#place-names — Public Fediverse posts

Two months ago my brain decided that I needed to find out what the name of each country means. As the work progressed, along came capital cities and some administrative divisions. On some days I didn’t do anything else but this and on some other days I barely even looked at the list. A bit surprisingly I actually managed to finish the project, so here I present to you the meaning and language group of origin of quite many placenames.

https://yura.radulfr.net/countries.html

#etymology #placenames

Did you know Pinarayi Vijayan was once just A. Vijayan? Kerala politics is full of leaders known more by their hometowns than their real names! https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/kerala/pinarayi-vijayan-was-once-a-vijayan-when-place-names-shaped-kerala-politics-h3z4yqqq?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #PinarayiVijayan #KeralaPolitics #PlaceNames #KodiyeriBalakrishnan

We all know 'New York, New York' but what about 'Eger, Eger, Eger' (Sudetenland).
Are there any places with higher levels of self-nesting?
#maps #PlaceNames #geography #Germany #CzechRepublic #Czech

This is rather nice, newly on the National Library of Scotland Maps website: East Lothian Field Names Recording Project. I'm having fun already looking up field names for some ancestral farms around Gifford, Garvald and Saltoun. A project still in progress. https://maps.nls.uk/projects/field-names/project/

#History #Geography #Scotland #EastLothian #Farming #Agriculture #PlaceNames #Maps

#1225 Adrian Room - Dictionary of British Place Names. Bookmart Limited, 1995, 1st paperback edition.

#AdrianRoom #BookmartLimited #PlaceNames #Toponymy #BookOfTheDay

#1201 P.A.S. Pool - The Field-Names of West Penwith. Author, Penzance, 1990, 1st edition.

#PASPool #PeterPool #Toponymy #PlaceNames #Penwith #Cornwall #Kernewek #BookOfTheDay

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.

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The thread about a Christmas-themed A to Z of Edinburgh and Leith place names

For no particular reason other than the time of year, let’s take an A to Z look into some of the street and place names of Edinburgh and Leith and see what festive or seasonal connections we might find.

A is for Albert Street. This street in Leith was named for the Prince Consort, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, around 1870 to commemorate his death in 1861. Albert is credited with introducing the first Christmas trees to Britain (he didn’t apparently it was Queen Charlotte – of Mecklenburg-Strelitz – in 1800)

B is for Bethlehem Way. This is a rather insipid development of modern flats in the Lochend area of the city, built on the site of the old Hawkhill Quarry. I’m afraid I cannot offer an explanation as to why this name was picked – this area has no biblical or Middle Eastern connection that I know of.

B is for Bell’s. There are a number of Bell place names in the city, but I have picked Bell’s Brae, that charmingly steep street that connects Queensferry Street to the Water of Leith Village (which you might call Dean Village). At one time this was in the parish of the West Kirk so had to be climbed each week to attend church, so this was known as the Kirk Brae. It was named Bell’s after the millers of that name further upstream at Bell’s Mill.

C is for Chestnut Street. This is named for a rock just off of Granton’s western breakwater and for a street name is rather odd as it was first named as late as 1985, before disappearing again when the industrial area of Granton docks was cleared. It was then being re-used in a street nearby within the last few years for new build housing. It is named for the rock of that name in the Forth.

D is for Drum. As any parent knows, the worst gift you can ever receive for your small child is a drum. From the Gaelic Druim meaning literally “back”; it describes a ridge or raised ground. See also The Drum in Gilmerton, Drumbrae in Corstorphine, etc. The Drum in Leith is not that obvious now that it has been built on, but is the higher ground above Lochend Loch and was once a house and market garden of that name here, it was once the district name and is what the Hibernian F.C. ground was called before it was named Easter Road.

E is for Elf Loch. One of the sometimes overlooked bodies of water in the city boundary. Also called the Diedman’s Pool, this more festive name is possibly from the Gaelic ailbhinn or British elfin, meaning a rocky precipice, of which there are many nearby . An ancient, natural water feature it’s easily mistaken for a water obstacle on the golf course which surrounds it.

F is for Fir Hill. The suburb of Firrhill or Firr Hill is a mid-19th century mapmaker’s corruption of Fir Hill, in reference to the festive trees that grew there once upon a time. The school of this name features a fir tree on its badge and has the Gaelic motto Air Carraig, or “on the rock”.

G is For Guse Dub. Guse is the old Scots word for a Goose, and the Dub referred to a pond and spring where geese were once raised. This has long been the name of a little corner of Causewayside, where it meets the Crosscauseway.

