#sciennes — Public Fediverse posts

The thread about the Tenth Day of Christmas; Lord Russell Place and why the City honoured this name

This thread was originally written and published in January 2020.

This part in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread is preceded by a post about Lady Fife’s House, Well and Brae.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Lord Russell. Why did I pick Lord Russell? Well, despite Edinburgh being the place to be for landed Lords for many a century, and despite there being an infinite number of streets named after the Lord of this or that, there’s actually only a single street address in the city that actually has the word “Lord” in it. That is Lord Russell Place in Sciennes.

Lord Russell Place

Lord Russell refers to John Russell, 1st Earl Russell (1792-1878) who was British Prime Minister from 1846-52 and again from 1865-66. Russell was English but attended Edinburgh University between 1809-1812 (although he never graduated, being frequently in ill health).

Lord John Russell in 1861

In 1830, he was made the Paymaster of the Forces in the government of the Earl Grey. In this position he became a principal leader of the Great Reform Act of 1832. The building was named for Russell when it was built in 1833 as a mark of respect for this. He was not the only politician so commemorated by the city for this reason; Earl Grey, had a section of Lothian Road named for him as Earl Grey Street. Somewhat ironically, this was renamed from Wellington Street and it was the Duke of Wellington himself, hero of Waterloo, who had lead the opposition to the Reform Act. In 1834, Earl Grey was made a Free Burgess of the City and was treated to a celebratory dinner in a pavilion constructed the grounds of the High School. A similar honour was given to Lord Russell in 1845.

An 1831 cartoon of Russell as the man to treat the country’s ills. The men in the background are Tory MPs for “rotten boroughs”, requiring to be purged by Russell. “Grey’s Renovating Pills” in the tin between his legs refers to Prime Minister Earl Grey.

Notice that I’ve referred to Lord Russell Place as a “street address”; it is not a street in itself. Rather, it’s an example of the traditional Edinburgh practice of giving rows or blocks of buildings along the principal streets different addresses from the actual street (there’s a whole thread about that practice here if you are interested). Lord Russell Place forms only a short section on one side of Causewayside, with the block opposite being Summerhall Place. It was initially built as just the single building at the head of a gushet* of land where Causewayside met the ancient route from St. Giles Cathedral to the convent of St. Catherine of Sienna at Sciennes (* = Gushet, a Scots term for a triangular portion of land). This land is shown as being owned by a Mr Moodie in a town plan of 1817 and the building was expanded in 1859 in a similar style to complete a row as far as Sciennes Place.

Lord Russell Place highlighted on the 1893 OS Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Lord Russell Place would be an otherwise unremarkable Georgian block in a city of Georgian blocks, but its distinctive feature is the rounded bow window, appearing rather like a tower, on its northern façade. It is marred somewhat these days by the false windows – which were included to maintain a classical symmetry – in 2 of the 5 bays having lost their paint. The block was listed Category B in 1970.

The Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread continues in Portobello, with a post about Pipe Street.

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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Political sectarianism and redoubtable mothers: the thread about the Sciennes School Strike of 1925

As often seems to happen, I start off reading a little bit about one thing and then fall unwittingly yet compliantly down a deep rabbit hole with all kinds of unexpected tangents. So let’s unravel a bit of the Sciennes School Strike of 1925.

Sciennes, if you don’t know, is a neighbourhood in Edinburgh. You pronounce it to rhyme with machines (it’s a Scottish corruption of Sienna, after a convent that long ago stood here) and it is home to a school of the same name. To get to the root of our story we go back to 1872, when the Education (Scotland) Act of that year brought responsibility for mandatory schooling in Scotland under the control of local School Boards. For the Burgh of the City of Edinburgh (the formal name of the city) this was the Edinburgh School Board.

