuilt at the end of the 17th centurty by George Mackenzie and in 1739 was purchased by John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, who renamed it Carolina Park after his daughter and had it extended by William Adam. At the end of the 18th century the house was inherited by the Duke of Buccleuch.
• Wardie as a placename is first recorded over 100 years earlier than Granton, in 1336, with various spellings over time such as Warda and Weirdie. The flat plane of land in this area above the shoreline of the Forth back to the Water of Leith was known as Wardie Muir (moor). A castle of this name was built in the 15th or 16th century, which over time evolved into Wardie House. At the end of the 18th century, Wardie House was in the possession of Alexander Boswell (or Boswall) of Blackadder, in Berwickshire. When he died in 1812, he left Wardie to a distant relative, Captain John Donaldson, RN, whose inheritance required he take up the Boswall name.

Granton and Wardie also gave (and still give) their name to the two most prominent intertidal rocks on their respective foreshores, Granton Bush and Wardie Bush.

The boundary between the estates of Granton and Wardie was the rivulet of the Wardie Burn; west of the burn lies Granton, east of it lies Wardie. This also formed the old parish boundary between St. Cuthberts and Cramond. To the east of Wardie, on a boundary defined by what is now Netherby Road, lay the ancient lands of Trinity – part of North Leith parish and so-called because they belonged to Trinity House in Leith. The land ownership plan below was drawn up by Robert Stevenson on behalf of the Duke of Buccleuch in 1836 as part of the harbour scheme, which included a significant new access road to and from Edinburgh (marked red below) that spanned the Wardie Burn and crossed the land of Captain Boswall of Wardie. Interestingly, Stevenson’s first plans for Granton had a much grander pier, wet docks and this roadway was proposed as a railway.

The below map overlays the boundaries of the old Granton, Wardie and Barnton estates on a modern aerial photo. We can see that the boundary between Granton and Wardie, the old line of the Wardie Burn, is approximately in the middle of the current beach, with probably the lion’s share in Granton.

From an administrative point of view, when the Great Reform Act passed in 1832, it defined new parliamentary constituencies. One was created for the Burgh of Leith, which cut through the middle of the Wardie estate, in a straight line between where the Wardie Burn entered the sea and Ferry Road, 400 yards west of Golden Acre. To the west of this, Granton was in Edinburghshire, and to the south of this was the constituency the Burgh of Edinburgh.

The following year, Leith was made a municipal Burgh, and the boundary was pushed 100 feet further west from Granton Road than the parliamentary boundary. Although it still ran through the middle of the old Wardie estate (which was progressively being parcelled up and built on), this now meant that almost the entirety of the foreshore at what would later become Wardie Bay beach was then in Leith’s jurisdiction.

The Edinburgh Municipal Act of 1900 incorporated Granton into Edinburgh (into the No. 8 St. Bernard’s Ward), with the boundary remaining 100 feet west of Granton Road. When the Edinburgh Extension Act of 1920 passed and Edinburgh consumed Leith, the ward boundaries remained the same in Leith, and the old No. 5 North Leith Ward became Edinburgh’s new No. 19 West Leith Ward. Wardie Bay may now have formally been within Edinburgh, but it was still in a Leith ward (as it remained until incorporated into a new shoreline ward called Forth in 2007 when the city moved to a smaller number of larger, multi-member wards).

In news print, Granton Beach appears over a decade before Wardie Bay, but it’s not easy to tell what part of the foreshore this was referring to. Granton Bay never has been used, and Wardie Beach is used earlier on (1837) but only as a one off, and not in a local publication. Wardie Bay is cetainly the name used by the author Joyce Wallace, who wrote a number of excellent books on Edinburgh and Leith local history in the 1990s, including Traditions of Leith and Trinity and Further Traditions of Leith and Trinity.

In 1901 there was a great tragedy at Wardie Bay when the Revenue Cutter Active was driven against the Granton Breakwater in a storm with the loss of 20 of the 23 souls on board. This was widely reported in newspapers across Scotland and the UK, and Wardie Bay was the name used.

In 1987, there was a scheme put forward by Forth Ports, the harbour and navigation authority for the Firth of Forth, to infill the shoreline between the Granton and Leith harbour breakwaters, and the name Wardie Bay was used. You can read more about this ridiculous proposal over on its own thread.

This has all been a very long-winded way to say that I think, on the balance of probabilites, if I was asked to adjudicate on whether it is Wardie Bay or Granton Beach, I would say it is Wardie Bay.