H is for Holly and I is for Ivy, two streets in the Merchiston and Shandon “colonies” houses built by the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company, who often used the names of trees and flowers for their terraces of high-quality model workers houses.

J is for St. Joseph’s, the name of a Catholic Church and Primary school in the Broomhouse area of the city. It was one of the last R.C. parishes in Edinburgh to be formed, to serve the expanding post-war population in the council housing estates in the west of the city.

K is for the King’s Stables. Now the name of the road which connects Lothian Road to the Grassmarket, it was here in 1335 that Edward III of England’s occupying garrison built a royal stables for the King’s cavalry horses. As the centre of Royal power in the city migrated to Holyrood in the 16th century, the stables fell out of use and were sold in 1527. The name stuck though, and it has been as such ever since.

L is for Lamb’s House. OK, perhaps a bit contrived but I was struggling on this one and I’m pretty sure the shepherds brought at least one lamb with them to the stable in Bethlehem. Lamb’s House, named for the merchant and shipowner Andrew Lamb, is a 17th century house in Leith and one of that Port’s oldest buildings. It was sold by the National Trust for Scotland and restored in 2012.

M is for Mary. There are lots of Mary- place names in Edinburgh and more than a few churches and cathedral’s dedicated to her as a Saint. There are two Maryfields in Edinburgh. One was an old 1840s house at the head of Easter Road, giving its name to the area, and a current street and colony row in Abbeyhill. These fancy -field names after female relatives, were common. e.g. Annfield, Elizafield. Jessfield.

N is for St. Nicholas. If we go back to pre-reformation times, St. Nicholas was the chapel and burial ground of North Leith (although not its parish church). It was occupied by Cromwell’s Protectorate army after the Scottish Covenanters’ defeat at Dunbar in 1650, later being swept away when his Citadel was built in 1655. The only image I know if it is in the corner of the “Petworth House Map” of the Siege of Leith, when it was fortified as a strong point (note the trench around it and the cannons).

O is for Oxford Street, both London’s centre of festive shopping and a short street in Newington. Named for Oxford Park which was here beforehand, the reason behind that is long lost to memory and time.

P is for Perdrixknowe. The house of this name was built as Waverley House by the fountain pen magnate Duncan Cameron, but reverted to its old area name of Perdrixknowe (Partridge Hill) when converted into sheltered housing in the 1980s.

Q is for Quality Street. Chocolates anyone? There were once two Quality Streets; one in Leith and one in Blackhall. Usually the duplicate streets in Leith and Edinburgh had one renamed to avoid postal confusion, in this case it was Leith that changed, to Maritime Street, which was ironic as the one in Blackhall was most likely named after it about 150 years later! It was possibly named after a fashionable property in London at the time.

R is for Red (as in Rudolph the Reindeer). There’s lots of Edinburgh place names with “Red” in them. Redford, Redbraes, Redheughs, etc. Redhall is one of the longest established, being recorded in the 13th century and referring to a hall house built out of the local reddish sandstone from the Redhall quarry. It was later fortified and eventually referred to as a castle. It was reduced by Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army before the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and fell into disrepair. George Inglis of Auchendinny later built a mansion house on the estate.

S is for Sleigh Drive, named – along with a number of other streets in the Lochend council housing estate – after Sir William Lowrie Sleigh, DL, LLD, JP, Lord Provost of Edinburgh (1923–1926). The Corporation had a bit of a habit of naming their new housing schemes after recent Lord Provosts at this time (see also Chesser, Hutchison, Stevenson and Whitson). Sleigh made his name and money in the bicycle trade with a partner – Ross – trading under the name Rossleigh. they later moved into the motor and chauffeuring trade and are still going in the latter business.

T is for The East Way. How else did the Three Wise Men get where they were going? The East Way is a named footpath in the pioneering 1919 council housing development of Northfield which was laid out on Garden City principles with concentric rings of streets connected by footpaths. The others are named The North Way and The High Way.

U is for Upper Bow. Bow (pronounced Bough, traditionally, but Bow these days) was an old Scots term for an arched gateway, and before the construction of the West Port the West Bow was the western entrance into the city. The street was an awkward, steep dog-leg, the upper part of which was the Upper Bow, the top being the Bowhead where in antiquity there was a tron or public weigh house in the centre of the Lawnmarket. When George IV Bridge was built in the 1830s, the West Bow was redirected to connect to it, leaving the Upper Bow as a little stub, connected to it by a public stairway.