The roundel of the Edinburgh School Board, “the female figure of education” dispensing knowledge to the young. Dean Public School, one of the ESB’s first new schools after the 1872 act. © Self

Most of the existing schools at that time were either church, parish or charitably provided and those of the Presbyterian churches (that is the majority of all churches in Scotland at that time) and parishes were transferred directly to the School Boards. Most of these facilities were too small and found to be inadequate as teaching spaces for modern methods, so a crash building programme was initiated. Sciennes School was a product of this program, completed in 1892. Other public schools in the Southside of Edinburgh at the time included the 1877 Bristo School on the long demolished part of Marshall Street, Causewayside School on that street and later Preston Street school of 1896 on the east part of that street.

Sciennes Primary School, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Stephencdickson

Board schools, while largely Protestant in outlook, were strictly speaking non-denominational and there was no direct church control (although the churches had a reserved seat in the board’s membership). Crucially to what would happen in the future though, Catholic schools were not covered by the 1872 act and remained in control of that church, with the Scottish Episcopal Church also choosing to remain independent at this time, fearing the erosion of their denominational, religious education. To provide for a Catholic education in central Edinburgh therefore that Church set up a school, St. Columba’s. It moved around a bit, repeatedly outgrowing a series of unsuitable premises, before settling in a converted townhouse at 81 Newington Road. You can still see where the sign once was.

81 Newington Road, you can see where the sign would have been above the central window.

Edinburgh’s Catholic population was growing quite rapidly at the time with immigration into the city centre from both Ireland and Italy. And then came the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act, which brought the Catholic schools into control of the state sector, with the School Boards rationalised into larger local Education Authorities, with wider responsibilities. Like the old School Board, the Edinburgh Education Authority (EEA) was directly elected by popular ballot and was outwith direct control of the City Corporation or any church; although a system of proportional representation meant a balance of Presbyterian, Episcopal and Catholic members had reserved places on its board. The new authority was unimpressed by the size and quality of the facilities it had inherited off the R. C. Church (actually, it bought them off them under the provisions of the 1918 act) so set about trying to find a better home for St. Columba’s.

The post-WW1 economic slump meant there wasn’t the money to go around to build a new school – particularly a minority school – so the EEA looked to rationalise its public schools in the Southside, which it found had an excess of capacity, and make one of them into a new Catholic school. The plan seemed simple enough; move St. Columba’s to the half-empty Causewayside School and transfer that school’s roll to Sciennes, Bristo or Preston Street schools, whichever alternative was closest to children’s homes.

Causewayside School, architectural elevation by Robert Rowand Anderson, which would later become St. Columba’s

After the numbers were crunched, 154 children were to be relocated from Causewayside to Sciennes, 101 to Preston Street and 66 to Bristo. 291 children were to transfer in turn from St. Columba’s into its new home and 81 Newington Road would be disposed of. All simple enough and making better use of the Authority’s resources, so it should be relatively uncontroversial administrative change, yes?

No. What happened next was the emergent Scottish Protestant League decided to wade into things and try and make it a wedge issue – stirred up in part by local lawyer, political dabbler and green inker, Robert Sterling Craig Esq SSC, known as Sterling Craig. Sterling Craig was nominally a Liberal and therefore opposed to any place for religious education in schools, but it seems clear from his writing and speaking on the subject that he also had a clear anti-Catholic bent. When the Authority announced its decision towards the end of the school term in June 1924 he and a local parish councillor, Mrs Inglis Clark, organised a public meeting in protest “in the strongest way“.

What followed next was a rather predictable series of conflicting arguments by Sterling Craig and Clark, which began to descend into the disingenuous, e.g. the alternatives would be too far, causing 2 or 3 mile walks to school (Sciennes and Preston Street were less than 500m away). The EEA was accused of inflating the roll of St. Columba’s by “stuffing” it with children from the Catholic Home (an orphanage), a claim the Authority flat out denied: they claimed 477 children were being displaced – the Authority said it was 321. Sterling Craig simultaneously claimed that Causewayside was a non-denominational school (it was) but also “Protestant” (it wasn’t, although likely much of the school roll was). His loud and authoritative voice drowned out the views and representations of the parents and children impacted by this. He had previously sat on the Edinburgh School Board and was standing for the upcoming Edinburgh Education Authority election and decided to make this issue a key plank of his campaign. His letters to the Scotsman refer to “the Roman Catholics” and “the Roman Catholic Children” in a very othering tone – they are quite unpleasant to read in places with retrospect.