• It is an accepted term in print by local authors, and the most commonly used term in local newspapers
• The most prominent intertidal feature on the beach is Wardie Bush – Granton Bush is a mile to the west
• While the older estate boundaries put much of what is now the beach on the Granton side, the beach and bay have only come into existence as we known them since 1860, by which time the estates were being broken up by feuing, and a new municipal boundary had been set which put almost all of the beach east of the breakwater on the Wardie side.

However, there is really no right or wrong answer here. No authority has ever decreed an official name. The bay itself is a local feature, it’s not defined or recognised on Ordnance Survey maps or marine charts. So you go ahead and call it what you think is best, and don’t let anyone (especially me) tell you otherwise.

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.

Blitz! The thread about WW2 air raids in Edinburgh and Leith

An air raid on Leith on the night of Monday April 7th 1941 saw extensive property damage caused in North Leith. But it wasn’t just bricks and mortar that suffered: three people were killed and 118 injured in the raid which makes it the 10th most deadly such event (by total casualties) in Scotland during the war.

Note, there was deliberately limited and non-specific press reporting of the details and casualties of air raids during the war itself. Some such reporting only took place, retrospectively, after the war but understandably details were occasionally incorrect or overlooked. For accuracy and out of respect I have endeavoured to cross-reference everything below that refers to individuals with the official civilian war death records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Scotland’s People.

One of those who lost their lives in the raid that night was 17 year old Anstruther (Ernie) Smith, a delivery boy from 15 Graham Street who also worked as a messenger for the Leith ARP (Air Raid Precautions – civil defence). On hearing the sirens he had assisted his elderly neighbours to a shelter before reporting for duty at Leith’s Town hall a few streets away where Ferry Road meets Great Junction and North Junction Streets. It was here that he lost his life when a bomb landed nearby and exploded. He was fondly remembered in his community as someone who freely helped the elderly; checking in on them on his way to work each morning to light their fires and make them a cup of tea, and running errands for them. The Anstruther Pensioner’s Club was formed after the war in his memory, it was held in the very room in the Town Hall where we died and it attracted 300 members and a waiting list of 200.

Also killed by the same bomb that claimed Ernie was 85 year-old Jane Notman Young, who died in her house by the Town Hall at 21 North Junction Street. Lastly a 19 year-old apprentice draughtsman and Home Guard volunteer, Kenneth James Anderson, died in hospital the following morning after his house at 5 Largo Place was badly damaged in the blast. This block would later have to be demolished.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/15989027951/

Mercifully the death-to-injury ratio was substantially lower than other comparable attacks on Scottish cities; Leith had been hit by two bombs known as Luftmines – large weapons that were dropped on a parachute and intended for use against dock areas to attack shipping. These as it turned out were not very effective against other targets such as buildings, despite their size. Never the less, three hundred people in North Leith were rendered homeless due to the damage caused to housing in the neighbourhood. £1,500 was allocated to Leith from the National Air Raid Distress Fund, which provided emergency clothing, bedding and canteens to raid victims.

The bombs that hit Leith damaged the three principal public buildings of the burgh; its Town Hall (which included its main public auditorium), its Library – both of which were hardly 10 years old – and the large David Kilpatrick (“DK“) School adjacent. As well as the tenement houses, the Norwegian Seaman’s Lutheran Church, North Leith Parish Church and a railway embankment and signal box of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) all suffered varying degrees of damage. The gallery below shows some of these:

The main lending room of the library was not fully repaired until 1956 although the reference room had been re-purposed to serve as such in the meantime. The Town Hall and its auditorium had to wait until 1961, a full 20 years after the bombs had fallen. The city’s apparent neglect in restoring the public buildings of Leith after the war caused much local consternation at the time. This damaged caused to the outbuildings of the DK school, which were in use as a nursery school, became known locally as the Bombies and was apparently where pupils would gather to sort out their differences with fists. It would not be replaced until much later and this in turn was demolished, along with the rest of the school, in the 1980s.

Although Leith was marked as a bombing target on German maps, the intended target of this raid had actually been Clydebank almost 50 miles to the west, where 20 souls lost their lives and 313 were injured that same night. This attack was a follow up to the Clydebank Blitz of March 1941 but the raiders had become scattered and twelve other targets across Scotland, including Leith, were hit that night with a total of 49 killed and 456 injured. Most of the deaths night were in Gretna in Dumfriesshire where a lone aircraft jettisoned its bombs and hit a Masonic Lodge, killing 22 and wounding 18. Other bombs were dropped as widely as Bankfoot and Stanley in Perthshire, Loch Nevis in Knoydart, Fife and Arbroath in the east of the country and Greenlaw to the south in the Borders; a huge margin of error. Closer to Leith were the mainline railway leading to the Forth Bridge near Turnhouse and Braehead House in Cramond with thirty four incendiary bombs between these points. These were 1kg aluminium tubes filled with a compound called Thermite which burned at around 2,500°C and were intended to set fire to wooden structures and the timber flooring and roof structures of buildings. These were a far cry from the ineffective rope and tar incendiaries dropped on Edinburgh and Leith by a German Zepellin in 1916.