V is for Victoria Street. It is the Victorians who are credited with popularising the celebration of Christmas in the UK after all, and instituting many of the British traditions associated with it. Conveniently, this is what the West Bow was renamed to when it was diverted to connect to George IV bridge, to commemorate the recent accession of Queen Victoria. It is one of Edinburgh’s most picture postcard little streets, but is usually covered in cars despite recent attempts to make it pedestrianised.

W is for Whisky Row. Now renamed Elbe Street to reflect Leith’s North Sea trade with Hamburg on that river, it was once an address of numerous wine and spirits merchants in the Port. Cheers! Slàinte is Nollaig Cridheil!

X is for Nothing. What naughty children get in their stockings – but mainly as there are no X- placenames in Edinburgh or Leith.

Y is for Yool. Yool’s place was an old street in Portobello. Thomas Yool or Yoole set up the pottery on the site with his nephew, Thomas Rathbone and a business partner John Thomas, and gave his name to a short street. Pottery was the once prosperous industry of the town, built as it was by claypits to house the workers of the brick and later pottery industries. After Yool’s death the business continued as T. Rathbone & Co., by Rathbone’s son – John – before being bought in 1839 by new owners.

Z is for Nothing, there’s only one Z- placename in Edinburgh and that’s named after Zetland, the traditional county name for the Shetland Islands.

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 town that bricks built: the thread about some history of Portobello and why it has a road for a king

This thread was originally written and published in February 2021.

If you go down to the beach today, you’ll be in for a big surprise… No, the teddy bears are not having a picnic, but the sea and/or Figgate burn have performed one of their semi-irregular uncoverings of the old Portobello Harbour from the sand.

The harbour was built in 1787 for local “brick baron” William Jameson, who had hit the big time when he fued land to the east of the Figgate Burn on which to build a house and instead hit clay, kicking off the town’s brick (and later, pottery) industry.

The other thing needed for brick and pottery kilns – coal – was readily available in the vicinity at Niddrie, around Musselburgh and along the coast at Prestonpans and beyond. Here is the harbour on Wood’s 1824 town plan of Portobello; it lies just east of the Figgate Burn, on the shore, in front of the new flats by the bottle kilns.

The stone pier extended some 100 feet, and a basin was excavated out of the beach between the burn and the wall; but it was doomed to fail thanks to the effects of sand transport along the beach consistently silting it up. Portobello really owes its existence to Jameson and the clay. Before that, there wasn’t much except a few small cottages and hostelries strung along the road from Edinburgh to Berwick. The brickworks drew in workers and a village began to form.

The nascent workers village was known as the Figgate Village.

Long before it was Portobello, the area was know as the Figgate Muir; an expanse of muirland (Scots for moor) along the Figgate Burn which ran down to the sea. The Figgate Whins (whins in Scots are gorse) bordered the old road above the beach from Leith and Edinburgh to Musselburgh. “Figgate” is referenced as early as 1466 as “Fegot”, part of Duddingston Kirk parish. Fegot possibly comes from the norse Fé (cattle or sheep) and Gata (a “way”, as in the Scots Gait, but also pasture). You can also see it spelled Freegate, Frigate, Figate, Figgot, Thicket, etc. on older maps.

John Adair’s map of the area in 1682 shows it to be nameless and uninhabited, the Figgate Burn being the sole feature to help us orientate where Portobello is today. There is a vague suggestion of a track and stippling indicating the muir and whins. E. Didstoun is Easter Duddingston farm, where the King’s Manor Hotel is now.

Roy’s Lowland map of c. 1750 shows the area clearer, but it still appears uninhabited; nothing more than a road, muir and whins. The road was notorious for banditry; in 1762, the Scots Magazine records that the master of a fishing boat, Alexander Henderson, was attacked on the road across the Figgate Whins when making his way between Musselburgh to Leith and relieved of 12s 6d in money, hit on the head with a broadsword and left for dead. Travellers apparently preferred the open beach rather than the track through the whins, or took the longer route more inland from Jock’s Lodge to Duddingston to Musselburgh (via what is now Willowbrae).

A cottage on this road between Leith, Edinburgh and Musselnurgh (now the High Street) built in 1742 was named Portobello, in honour of the victory of Admiral Vernon at Porto Bello in 1739 (its builder, George Hamilton, by legend having served there.) A Court of Session record of has testimony that Portobello House or Hut was built by one Peter Scott. Adverts in 1753 record it as a tavern, proprietor George Hamilton, from where he ran a cobbler’s shop and also horse racing on the shore. Stuart Harris thinks the direct link to Admiral Vernon at the Battle of Porto Bello may just be a “sailor’s yarn”, and the name may just be fanciful, as was the trend at the time. The house was cleared around 1862 when the town hall was built.