Sterling Craig was upset that a “central” school (i.e. one serving a wide rather than strictly local catchment) was being located in the Southside of the city; that children would be bused-in (actually, trammed) at the Authority’s expense and that they would be given school meals at the EEA‘s expense (at this time most school children went home for their lunch time) – despite these all being provisions in line with the 1918 act and therefore a legal obligation for the authority. To boil his arguments down to a single sentence, they would be: I’m not anti-Catholic, but can’t they just go some place else? To this extent he suggested wholly inadequate facilities at Old St. Patrick’s in the Canongate (the Authority pointed out that they didn’t own these and so would have to buy and renovate them at its own expense). It was all very not from round here and he and his allies in Mrs Inglis Clark and others began to go rather seriously down the route of sectarian scaremongering. However the EEA, to its credit, stuck to its plans and even managed to get most of the parents would would be impacted by the changes on side. The nay-sayers were not placated however and together with the nascent Scottish Protestant League (SPL) under Alexander Ratcliffe and a number of local Presbyterian churchmen, they organised a “Great Protestant Rally” at the Livingstone Hall on South Clerk Street in January 1925, which was attended by around 500.

Advert for the Great Protestant Rally, Edinburgh Evening News, 3rd January 1925

The meeting denounced the Education Authority as “traitors” and as a result the SPL – which claimed itself apolitical – and Sterling Craig agreed on a platform of trying to take over the Education Authority at the upcoming elections and campaign for repeal those provisions of the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act that they disliked; namely the state provision of R. C. education. Sterling Craig’s words were reported as “the only thing that prevented ‘the Catholics’ walking back to St. Columba’s and the old school going back to Causewayside was the laziness of the ratepayers” (if only people would turn out and vote for him, he would sort it out).

1935 reprint of The Protestant Advocate in Ratcliffe’s own newspaper, the Protestant Vanguard

In case you didn’t realise it by the way – 1920s and 30s Edinburgh local politics was quite a hotbed of anti-Catholicism. The Protestant League stood seven candidates in the 1925 Authority election, Sterling Craig stood himself as an independent. Just one of the those candidates – Alexander Ratcliffe (who styled himself “Scotland’s Modern John Knox” and went as far as to refer in public to St. Columba’s as “the now misnamed St. Columba’s“) – was elected, as was Sterling Craig. Ratcliffe soon turned his ire to the opening of a Carmelite Convent in the city before getting altogether a bit bored of Edinburgh local politics. He would move to Glasgow where he made some inroads with the SPL in that Corporation’s elections of 1931, exploiting and stoking that city’s long-standing sectarian tensions. In Edinburgh it was to be the Protestant Action Society under John Cormack that would later take up the anti-Catholic political mantle. As a party held together purely by a common hatred, it was inevitable that the SPL would eventually become unstable. It split with the Ulster Protestant League in 1933 when Ratcliffe’s wife Mary and another SPL member attacked and defaced a (factually correct) painting in the Northern Irish parliament that showed the Pope celebrating William of Orange’s victory at the Boyne

William III, the Duke of Schomberg, and the Pope (top left, blessing the Protestant monarch from a cloud), by Pieter van der Meulen, c. 1690

After falling out with the UPL, the SPL itself fell apart due to irreconcilable internal divisions. The Scottish protestant mainstream distanced itself from the increasingly extremist and unpredictable Alexander Ratcliffe. The man who had started his political life at the Edinburgh Education Authority moved on to dabbling with the Scottish fascists, who in turn kicked him out as being too extreme for even them. He has been described as “one of the very first Holocaust deniers in the country and perhaps even the world“. He was an extreme anti-Catholic and anti-Semite to his core who thought that Hitler and Mussolini were in league with the Pope to smash Protestantism… This conflicting and thoroughly distasteful man died at his home in Glasgow in 1947.