Although this raid caused the greatest damage to property in Leith during the war, it was not the worst in terms of the loss of life. The previous summer, on the evening of July 18th 1940 at 7:45PM, seven people were killed on George Street in North Leith (now known as North Fort Street). At 8 George Street David Lennie Duff (a 33 year-old basket maker) and his sister Lily Duff (a 23 year-old biscuit packer); Catherine Helliwell (a 61 year-old housewife) and her son-in-law Robert Thomson (a 25 year-old baker); Catherine Fallon Baird (74); and Catherine Redpath (41) who had been visiting the address from her home at 20 Gorgie Road were killed. Over the street at number 13, 15 year-old Jane (Jean) Bauld Rutherford from number 17 was killed when the bomb shelter she was in was hit. The fatal damage had been caused by bombs intended for the Victoria Dock, one of which hit the foot of Portland Place where a nearby tramcar was fortunate to miss getting a direct hit that would surely have resulted in more fatalities.

Number 8 George Street, where six people had lost their lives, had to be demolished along with its neighbour at number 10 and was not rebuilt until 1959. The rest of the tenements of George Street – apart from the northern corner blocks – were later levelled by the city planners as part of the Fort Area Comprehensive Redevelopment not long afterwards.

Four days later, on July 22nd, a raid on Leith Docks killed Robert Hume of 45 Glover Street (aged 33), a fireman with the Auxiliary Fire Service at the Albert Dock. Also on this night Mary Fulton Riach (aged 65) of 23 Woodbine Terrace and Catherine Leishman (aged 68) of 4 Meadowbank Crescent both died from heart failure during the raid, the official cause of death being put down to “war operations“. Two months later, on September 29th, a single stray bomb fell on the block of number 21 – 27 Crewe Place in East Pilton killing the young McArthur children; brother and sister Morag Elizabeth (aged 5) and Ronald Egbert (aged 7) from number 27. Their neighbour Charles Fortune Wilson (aged 69) of number 25 would die the next day in hospital. The landlords and builders of this housing scheme, Mactaggart and Mickel, rehoused the now-homeless survivors and had rebuilt the house at their own expense within 6 weeks. A wartime shortage of timber meant it was given a flat roof, the only such house on the street and the only clue to its sad history.

Another single, stray bomb dropped that evening hit a bonded whisky warehouse of the Caledonian Distillery on Duff Street in Dalry. The distillery was home to over a million gallons of highly-flammable spirit and an immense fire erupted, so ferocious that the reflection on the clouds in the night sky was apparently visible to German aircrew flying over Middlesborough, 150 miles (240km) away to the south. The bond was totally destroyed, as was one adjoining tenement of fourteen flats at 28 Springwell Place.

A week later around 745PM on October 7th, five small bombs were dropped in the district of Marchmont, landing at 29 Roseneath Terrace, 20 Meadow Place, 16 Roseneath Place, 13 Marchmont Crescent and 21 Marchmont Road. Eleven people were injured by flying glass and splinters. Three weeks later on the morning of October 26th, Margaret Ridley Stuart (aged 72) died at her flat at 45 Tolbooth Wynd in Leith from a heart attack brought on by another air raid leaving her husband Thomas, a retired dock labourer, a widower.

The following month the animal population of Edinburgh Zoo was reduced slightly when, on November 4th, two stray bombs hit the park killing six budgerigars and a wild rabbit (as reported by Zoo Director T. H. Gillespie to The Scotsman, Friday 20 December 1940). The craters were left unfilled and became a visitor attraction. A crater caused by a bomb dropped on the lawn of Holyrood Park was used by enterprising locals to raise money for a Spitfire Fund by charging for access to view it.

The month after the raid on North Leith which had killed Ernie, on the night of 6th May 1941, five lives were lost in the suburban bungalows of Duddingston on the outskirts of the city. One large bomb, three smaller ones and 100 incendiaries fell on Niddrie Road (now called Duddingston Park South), Milton Crescent and the Jewel Cottages at around half past midnight. Leonard Arthur Wilde (aged 39), an Air Raid Warden, was killed in his home at number 27 Milton Crescent along with his neighbours Joseph Watson (aged 40) of the Home Guard and William Dineley (aged 37). Lilias Tait Waterston (aged 69) was killed in her house at 26 Niddrie Road and her neighbour Barbara Thomson (87) was killed at number 30.

The last bombs of the war which caused fatalities in Edinburgh fell on Loaning Road in Craigentinny on the night of August 6th 1942, demolishing the Corporation tenement at number 35. Two people were killed; Elizabeth Veitch (aged 13) at number 35 and Robert Wright (aged 66), the janitor of Craigentinny Community Centre next door. A replacement tenement was built here post-war.

You can see in the first picture where the bomb has left a crater (green arrow), upended an “Anderson” shelter (blue) and the entrance to another shelter (orange). Note the white painted poles, so you don’t run into them in the dark

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. At least 5 further deaths were recorded as being due to “war operations” when people had heart attacks brought about by the shock and stress of experiencing an air raid.

If this thread has proved interesting you may be interested in a thread on the first aerial raids and shooting down of German aircraft over the UK in WW2 which took place over the Firth of Forth in view of Edinburgh and Leith or a thread detailing some of the anti-aircraft defences of the city during the conflict.

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.

The thread about #NowAndThen photo montages of old railway stations, tramways and bridges around Edinburgh and Leith

This thread was originally written and published in December 2017 and a further part in May 2019.

This thread features #NowAndThen photo-montages of long gone railway stations, tramways and bridges in Edinburgh and Lieth; period photos overlaid on the current streetscape to show just how much or little things have changed over time.

Duke Street in 1954 on the last day of service for the No. 25 tram. This service ran from Corstorphine to Portobello King’s Road via Leith Walk and the Links. Not much else has changed on this side of the road, although the occupants of the buildings certainly have. On the left was the Palace Cinema, with a snooker hall above. It is now a J. D. Wetherspoon pub.

Commercial Street in 1955. The No. 17 tram from Granton passes the “Highland Queen” bonded warehouse of MacDonald and Muir. It is running across the railway lines that crossed into the docks from the former North British railway at North Leith / Leith Citadel station. The bond is now flats, through the West Dock Gate where the railway ran is the now the Scottish Government building – Victoria Quay. The Old West and East docks are infilled, unimaginatively used as car parks. The Victoria Dock is cut off from the harbour basin and is a sterile and bleak water feature in front of Victoria Quay.

King’s Road at Portobello in the 1950s. The No. 12 tram from Corstorphine via Leith, it has just passed the ghost of a car heading the other way to Portobello. The background is dominated by the great red brick lump of Ebenenzer J. Macrae’s Corporation electric power station.

Tollcross in 1956. There was a tramway depot here – where the central fire station now is – and the route was also a junction where 3 routes from the suburbs converged and then split immediately into two to head into the city by different routes. As such this was always a busy place on the network and this scene is busy with shoppers and tramcars. The tenement on the right and the castle are all that remain of the original buildings in this shot now.

Trinity Crescent in the 1950s. A no. 17 tram squeezes under the bridge carrying the railway from Trinity Station along Lower Granton Road to the docks. The low bridge and tight S-shaped turn of the road meant that the tramway here was single line in the middle of the road, with the overhead line lowered. A set of traffic signals allowed only 1 tram at a time into this short section and warned motor vehicles that a tram was about to pass as their route swung onto the right lane to make the turn.

And Trinity again in 1986. A ghost train crosses Trinity Road on track removal duties. Click on the link to the EdinPhoto website to see more images of this series.

Moving on to animated transitions, here is Balgreen Halt station. A 1934 addition to the suburban railway network by the LNER (London & North Eastern Railway), it was closed in 1968. Estimate the old photo is early 1960s.

And at the end of the line at Corstorphine. Always a hard one to get your head around as no hint of the stations presence is left under the 1980s housing, beyond the name “Station Road”

Side fact, Corstorphine had extraordinarily long platforms for a suburban station (250m, sufficient for a 12 coach train of 60 foot stock), I believe this was because the railway company hoped that a new barracks to replace the Georgian cavalry establishment at Piershill would be built nearby. The new barracks were ultimately built at Redford instead but Corstorphine was left with its overly large station. There were 2 full platforms and 2 full length carriage sidings. As a result it was used to stable and clean coaching stock overnight and on occasions such as rugby and football matchdays.

Another overlooked Edinburgh suburban station; the awkwardly located Piershill at the foot of Smokey Brae, between Meadowbank and Restalrig. The road here running under the bridge is Clockmill Road, which connected to the Clockmill Lane. This was the ancient route from the Canongate to Restalrig, cut in two by the London Road when it was built in the early 1820s. The road was obliterated and the bridge cut off by the groundworks for the 1970s Commonwealth Games stadium, the velodrome being built on top of the road. The bridge is now blocked up as a garage, but may be re-opened as a through route in the future when the eastern end of the stadium site is redeveloped as housing.

Leith Walk station – no, not the big one at the Foot, but the one called Leith Walk towards the top.The demolished tenements of Shrub Hill and Shrub Place are in the background, plus an intriguing belfry. I’m guessing it was the old school next to Pilrig Model Buildings, which later became the “Royal Caledonian Bazaar”.

Now the site of the Inchkeith House multi-storey flats, the Royal Caledonian Bazaar was a “posting and livery establishment”; basically a horse transport depot. The proprietor was one John Croall. The Croalls were established in the horse business and were pioneers of motoring in Edinburgh. They gave their name, unsurprisingly, to Croall Place, the tenement at the top of Leith Walk where it meets Macdonald Road. Croall & Croall later built car and bus bodies and had a number of works around the West Port and Lothian Road. They later became part of the SMT (Scottish Motor Transport) empire.

Granton Road, once an important suburban commuter station and tram route. It was much more conveniently located for the wealthy suburb of Trinity than the station of that name, and later for the big new housing scheme at Boswall.

There’s an old cast iron column just outside where the station was, I always assumed it was a tramway pole for the overhead wires. This photo shows it supported no wires – there’s an actual tramway pole right behind it – and it had a crown-shaped vent cap. It’s not a pole or a lamp post at all, it’s actually a sewer vent – a stink pipe – which is why it has survived.

We move on to Granton station itself. One of the first in Edinburgh and originally the site of a pioneering train ferry to Burntisland before the Forth was bridged. It closed in 1925 as an economy as there was little need by this time for a passenger station in the middle of the docks – most people taking the ferry across the Forth found the electric tramway much more convenient to get into the city than taking the train.

The slip for the train ferries is still used by the Royal Forth Yacht Club. Thomas Bouch’s Floating Railway was an ingenious and effective solution to bridging the Forth before the technology allowed a permanent structure. Basically an early, steam-raised linkspan that lowered a ramp on to a special ferry boat, allowing wagons and carriages to be run aboard. The whole apparatus, rails and all, was on a great wheeled carriage, allowing it to move with the tides. The rails were in short sections, bolted together in such a way that they could flex.

Thomas Bouch is an engineer remembered for his greatest and most infamous creation, the first Tay Bridge, but he had a long career in which he constructed many pioneering and innovative solutions to the problems of getting railways across obstacles.

I’m quite chuffed with this image, which shows the evolution of the Upper Drawbridge at Sandport Place. Not only is the river much higher now since the docks were dammed, but the deck was widened and the central arch of the current bridge replaced the lifting section.

The Water of Leith is no longer a tidal river, as in the 1960s a set of lock gates were installed at the mouth of the docks to keep the dock basin always filled with water to allow bigger and deeper ships to use the port, and not be so restricted by the tides when coming and going. The water level these days is frequently within a foot of the central arch but you can still see the “river bed” in the right conditions only a few feet below that, there must be a good 20 foot of mud and silt and sludge built up on the river bed, unable to be washed out by the tide.

The next image is the same spot as before but looking the other way, to St. Ninian’s Wharf (named for the old North Leith Kirk behind, with its distinctive Dutch tower). The site of a dry dock and boatbuilding yard in the 1850s and 60s.

The photo confused me for a good while, as I assumed that the ship must be in the dry dock, which was one of the first dry dock in Scotland so pre-dated the photo by about 100 years. I later realised that the ship being built in the picture is not in the dry dock at all, but on a building slip alongside, with a temporary coffer dam following the line of the river wall – marked in red on the Town Plan below.

That ship may even be on a “patent slip”, a Leith invention.

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.

Tenuously Jacobite: the thread about the Naval Reserves in Leith and Granton

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

Here is a photo of HMS Killiecrankie alongside at Leith docks in 1963. She was the training tender for the Leith & Edinburgh Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) station at HMS Claverhouse on Granton Square.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/126268375@N08/14803466805/

The Killiecrankie was built in 1952 as the Ton-class minesweeper Bickington, over 100 such ships were built in the 1950s in response to Cold War paranoia that the Soviets would mine inshore waters. They were all given names ending in –ton, but in the event far too many were produced and so there was a surplus. These were given different roles and were renamed. Bickington for instance was commissioned as HMS Curzon as the tender to the Suffolk RNR. When she moved to the Firth of Forth again she took up a new name. She served this station from 1962 – 1676, before renaming to her originally intended HMS Bickington and being transferred to the Fishery Protection Squadron

HMS Claverhouse was a shore base and it is Royal Navy practice to name shore bases as if they were ships. But how did this particular name with its strong connotations in Scottish history become associated with Edinburgh and Leith, which it otherwise has a brief connection with? (And if you don’t know the connotations, all will become apparent in a few paragraphs).

The first Claverhouse was a war-surplus coastal monitor; a sort of small, slow, relatively unseaworthy ship for carrying around a few big guns to shoot at things ashore with. She was originally called the M23 and in 1922 had been sent to Dundee as RNVR (Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve) drill ship and renamed Claverhouse . I suppose someone had a sense of humour to name her after John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee. This man was variously Bonnie Dundee to his supporters or Bluidy Clavers to his opponents, given the divisive (and ultimately fatal for himself) part he played in leading the Jacobite uprising of 1689.

The RNVR was distinct from the RNR; the latter organisation was a reserve force of professional civilian seamen, the former were civilian volunteers from non-seafaring occupations.

The Claverhouse took her ships crest and motto directly from the Viscount Dundee, a phoenix rising out of the flames and “Gang Forrit” (which either is literally to “go for it”, or a euphemism for to take communion).

With war clouds on the horizon in the 1930s and a need to rapidly train up volunteers and reserves to man a wartime navy, HMS Claverhouse was shifted to a permanent shore base on Granton Square, in the requisitioned Granton Hotel. The new HMS Claverhouse took on the crest and motto of the ship from Dundee, which it also inherited as a drill vessel. At Granton merchant seamen were given training in defensive techniques (i.e. how to fire guns!) and the station was also used as an HQ for the local coastal defence forces. When war ended, Claverhouse was not returned to civilian life but was kept on as the HQ for the newly formed Forth Division of the RNVR. Again, the motto and the crest was that inherited from Viscount Dundee. Tay Division of the RNVR was based on the old wooden frigate HMS Unicorn in Dundee, so it took as a crest a white unicorn.

The old monitor was still going and stayed on at Granton as the Claverhouse drill ship until 1958 when she was sent for scrap. But given the post-war naval reserves had a primary focus with inshore minesweeping, she was joined in 1948 by a small war-surplus motor minesweeper called MMS.1089.

MMS.1089 took the name HMS Forth, but was soon renamed Killecrankie. Again someone had a sense of humour as, if you don’t already know, it was at the Battle of Killecrankie in 1689 where Viscount Dundee met a very pyrrhic end when a musket ball went through him in the moment of victory; finishing both him and ultimately the Jacobite rising.

The little Killiecrankie was too small and obsolete for the realities of the Cold War so she was sold in 1957 and replaced with the newer and bigger HMS Bickington/ Curzon, which inherited her name. This ship carried a generic ship’s crest that had been assigned to all of her type. In 1976 Killiecrankie was returned to being plain old Bickington and was replaced by her sister Kedleston, but the latter kept her own name.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/153873640@N02/41105299245/

In 1986, Kedleston was in turn replaced by a new River-class minesweeper as the Forth RNR training ship, somewhat confusingly their new vessel was called HMS Spey. She lasted at Leith until 1993 when a defence review withdrew the entire RNR fleet and moved it to other purposes. Spey spent here next 4 years in Northern Ireland before being sold to Brazil.

As part of the 1993 economy measures, in 1994 the Forth Division of HMS Claverhouse and the Tay Division of HMS Camperdown were merged as HMS Scotia and relocated to Rosyth. Another volunteer unit at Granton, the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service (RNXS), was also disbanded at this time. The RNXS was a uniformed, non-combatant volunteer service whose role was to assist in the operations of ports and anchorages in times of conflict.

Rosyth as it turned out wasn’t that smart an economy measure; although it looked good on paper, shifting your volunteer base away from the centre of population it draws from doesn’t help with recruitment. The RNR therefore re-established separate Forth and Tay divisions in 2000. The new Forth Division only lasted until 2004 before being wound down as yet another economy measure. The old HMS Claverhouse on Granton Square is now the Claverhouse Training Centre for various cadets and other reserves units.

So anyway, that’s the long version of how some rather geographically and historically unusual (you might even say inappropriate) names came to be used for naval establishments in Edinburgh and Leith.

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.

Ocksters, Oxscares and Oxcars: the thread about the islands of the Forth and what some of their names mean

Oxcars. A lump of rock crowned by a lighthouse in the Firth of Forth. I was interested to see that a 17th century variation of the name was Ocksters – the Scots word for armpit!

A few years previously it’s down as Ockstairs on the original sketches for John Adair’s map of the Forth, but then in a 1703 imprint it has been amended to Oxscares. The oldest variation is recorded in 1621 as Oixtaris in the Register of the Privy Council on the subject of the need for a beacon on these rocks, which are submerged at high tides.

If you are wondering where these variations come from, then wonder no more. The root is Ox Scaris, as in ox skerries; ox being the animal and skerries being intertidal rocks. Ocksters etc. are simply phonetic variations. It’s likely this animal theme lent its name to the neighbouring rock of Cow(s) & Calves, which was traditionally Muckriestone as it lies off the north on Admiralty coastal charts.

Working our way down the Forth from it’s outer reaches, we can explore the toponymy of the islands; the meanings of their place names. The Isle of May, at the eastern extreme, is likely from the old Norse, Má ey or gull island. Stands to obvious reason. The Gaelic Magh, an open field, is less likely.

About 8 miles south, and a little west, of the May is the Bass Rock, whose unmistakable outline is prominent along the East Lothian coast. The origin of its name has been lost to history, John Milne suggests a relation to death, from the Gaelic bàs, as it was long a place of banishment and execution, but that’s just conjecture and some of Milne’s use of Gaelic is often a little bit too convenient. But we do know that the Bass gives the scientific species name to the Northern Gannet – Morus bassanus – for which it is the largest colony. These animals were scientifically described as far back as the 16th century as Anser bassanus, and later in the 18th by Linnaeus as Sula bassana. The Scots word for them was however the solendguse or solen goose. In the spring and summer, the Bass takes on a white appearance, caked in the birds and their droppings.

Moving west, the next island is Craigleith. Milne suggests the Gaelic Creag Liath – the grey rock. (In Gaelic, Liath – is the colour of a blue sky, but when used in reference to the landscape it refers to something being greyish. This is a feature of the Gaelic language when dealing with place names; the colour use is subjective and descriptive, not literal). However Craigleith is actually comprised of very dark, volcanic rocks – it needs to be squinted at in combination with the stains of guano to take on a greyish hue. It should also be noted that in Gaelic the word liath does not have the soft “th” ending that Leith does in English. Notice on the 18th century map below that the earliest spelling is Lieth, with the I before the E, which was also the case at this time for maps showing the port and town of Leith along the coast.

Next up is The Lamb. Milne goes for the easy Gaelic Làmh for an arm or handle, one assumes for the shape, but in that language the –mh sounds like an English –v. As I said before, sometimes Milne’s use of Gaelic for the roots of place names seems to be just too convenient. There might also be a Norse origin for the name, or it may simply be named after the animal (see already Oxcars, Cows & Calves). It is after all flanked by the North andSouth Dog rocks. This island was bought by Uri Geller (yes, that Uri Geller) in 2009 so he could dowse for Egyptian treasure on it. Yes, I’m being serious, he described that it’s an analogue for the layout of the Egyptian pyramids and holds the buried treasure of Princess Scota. He recently told the BBC that he has spent a single night on his island and didn’t enjoy it one bit and was declaring the island a micronation, the Republic of Lamb. In January 2026 Mr Geller again made the headlines when he declared Donald Trump an honorary citizen and president of the island.

Moving west is Fidra, for which Milne once again gives a fanciful Gaelic derivation, but it’s now believed to be Old Norse, from Fiðrey or Feather Island as a result of all the seabirds. Eider feathers would have been gathered here in yore for use in bedding. Robert Louis Stevenson based his plan for Treasure Island on Fidra (amongst other islands). Like its eastern neighbour, Fidra too is guarded by North and South Dogs.

Next along is Eyebroughy, the fourth and final of the basalt islands between North Berwick and Aberlady. It is shown as Ibris in Adair’s 18th century chart and the 1850s Ordnance Survey place name book for East Lothian also gives Eyebrochy. The Old Norse Ey for island seems an obvious start for the word, but I cannot find a reference explaning the second part.

There is now something of a gap until the next major island; it is 12.5 miles from Eyebroughy to Inchkeith, which looms large in the centre of the Firth. Its etymology gets a whole chapter on its Wikipedia page, but the logical explanation may be Innse Coit, a hybrid of old Gaelic (Island) and Welsh (wooded); a wooded island. The oldest recorded form is Ked in the 13th century, but as the Place Names of Fife points out, its an unlikely candidate to be known for being wooded, so once again we probably just don’t know. It was used to quarantine victims of syphilis from Leith and Edinburgh in the 15th century, of that we do know. The Grandgore (syphilis) Act of 1497, saw the island made a place of “Compulsory Retirement” for sufferers, obliged to board a ship at Leith and to remain on their island “till God provide for their health“.

Interestingly, the Georgian mapmaker extraordinaire of Scotland, William Roy, left Inchkeith off his Great Maps of both the Lowlands and Highlands, with the Forth forming the boundary between these two geographical divisions in the east of the country. But there is a square that looks like a repair where it should be…

Next up is Oxcars, 5.5 miles west of Inchkeith, where we started this thread. If we move south from there we get to Inchmickery and Mickrystone (now Cows & Calves, as previously mentioned also). The derivation of Mickery may be from the Gaelic Innis nam Bhiocaire, island of vicars, as like most of the islands of the Forth it has been a Christian retreat at one time or another. The island was fortified during both World Wars, and it’s not without good reason that there’s a legend that its outline was deliberately made to look like an anchored battleship. The logic is that any U-boat commander who made it into the Forth would pop up his periscope, be taken in by the cunningly disguised island and would have fired his torpedoes and disappeared before realising he’d wasted them on a rock. If you know your Royal Navy ships, the fortifications are a reasonably good likeness to HMS Nelson and Rodney, but I have it on expert authority that the legend is precisely that, a legend.

North of Cows & Calves is Inchcolm; probably the best known of the Forth Islands and certainly the most visited. It is named for Saint Columba (Colum Cille in Gaelic) who reputedly visited it in the 6th century. The modern name is from the Gaelic Innis Choluim orColumba’s Island. The old joke goes “how many inches are there in the Forth?” and you’re meant to count the islands. In The Scottish Play, Shakespeare refers to the place as Saint Colmes Ynch.

Just off Inchcolm lies Inchgnome, but the jury of the best minds in Scottish placenames is still out on where that one might come from. Probably from some obscure Gaelic saint.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwshack/26451815521

South and west lies Cramond Island, which obviously takes its name from the village off which it lies. That in turn comes from Caer Amond, Caer being old British for a fortification (referring to Roman fort on the site), and Amond or Almond is the river of that name. Like the rivers Esk and Avon (and others), River Almond is a tautology as the latter word simply means river.

Another tautological place name is the island of Carcraig , just northwest of Inchcolm. The Car element is an Scots word for rock (from the Old English Carr) and the Craig bit is the Scots word for the same, from the Gaelic Creag.

The other principal islet off of Inchcolm is Meadulse. This rock is entirely covered by the tide which makes it an excellent growing place for seaweed and the name likely comes from the edible dulse which grows there and is known to have been a medieval food source.

The final, and westernmost, of the Inches of the Forth is Inchgarvie, that convenient supporting foothold for the Forth Bridge. Its name is likely from the Gaelic Innse Garbh, or rough island, the –bh sound in Gaelic sounding like a –v in English. This is on account of its rugged appearance (and perhaps its legendary population of giant rats!).

Upstream of the Forth Bridge there are fewer islands. The Beamer Rock‘s name is quite literal, and refers to an early beacon that was there from time immemorial to guard ships from it. The older form was Bimar or Bymerskyrr, the –skyrr from the Scots skerry, for a low islet or sea rock. This islet suffered the indignity of having the very beacon it was named for demolished (the base was blown up with explosives) in 2011 to make way for a tower of the Queensferry Crossing.

I won’t move any further west than this, as this site is principally concerned with the geography of Edinburgh, Leith and the Lothians. However there are of course countless other islets and named rocks in the Forth. Many of these are simply a variation on Craig, Carr and Bush, all words referring to rocks. Selected others in the Edinburgh area include:

• Birnies, a collection of tidal rocks at Granton. I cannot find a description of the name, but the –birnie in the placename Kilbirnie comes from the Gaelic Cill Bhraonaigh, or Saint Brendan.
• Another rock near the Birnies, Chestnut logically takes its name from its similarity of appearance to the fruit of that tree
• General’s Rock on the Granton Foreshore, allegedly where English forces under Lord Hertford (Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset) landed in 1544 before the burning of Edinburgh and Leith.
• Gunnet Ledge, a navigational hazard directly north of the entrance to the Port of Leith and west of Inchkeith, marked by a pair of bouys called the East and West Gunnet since at least the start of the 19th century. Probably a variation of Gannet, alternative older spellings include Dunnet and Guneet.
• Martello Rocks, sitting at the old tidal entrance to the Port of Leith and named retrospectively for the Martello Tower that was constructed upon them to defend the approaches
• Megmillar another intertidal rock off of the Granton foreshore, whose name I can find no explanation for.

The names of many of these islands were given to Council housing tower blocks built in the north of the city in the 1950s and 60s. There re are of course many more, but I hope this whistle stop tour has been of some interest.

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.