In 1814, what was by now being referred to as the area of “Portobello” was detached from the parish of Duddingston to form a parish in its own right, the “chapel of ease” being raised to parish kirk. By the time the town became a burgh in 1833, it had adopted the name formally.

Back to William Jameson. He built himself a mansion to the south of Portobello on his land called Rosefield in the 1760s. You can still see some of the garden walls (built, of course, in Portobello brick) and a few lumps of dressed stone from it in Rosefield Park.

Jameson took on the feu of what would become a significant part of Portobello in 1763, from Baron Muir of the Exchequer. Jameson’s brickworks developed in 1765, and contemporary accounts refer to the area as “Brickfield or Portobello“. There was a Brickfield on Leith Links too where there was an earlier brickworks. Jameson’s clay pit provided the feedstock for the local brick and pottery industry. Part of it would later be filled in and flattened to form the Craigentinny sidings and depot, another part was flooded and landscape to become the Figgate Pond.

Around 1785, a lawyer from Edinburgh by the name of John Cunningham feud a parcel of ground near the beach from Jameson and had built for himself a most curious villa upon it. Portobello Tower was built in red Portobello bricks, but to the beach side of it was attached a great folly tower; a battlemented octagon with a square stair tower adjoining.

It is in-filled with all kinds of curious bits of masonry tracework that were collected by Cunningham from old Edinburgh churches and houses (including parts of the original Mercat Cross and allegedly from the Cathedral of St. Andrews). An 1864 rebuild of the structure consolidated it somewhat from its more ruinous original form as a belvedere into accommodation.

The draw of the sea and the sand of Portobello has long been a draw for Edinburgh residents. Writing in 1806, Sir John Carr in Caledonian Sketches says “Portobello is a beautiful village, embellished with many genteel houses, and stands close to the sea shore… It is much frequented in the season by fashionable families and by respectable citizens of the capital, from which it is but a very short distance, as a delightful sea-bathing place“. In that year, a bath house was built with hot and cold salt water baths at what is the foot of the appropriately named Bath Street.

By the middle of the 19th century, Portobello was a fashionable suburb of large villas that were being built along the High Street in the direction of Joppa. We can get an idea of what it looked like from the below print of 1845. Coillesdene House (where the tower block now is) is the large house on the right, the spire on the left is the old Parish Kirk. It can be seen that the land immediately to the south is still fields and hedgerows.

On Portobello High Street stands the remains of one of the town’s Georgian villas; that of Shrubmount, the last residence of the geologist and evangelist Hugh Miller (1802-1856). The house has since been rebuilt into a Victorian row on the High Street – confusingly what we see of it from “the front” is actually the gable end of it, the pillars of the original portico entrance are buried within the back of a kebab shop now. (Thank you to Fraser Macdonald for correcting the location of Shrubmount, which is mispositioned in a couple of books). Miller had a geological museum in the house, but was tormented by mental illness and committed suicide when Victorian medicine failed him and he feared he might harm his family.

The gentlemen cavalry of the Royal Edinburgh Light Dragoon Volunteers, who counted Sir Walter Scott in their ranks, used to drill on the beach in the early 19th century. They were somewhat lampooned in the contemporary press in the manner of a well meaning Dad’s army that was more of a horseriding, dressing up and drinking club. John Kay caricatured the Edinburgh yeomanry in his typically acerbic style.

In 1822 on his state visit to Scotland, King George IV reviewed the Scottish yeomanry cavalry and a “picturesque force of Highland clans that had come to Edinburgh in honour of his visit.” On Friday, 23 August, the King reviewed 3,000 volunteer horse and “clansmen” on Portobello sands from his carriage, which had approached down a road that we now call the King’s Road for that reason. In the painting by Turner below, the King is on a silver horse dressed as a Field Marshall in the centre of the canvas. The crowds assembled on the sands include many men drinking from glasses and the east coast fishwives in their distinctive striped dresses and garb.

And if you are to wander around the modern housing that occupies the site of the former Buchan’s Pottery in Portobello, you can find all sorts of street names that relate to an earlier time: William Jameson Place, Brickfield, The Pottery, Harbour Place and Pipe Street and Lane.

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 Sciennes; how you pronounce it, where the name comes from and its important moment in Scottish literary history

This thread was originally written and published in February 2020.

There was some chat the other week about place names that were so unapparent in their pronunciation that they were the shibboleth of the real local. One which kept coming up for Edinburgh was Sciennes. First things first, it is Sciennes; as in Sheens; as in Machine; as in Rise of the Machines. The name comes directly from St. Catherine of Siena, a convent in her honour being established in the locality in 1517. In Scots, Siena was Seynis or Schiennes. From there it’s a short leap to the modern Sciennes, but the pronunciation has remained true to the original local form.

The convent occupied a 2 acre site and was surrounded by an enormous wall, some 13 feet high. The land had been fued off the Burgh Muir (common moor land owned by the city) to the Canon of St. Giles in 1513, who founded a chapel and hermitage to St. John before giving it to the Sisters.

Given the location of the convent some 1,000m outside of the city walls (hence the big defensive enclosure) it is consistently missed off of all the older town plans and it’s not until Kirkwood’s plan of 1817 that it makes an appearance. We can see an old rendition of Scienes and the reference to Siena. The designation as a monastery is a mistake.

Notice the 2 arrows in the above map and notice that they correspond to two obvious kinks in the modern street layouts. These mark the turn of the boundary wall of the convent – I have found a good rule of thumbs when looking at old streets in Edinburgh which is that if there is a bend or kink in an otherwise straight road that seems to serve no apparent purpose, there’s a very good chance that it respects the alignment of an even older property boundary. See this thread for instance. Or this one!

The presence of the convent also explains why Sciennes Street (marked in green below and now known as just Sciennes) splits off at a very shallow angle from Causewayside (red arrow) . Until the early 19th century one of the two main road south east out of the city – leaving that odd gushet formed by Lord Russell Place; it was the alignment of the original footpath to the convent from St. Giles to the north.

After the quagmire of the Boroughloch began to be drained in the 18th century and the Meadows began to be laid out as a pleasant, formal park, some of the rich of the city built large villas along the southern edge. A roadway formed at the back of the plots to give coach access, meeting the old route to the convent at its eastern extremity.

And at this junction stood a place called Sciennes Hill House. This building isn’t actually on a hill as such, but when entering the city from Causewayside it is at the top of the ascending grade from the south. The Scottish philosopher and historian of the Enlightenment, Professor Adam Ferguson of Raith, lived here at the end of the 18th century. His property was ¾ miles from the city walls at the Bristo Port and so his friends took to jokingly calling it Kamchatka on account of its perceived remoteness.

The National Gallery has the below sketch of the house and notes a soiree which took place there in 1786 that was attended by a young Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Dugald Stewart, Joseph Black, James Hutton and John Home! One can only imagine how inadequate you’d feel, staring into your tea, sitting round a table while that lot had a debate! This was both the first and last time that the young Scott met Burns and it was a formative experience for the former, then just 15 years old.

By this time Sciennes was a well-established place name and had given its name to that lane along the back of the big villas, as Sciennes Road, to Sciennes Hill House, to Sciennes House Place and Sciennes Hill Place. And what became of the house itself? Well, believe it or not, it’s actually still there, hiding in plain sight, even if you look straight at it. Its clever disguise is that the back of the house is now the street façade, and the house has been subdivided and reconstructed into what looks from the street to be an unremarkable tenement.

But when you look at it again when armed with the facts, suddenly things begin to look incongruous. That rubble finish doesn’t quite look Victorian, that stair door is out of alignment, and the vertical spacing of the windows is well out with its neighbours.

Oh and those plaques are a bit of a give away too…

And if you can get around the back, this ain’t your usual finish for a tenement back green! It’s quite obviously the (restored) façade of an altogether different and grander Georgian house.

The rear of the building was restored in 1989 (there are pictures of it here just prior to this) and given the much quite regular appearance above. In the old engraving below it can be clearly seen where the original doorway and portico was, at 1st floor level, by the gap in the horizontal bands of masonry and window spacing.

St. Catherine of Siena lent her name to one other street in the neighbourhood, that of St. Catherine Place, a street of grand Victorian semi-detached villas on the boundary with The Grange. For some reason though, when Bertrams Ltd. built a large factory in Sciennes, they went for a different spelling and we got the St. Katherine’s Works. Bertrams were ironfounders and engineers, specialising in roller machines for papermaking and printing.

Bertram’s were a very successful company in their time, with a foundry in Gorgie at Westfield and also one in London – another St. Katherine’s Works – to serve the newspaper industry. Sadly the Sciennes works burned down in 1983 at what was a difficult time for the company, with the Scottish print and papermaking industries in terminal decline. The whole company was gone by 1985 and when new housing was built on the site later it was appropriately named Siena Gardens.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/maleny_steve/42942242202

Sciennes of course also gives its name to the local school (I am typing to you from an old teacher’s desk of that establishment, recovered from a skip). I recall the first time I saw the name, written on an Edinburgh schools football league fixtures sheet about 30-odd years ago and yes I too did imagine it was pronounced Scy-ens.

There’s one more “place” in Sciennes that’s been lost to time, which is the romantic sounding Glen Sciennes. Indeed it’s a place that never even existed anywhere but on paper as a faux-Highland brand name for the spirit from a distillery in the district belonging to Thomas Duncanson & Co. It was being advertised in the London papers in 1854 but the firm went bankrupt in 1859, so Glen Sciennes had a life span of only five years. After this the distillery ran through a number of other names; the Newington Distillery, the West Sciennes Distillery; the Edinburgh Distillery before closing in 1925 by which time it was the last malt distillery in the city. The buildings were incorporated into Bertram’s works.

I don’t know of any contemporary illustrations of the Sciennes distillery, but a William Channing sketch of 1852 of Sciennes Court – where the Sienna Gardens student flats are these days – shows its chimney in the background.

Always be on the lookout for unexplained kinks in old streets or buildings that feel a bit out of place; if you dig into them a little bit you might find out more local history than you bargained for!

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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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.

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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.

Battles, treachery, murder, witchcraft and execution: the thread about the dark and bloody history of the Quarryholes

This thread was originally written and published in September 2022.

The “things I’d like to write a thread about” intray can get pretty overcrowded so it brings me more than a little bit pleasure to say that it’s only taken me 7 months to get around to my promise of following up on writing about the Quarryholes. This is not one but actually two distinct places, the Upper or Over Quarryholes (blue on the map below) and the Nether or Lower Quarryholes (red below). You can see the tailburn of the loch at Lochend cutting between the two.

As the name suggests, the Quarryholes were areas where quarrying had once taken place and left behind pits in the ground and a hamlet grew up at both of the locations.

In 1554 the Querrell Hollis feature in David Lindsay’s “Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits” as a location where a horse is drowned; the quarry pits had long been flooded and were dark and dangerous bodies of water. The distinct Ovir Querrelholis is recorded in 1588. Quarrel was the Scots for quarrying but obviously in modern use means a squabble or disagreement and that is quite apt given the subsequent history. In the early 17th century, the charter of both of the Quarryholes was in the possession of William Rutherford of Quarryholes, the son of an Edinburgh Burgess and merchant, one Bailie William Rutherford. William junior was a merchant and shipowner in Leith who in 1612 was in trouble for cutting off a man’s finger and in 1617 was back before the Privy Council for illegally exporting tallow and cheese.

A son of William junior, also William, sold the Quarryholes to the City of Edinburgh in 1634, and they in turn passed them on to Heriot’s Hospital (Upper Quarryholes) and the Trinity College & Hospital (Lower Quarryholes). Another Rutherford son, Andrew, was born at Quarryholes in the early 17th century and would rise to become the Lieutenant-General of the Garde Écossaise, the bodyguards to the French Crown, and a favourite of King Louis XIV of France.

On his return to Scotland, Andrew was made the Lord of Teviot by King Charles II and given a regiment to command. Later he was Governor of Dunkirk and arranged its sale to the French on behalf of the King. He died on active service in 1664 as Governor of Tangier, one year after becoming Earl of Teviot.

But links with military violence and the Quarryholes were not just in far off Morocco. In July 1559 the Lords of the Congregation, the Scottish protestant nobility fired up by John Knox, who had been energetically “reforming” Churches in Stirling and Linlithgow now moved on to Edinburgh. At the Quarryholes they parlayed with supporters of Queen Regent Mary of Guise to agree a temporary mutual toleration, avert further conflict and avoid the potential for full blown urban warfare in the city.

Mary of Guise died the following year but things didn’t get much more peaceful as a result in Scotland; or at the Quarryholes. On 16th June 1571, during the ensuing Marian Civil War, “Drury’s Peace” took place at the Quarryholes – which proved to be anything but peaceful. “Black Saturday” as it was also known occurred when pro-Mary Queen of Scots forces under the Earl of Huntly rode out from Edinburgh Castle to confront pro-King James VI forces from Leith under the Earl of Morton and his enormous hat.

There was ample bad blood between Morton and Huntly and their heavily armed parties were spoiling for a fight. To try and negotiate between them, emissaries were sent to meet at the Quarryholes under the mediation of Sir William Drury, the English Ambassador . Drury (of Drury Lane, the Strand) proposed terms which both parties seemed to accept, but neither side could agree which would turn and leave the field first. Eventually he got them to agree that they would leave at the same time when he threw up his hat. The emissaries returned to their own lines and Drury duly threw up his hat.

The Queen’s men under Huntly duly turned and left as had been agreed but the King’s men under Morton treacherously did not and charged at their opponents retreating towards the Canongate and ran them down. They were “pursued with cruel and rancorous slaughter to the very gates of the city. The whole road was covered with dead and wounded“. Lord Home, several other gentlemen, 72 soldiers, colours, horses and two cannon were marched into Leith by a triumphant but treacherous Morton. Back in Edinburgh, the citizenry suspected that Drury had betrayed the Queen’s forces and he had to be protected from the city’s notorious mob.

The Quarryholes were the scene of a second military conflict 80 years later when English forces under Oliver Cromwell arrived in Musselburgh in 1650. Their goal was to try and take Edinburgh and Leith which were fortified and held by the Covenanter government of Scotland under Generals Alexander and David Leslie (no relations). The Leslies were a match for Cromwell and his New Model Army, but it turned out not for the interfering Covenanter ministers on their own side. However their initial plan of throwing up defensive lines between the Calton Hill and Leith, sitting behind them and waiting it out worked surprisingly well.

The Covenanter army was reasonably well armed and equipped and had burnt the lands before it, it could afford to sit firm and let the elements, disease, hunger and dissent take care of Cromwell. Cromwell however, with his usual divine guidance, charged straight at the Leslies’ fortifications on the 24th July 1650. He chose the area of the Quarryholes as being a weak point and made a “furious attack… at the head of his whole army” from the east .

Cromwell’s forces approached from Restalrig and Jock’s Lodge while twelve of his warships fired on Leith from the Forth. The Leslies however were waiting and their artillery opened fire from positions on the Calton Hill and around Lower Quarryholes. Along a rampart constructed on the line of what is now Leith Walk the Scottish foot unleashed “a rolling fire of musketry” towards the English, supported by the cannon mounted on the old walls of Leith. The feared New Model Army was easily beat and rapidly “retired in confusion”

Cromwell’s men left their dead and wounded and two cannon behind in their haste. Unperturbed, Cromwell circled around Arthur’s Seat and tried to attack the city from that direction. He was met by the regiment of Campbell of Lawers, one of the best in the Scottish Army. On seeing Cromwell’s intent, Campbell had marched double-time up the glen of Holyrood Park and taken up position around the ruins of St. Leonard’s chapel in the shelter of the numerous old walls there. Here he ambushed Cromwell’s men and caught them in an enfilade; firing into the exposed sides of his formations. Again the New Model Army broke. “They threw aside their muskets, pikes and collars of bandoleers and fled, abandoning their cannon, which were brought off by the [Scottish] horse brigade“. Cromwell – not used to being beaten twice in one day – retired to his HQ at Musselburgh to lick his wounds. He would rue the day he visited the Quarryholes, but ultimately had his revenge at the Battle of Dunbar – which went catastrophically badly for the Scots forces under the meddlesome interference of the Kirk men.

While this was the last time the Quarryholes was troubled by military matters, its dark and dangerous reputation persisted. Drownings in its dank and lonely pools were commonplace.

As early as 1677 the Trinty Hospital had been ordered to fill up their holes on account of the danger. They did not, however, and in 1691 an English soldier, Lt. Byron, drowned there. The holes were ordered to be filled in again. Again they were not. In 1717, a chaplain by the name of Robert Irvine was found guilty of the murder of two boys in his charge by cutting their throats with a pen knife when out walking with them near the holes. Irvine was found lurking with the bodies that he had dragged into the place. Justice was swift and merciless; Irvine was sentenced to have his hands cut off and then hung until dead at the Gallow Lee at Shrubill. His hands were then placed on spikes on the Broughton Tolbooth and his body cast into the Quarryholes where he had committed his vile crimes.

In 1753 a butcher in the Grassmarket by the name of Nicol Brown was executed for the murder of his wife. He had gained notoriety for reputedly eating, for a drunken bet, a pound of flesh cut from the rotting corpse of wife murderer Nicol Muschet as it hung on the gibbet. Brown in turn killed his wife by setting her on fire. He too was found guilty, executed by hanging and hung in chains on the gibbet at the Gallowlee. But the body disappeared two days later, having been taken down by the Incorporation of Butchers and tossed into the Quarryholes. It was fetched back to the gibbet, but again 2 days later was back in the Quarryholes. It was said that the butchers felt mutual disgrace “thrown upon their fraternity by his ignominious exhibition there“.

In 1598 a court messenger named Thomas Dobie was found guilty of committing suicide by “drownit himself maist violentlie” in the Quarryholes. For such a slight to his profession his corpse felt the full wrath of the forces of justice. His body was taken to the Tolbooth and imprisoned before trial. Found guilty, he was sentenced to be dragged through the town backwards and hung (despite being dead) before being displayed on the gibbet. For good measure he was also handed down a fine of £1,340 Scots – the largest ever recorded in Scotland for a suicide.

“The Quarryholes had traditionally been used for ducking moral offenders or for executing women by drowning“. There are records of a woman being drowned in the Quarryholes over a case of infanticide. In 1585, Marion Clark was condemned “to be drounitt in the Quarrell hollis” for the crime of “going about the pestylens and seiknes beand apone her” i.e. she had caught the plague and had not stayed at home; concealing sickness and breaking quarantine was dealt with severely in the 16th c.

The gruesome history goes on. In 1649 a woman named Magie Bell from Corstorphine was executed for witchcraft. It was said that she had cursed a neighbour’s son to die, that he had fallen sick, and that she had then restored him by an appeal to god. Bell was further charged with making a girl sick who had refused to lend her thread, and then making worms come out of her mouth before she recovered. Under torture, Bell confessed that 18 years previously when living in the West Port of Edinburgh she had “met the Devil at the back of the town wall at the Quarrell Hollis” and was the only surviving witch of that coven, the others dying in the plague of 1646. On moving to Corstorphine she met with the devil “in the Broome” i.e. around modern Broomhall. She recanted her confession but was burned as a witch. Some of her accusers including the girl with worms in her mouth were also tried, convicted and burned.

By the middle part of the 18th century, the reputation of the Quarryholes finally began to improve. After a disastrous farming season in 1715 and relentless banditry and thieving of crops and cattle, the occupiers petitioned for the formation of the Leith Burlaw Court. Burlaw Courts were the lowest form of rural law enforcement, where disputes could be settled without going on to law courts. The farms of both Upper and Lower Quarryholes were entered into the books of the Burlaw Court. Quarrying was restarted at the Lower in the 1730s to provide local building stone but by 1766 those holes are recorded as having been filled in again. From that point on, the Lower Quarryholes was only ever a farm, and the OS town plans show it clearly .

The farm survived until the late 1920s, and an 1887 photograph of it exists in “The Story of Leith” by John Russell, surrounded by new tenements. On the opposite corner of Easter Road is the pub of Tamson’s Bar, which at one time was the Quarryholes Bar.

The farm survived as long as it did due to protracted development of the tenements between Dalmeny Street and Lorne Street, which can be seen in the below 1918 Bartholomew plan for the Post Office.

The late 1920s Corporation housing infill on Dickson Street, Dalmeny Street and Easter Road marks the site of the Lower Quarryholes farm. Funny to think that as late as 1920 there was a farm on Easter Road.

At the Upper Quarryholes, quarrying commenced again in 1761. The holes and the buildings can be seen in the corner of a panoramic sketch by Thomas Sandby from Arthur’s Seat looking towards Leith in about 1751, looking over the roof of Holyroodhouse Palace and its Abbey church.

And the Fergus and Robinson survey of 1759 clearly shows the Upper Quarryholes and circular objects that one might imagine are actual holes!

An 1801 feuing plan clearly shows the Upper Quarryholes farm buildings and at least one hole behind. The pencil lines give an idea of what was about to become of them.

The Upper Quarryholes were in the way of Heriot’s Hospital’s feuing plan for the Calton Hill and of Robert Stevenson’s schme for Regent Road and so they had to go. They would have been demolished around 1819.

Some of the landscape features of mounds and depressions in the London Road Gardens are said to be the remains of some of the quarrying around the Upper Quarryholes.

The Quarryholes, their quarries, holes and farms are long gone now, but the name does oddly linger on. If you walk to the bottom of Easter Road and look at a street sign outside the Persevere pub, you’ll see it pointing to Quarryholes. It’s not actually pointing to the site of the Quarryholes themselves but the name long persisted – both locally and officially – for the lands occupied by the Eastern Saw Mill, now the Leith Academy and its playing fields. A curiously low profile end of days for a placename that has both tumultuous and surprising (but brief) prominence in some key moments of Scottish history – and a thoroughly long and gruesome past.

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