A wartime anti-Semitic pamphlet issued by Alexander Ratcliffe

But back to Edinburgh and back to 1925, when St Columba’s opened its doors after the summer holidays, the former pupils of Causewayside School instead made their way to Sciennes, Preston Street and Bristo schools. How did this end up in a strike? Well what happened was that – in true local authority style – after winning parents over to its controversial plans the Education Authority went back on its assurances and rightly aggrieved a lot of parents. Sciennes, it said, was actually too full and so 150 or so children who had just recently been settled in at Sciennes would instead need to go to Bristo School.

Bristo Public School on Marshall Street. © Edinburgh City Libraries

This poured salt on a wound that had not yet had any chance to heal and the mothers of the Southside were having none of it. Official phraseology such as “arriving at a more equitable distribution of scholars” just made things even worse. The problem was not just the repeated relocation of children, it was where they were to be moved to. Bristo was notoriously small and dark and dingy on the inside and as you can see from the aerial photo below it had a tiny playground that was penned in on all sides by tall tenements. Furthermore, it was fundamentally on the wrong side of the (tram) tracks for many parents.

Bristo Public School from the air – it is the building in the centre with the flat roof to the rear and the corner tower. You can see how penned in the playground at the back was, and how many of the school windows were in the shadow of neighbouring tenements. From Britain From Above

Without the distraction of Sterling Craig or Mrs Inglis Clark and their anti-Catholic agenda, the mothers of the affected children quickly formed themselves into an effective deputation to the Education Authority. They literally marched strait there and beat on the door – turning up at its offices on Castle Terrace on September 2nd 1925 to demand an audience. For good measure, a flying squad was also send to the home of the Authority’s chairman – Councillor P. H. Allan – to wait for him in case he was there. When it became clear that the Authority was not for budging the mothers organised a public meeting on September 4th, packing out the Nicolson Square public hall. Councillor Mrs Adam Millar tried to cool things down but only inflamed the situation by saying it was not the Authority’s fault but the fault of parents as they had voted for the same EEA (or hadn’t bothered; turnout for the previous election was only around 20%). At the meeting the mothers of around 110 of the affected children agreed to stop sending them to school entirely if they could not send them to Sciennes. The Sciennes School Strike had begun.

Councillor P. H. Allan, Chairman of the Education Authority

On September 8th it was reported there were rumours that the strike would spread as a result of some children from Craiglockhart, Roseburn and Gorgie schools being dispersed to Dalry in the name of a “more equitable distribution of scholars“. The strike did not end up spreading but neither did it go away. The Authority tried to offer an olive branch and say children from the Buccleuch Street area could stay at Sciennes, however those from George Square would still have to go to Bristo. Whether this attempt at strikebreaking was a deliberate ploy to divide and conquer their opposition is unclear, but it failed. By September 15th, the 3rd week of the strike, it was still ongoing with 55 children remaining out of school. The mothers caused uproar in the Authority board room by turning up en masse with their children in tow and “infants in their arms“. But they did have sympathisers on the Authority and Mrs Swan Brunton* spoke out in their favour. At a deadlock, the Authority did what Authorities do best when they don’t know what to do and conceded to set up a Special Sub-Committee on School Congestion to look into the matter further.

Janet Swan Brunton 1882 – 1932. * = The redoubtable Mrs Swan Brunton JP, a suffragette of the Scottish Cooperative Women’s Guild. In 1928 she became only the 5th woman elected to the Corporation of Edinburgh, as a Labour member. She died suddenly in 1932 aged 50, in Glasgow at a meeting of the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society, and was buried in North Merchiston Cemetery

September 21st. No resolution was in sight, 58 children were on strike from Sciennes and in total 86 across the city were. On September 24th the Scotsman reported that the Education Authority declared the strike had been broken and most of the children had returned to the schools it had allocated them to. The next day, September 25th, they had to print something of a retraction; the children had not in fact gone back to school and were still on strike. At a public meeting of ratepayers it had been agreed that a general strike of children should be called for in the Central District. Come September 26th the Authority remained unmoved, issuing a statement that it had acted in accordance with its statutory obligations and that if the 42 children on strike were not sent to school then they would start taking legal action to enforce it. But still the strike was not broken and so one month into the walkout, on October 6th, the Authority held an exceptional meeting. Mrs Swan Brunton implored her colleagues to use their common sense and allow the 40 children to go back to Sciennes as they had been promised, with Mrs Mclaren speaking in support. Unfortunately, Mrs Swan Brunton’s motion, seconded by Mrs Mclaren, was voted down. Alexander Ratcliffe blamed the Catholics as usual.

October 14th, five weeks in and the strike dragged on. It was suggested at an Authority meeting that if only the Corporation would repave the street outside Bristo School with wooden setts that the noise of traffic that affected it would be reduced sufficiently to entice the strikers to attend. Chairman Allan tried to force through a resolution to this effect but Mrs Swan Brunton challenged the count on the grounds that it had not reached a quorum of three quarters of members. She prevailed this time and the meeting then collapsed into farce and had to be adjourned. The Authority tried again the next week. One typically bureaucratic proposal that came out of this was to set up yet another sub-committee – the Special Committee on School Areas. Alexander Ratcliffe yet again agitated against “the Catholics” and also this time the Episcopalians, supported by Sterling Craig as seconder. It was agreed to set up the sub-committee and spent the rest of the meeting was spent listening to the extremist ramblings of Ratcliffe .

Eight weeks in on October 26th another meeting was held by the Education Authority. It lasted precisely two minutes before again collapsing into chaos when the chairman over-rode Mrs Swan Brunton’s motion for resolution. He left to the mothers in the gallery crying “Shame!” November 2nd. Week 9. The Chairman called a private meeting restricted to a sub-set of members of the Authority, with the mothers forced to wait outside the offices. The Authority could not bring itself to publicly concede but fundamentally capitulated when it agreed that the 46 children who had been moved from Sciennes to Bristo could instead have their pick of Castlehill, Preston Street, Tollcross or St. Leonard’s schools.

Castlehill School, now offering a very different sort of education as the Scotch Whisky Experience

The mothers decided as one that they would send their children to Preston Street. They were true to their word, and 37 mothers and 46 children arrived at the school door the very next day, November 3rd, exactly 2 months from the start of the strike. The strike was over. Almost: the Authority meeting had ended so late in the day that nobody had bothered to write to the Headteacher at Preston Street to inform them of the decision! The school refused to admit the children and sent them away. It was not until November 4th that the Head was satisfied with the paperwork and the children were admitted to Preston Street School. The Great Sciennes School Strike of 1925 was finally over.

Preston Street School, CC-BY-SA Kim Traynor

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 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.

St. Catherine of Siena, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

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.

The ruins of Sciennes convent, from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant. Probably in use as a barn at this time.Another view of the same ruins, looking north east towards Salisbury Crags in the distance. From the Hutton Drawings, vol. 2, CC-BY-SA 4.0 National Library of Scotland

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.

Kirkwood’s 1817 Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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!

Kirkwood’s 1817 Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

Ainslie’s 1804 Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

Ainslie’s own Plan of 1804, showing the villa plots along the south of the Meadows. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

Adam Ferguson in 1781, by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

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.

Sciennes Hill House. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

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.

The rear of Sciennes Hill House is now the front.

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

Plaque on Sciennes Hill House. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Kim Traynor

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 original (restored) facade of Sciennes Hill House. CC-BY-SA 2.0 Kim Traynor

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.

Sciennes Hill House in 1891, from “The Literary Landmarks of Edinburgh”in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.

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 St. Katherine’s Works. Note the malt kiln cupola to the right of the large chimney, from the West Sciennes Distillery. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

1850s Post Office Directory entry for the Glen Sciennes distillery.

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.

Sciennes Court, 1852 by William Channing © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret