#southleith — Public Fediverse posts

And on the subject of #witchcraft, again from #SouthLeith, now 2 May 1644 “Ordains to mak intimaone that none use any kind of torturing aganst any of yose who are suspect of witchcraft and for ye present in prisone.” #ScottishHistory #Edinburgh #17thCentury #SeventeenthCentury #kirkSession

And on the subject of #witchcraft, again from #SouthLeith, now 2 May 1644 “Ordains to mak intimaone that none use any kind of torturing aganst any of yose who are suspect of witchcraft and for ye present in prisone.” #ScottishHistory #Edinburgh #17thCentury #SeventeenthCentury #kirkSession

And on the subject of #witchcraft, again from #SouthLeith, now 2 May 1644 “Ordains to mak intimaone that none use any kind of torturing aganst any of yose who are suspect of witchcraft and for ye present in prisone.” #ScottishHistory #Edinburgh #17thCentury #SeventeenthCentury #kirkSession

And on the subject of #witchcraft, again from #SouthLeith, now 2 May 1644 “Ordains to mak intimaone that none use any kind of torturing aganst any of yose who are suspect of witchcraft and for ye present in prisone.” #ScottishHistory #Edinburgh #17thCentury #SeventeenthCentury #kirkSession

And on the subject of #witchcraft, again from #SouthLeith, now 2 May 1644 “Ordains to mak intimaone that none use any kind of torturing aganst any of yose who are suspect of witchcraft and for ye present in prisone.” #ScottishHistory #Edinburgh #17thCentury #SeventeenthCentury #kirkSession

Coastal Evolution: the thread about a view of Leith’s disappearing Sands and their industrial past

It’s not easy to get your head around where the shoreline was in Leith at a given time, the natural coast has been altered beyond all recognition by human activity in the last 500 years. Slowly and gradually at first, and then it marched northwards into the Forth in ever-expanding dock building activity in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. The best way to visualise it is, naturally, with a visualisation.

The earliest view showing the shoreline and Leith Sands that I can think of is a beautiful sketch by John Slezer made around 1693. The sands are on the right where the figures are; notice that already by this stage there is a prominent and solid masonry breakwater. This defends the Timberbush from the sea. From the French word Bourse – for exchange – this was where imported timber was sorted, stored and traded. The stacks of timber can be seen and as this was a very valuable commodity, and the principal import source for Scotland, it had to be defended from nature. The harbour pier is a mixture of stone, turning into timber. The buildings of the Shore are on the left, the prominent tower belonging to the King’s Wark, which was brought down not long after this picture was made.

One hundred and fifty years after John Slezer’s sketch was made, Dominic Serres painted the scene. Here the artist is positioned alongside the pier, looking south towards the Shore with the Tower of the “Windmill” at its head. We can see that the pier itself has been reinforced in a rather ramshackle manner by timers and masonry. Small boats have been brought ashore, with the catch of the day being sold directly to assembled hawkers on the sands. And in he foreground we see a supply of timber; it was the old custom to float it ashore on the tides before storing it in the Timber Bush. Leith Sands ran off to the left (east) from here.

While today the shoreline of Leith is almost entirely concrete and boulder breakwaters, with the little strip of sand strictly off limits behind the Dock security fences, it was not always this way.

One hundred and fifty years prior to this, this spectacular 1886 photo by Begbie (no, not that one, I mean Thomas Vernon Begbie) shows the palisade retaining wall on the sands, formed to level the ground behind for the coming of the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway to South Leith in 1835. On the left we see the industrial chimneys and kilns of the glass manufactory, gas works and chemical works.

It’s actually two photos, intended to make a panorama, and each was taken stereoscopically. I’ve joined them together and put them through a colourising app. Now, I usually avoid these apps as a matter of principle but on this occasion there is an obvious benefit in helping the features we see stand out.

Let’s take a look up closer. On the left we can see the glass bottle kilns or “cones” of the Edinburgh and Leith Glassworks. Glassmaking arrived in Leith with the English occupation by Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650s, establishing itself in the Citadel of that force. It really got going a century later when it moved across the river to South Leith. Beyond are the chimneys of the Leith Gas Works and the row of vertical tubes which were the condensers. The light coloured building on the right of those is the passenger building of South Leith Station. The various sidings for the goods yard fan off to the right.

In the middle, the proud looking fellow in his pale work clothes and a waist coat stands amongst the shoreline rocks and the whins. Note that the chemicals used in camera plates at this time were often insensitive to certain blues, and working clothes often come out looking pure white but were more likely to have been pale blue-grey denims. We see the Tower down on the Shore on the left, peeping out between the chimneys. By this time it was used as a signal station for communicating with ships entering the port, the masts of which can be seen in the distance. Behind our fellow are the goods sheds, timber sheds, railway wagons etc. of the busy dockland. Another group pose behind the palisade on his left.

To the right we see a family picnicking amongst the whins – this scrubby, bushy coastal rough ground of coastal grasses and gorse were the natural flora of the shoreline. Children, squatting down, are scratching about in the sand on the right. In the distance,”bathing machines” make their ponderous way in and out of the sea in the middle ground, and further away still is the dock breakwater and Martello Tower. The smudge of smoke might at first suggest that there is an occupant in the tower, but it was likely never armed or garrisoned at this time, and it’s probably a passing steamship.

The people of Leith have a long history of using the sands for leisure. The annual highlight of the Leith year (and a fixture in the Scottish calendar) was the Leith Races, which you can read about on their own thread.

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

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The thread about a view of 18th century Leith and its talented, young English artist

This thread was originally written and published in December 2021.

Here is a Now and Then transition that shows a view of Leith in the distance overlaid on the same vista these days. This particular original view is by the English artist Paul Sandby and is called “View of Leith from the East Road“. It was sketched here around 1750, making it one of the earliest accurate views of the town.

It’s possible to use the relative positions of the primary landmarks of old Leith – the steeple of South Leith Kirk , the first cone-shaped glass bottle kiln down on Salamander Street and in the distance the island of Inch Keith – to establish an fairly good approximate position from where Sandby sketched out his scene. However a modern building means we can’t get into quite the right place now.

My experience of looking at the detail of Sandby’s images of Edinburgh and Leith is that his draughtsmanship is exceptionally good and faithful to reality on the ground. There are occasions where he explicitly chooses not to do things like flip key details around to make a more dramatic or romantic scene, but it’s usually done in an obvious and deliberate way and was completely in line with his contemporaries. I think we can therefore be confident he was faithfully and accurately drawing the scene that he saw before him of Leith in 1751.

Our picture is an etching, with the detail composed of fine lines scratched into a wax-coated copper plate and then used to produce a print, and it was made by Sandby himself after his original watercolour. While watercolour was his primary medium, he was also a skilled etcher and printmaker. The original in the collection of the Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford. Sadly I cannot show you the colour original as it has not been digitised or included in print, but you can see from the below black and white scan that it is a perfect match.

There are multiple different versions of this view by Sandby. Below are two engravings, again by his own hand – engraving was another art in which he was particularly gifted and involved incising a copper printing plate with a cutting tool to use for printmaking. Version 1 seems to be for a large print with much detail and Version 2 was possibly for inclusion as a plate within a book judging by its simplification and cruder detail.

The Lowland part of William Roy’s “Great Map”, which was made just a few years after Sandby’s illustration shows the Kirk (1), the glass cone (2) and that windmill (3). Sandby is just off the Easter Road looking downhill probably somewhere off of the modern street of Thorntreeside

Zooming in on the detail in Engraving 1, to the right of the scene we can see the glass cone, the windmill (which was built early in the 18th century and was possibly in association with a saw mill and the farmhouse of Coatfield. The workers are bringing in the crops in the foreground. Sandby was keen on adding romantic elements such as these to his work – you can see that while they are included in the original watercolour he has varied and elaborated them here.

In the foreground, workers at leisure. A couple dance on the left (the main is in typical lowland garb), those on the right may be sitting down to eat, the central figure holds the stoup to drink from. The piper with kilt and tartan hose suggests a Government soldier, the Dress Act of 1746 having forbidden the wearing of “the clothes commonly called Highland clothes” by anyone apart from officers and soldiers. These gaily frolicking figures are absent from the watercolour, these were the sorts of detail a printmaker added to their work to make it more commercially attractive to a London market.

The young Paul Sandby was in Edinburgh for work and had a position as a cartographer to the Board of Ordnance under Lt. Col. David Watson at this time. He was usually based in a drawing office at Edinburgh Castle, but at times went out in the field in the Highlands to accompany Watson and make on-the-spot illustrations (such as that below) to illuminate the latter’s reports, so would have been used to being accompanied by soldiers. Watson, a son of the Lothians, came up with the idea for the military survey of Scotland and had appointed William Roy as its very capable cartographer. Sandby’s principal job was working under Roy as a cartographic draughtsman, turning the surveyor’s field observations and triangulations into a beautifully illustrated map. When you look at Roy’s Highland maps, you are looking at Sandby’s hand too.

But back to our engraving. To the left of the print is South Leith itself (North Leith was an entirely separate parish and jurisdiction at this time), with the distinctive Dutch steeple of the Kirk. The large house in the foreground, directly below the church may be that known as Whitfield House, it is approximately where Crown Street is in modern Leith. The line of buildings of the Kirkgate – the principal north-south street of auld Leith – is obvious, running off to the left from the Kirk. The tall building left of the Kirk may be the Tollbooth. The masts of the ships sitting in the port beyond are to the right of the Kirk.

A few doors down from the Tolbooth was a signal tower, seen in this engraving in “Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time” by Daniel Wilson, which may be the tall structure left of the steeple.

This signal tower wasn’t very well located, particularly as the taller tenements grew up around and it would be relocated to Robert Mylne’s late 17th century windmill at the head of the Shore in around 1805. We can see this structure in the below watercolour by John Clerk of Eldin; this is some time inbetween its abandonment as a windmill and its conversion to a signal tower, as it retains its original roof. When Sandy had been in Edinburgh, he fell in with the artistically inclined Clerk of Penicuik family, and the Adam family of architects who were in their circle. Sandy was a particular friend to John Clerk of Eldin and Robert Adam, and the three whiled away their youth travelling Midlothian and sketching ruinous castles together. John was a capable artist and printmaker in his own right, but was much influenced by Paul.

Daniel Wilson’s book also has the below engraving of South Leith Kirk with that steeple again. We can see just how closely Sandby’s image matches this. I have said it before and will say it again, his mix of artistic skill, a cartographers eye and a bit of military discipline means that Sandby’s landscapes are usually very accurate. These sorts of Dutch Steeple belfries were very common on both religious and civic buildings in post-Reformation East Scotland, and amongst others North Leith (St. Ninian’s), the Tron Kirk and the Holyrood Abbey church also had them.

An interesting thing about South Leith kirk is that it’s really only one half of a church; the nave (west bit) and its aisles. The chancel (east part), crossings and central tower were destroyed or damaged beyond repair in the Siege of 1560. If you squint at it on the contemporary siege map, you can see a central tower and the crossing. The sketch is a little bit squished, it was quite a long, low building in reality, twice as long as the church we have today.

Daniel Wilson’s engraving shows the rather crudely filled in arches at the east end of the nave (blue arrows) and the remains of the arches supporting the original tower and crossing roof (orange). The 1560 map and arch remains suggests a crossing only to the north.

Back to Paul Sandby, he made this rather nice sketch of his boss Lt. Col David Watson around this time. Watson was son of Thomas Watson of Muirhouse and a seasoned campaigner, present at the battles of Dettingen, Fontenoy and Culloden. It was Watson who picked up General Wade’s road and fortification building scheme after the 1745 Jacobite rising and massively extended it. He spent eight and a half years in the Highlands on this project, which would spawn Roy’s Military Survey and give us those beautiful and insightful maps of most of Scotland, the first really accurate topographic survey of the country.

This was not the only panorama that Sandby made of Leith, he made a watercolour with the town in the distance in 1747, probably painted from the vicinity of the old village of Broughton. Given that the Ashmoleon collection explicitly forbid any sharing of their images in any form, you’ll have to go and take a look on their site. In another thread, we look at another remarkably detailed and accurate Sandby illustration, painted from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and looking north towards Leith over the lands were the New Town would follow a few decades later.

Paul Sandby’s work heavily influenced many British watercolour artists who would follow. The Scottish artist Alexander Carse made a similarly pastoral view of South Leith from the Easter Road around 20-30 years after Sandby. Again we see workers at rest and play, set in a rural landscape but one that is not far removed from the urban and from creeping industrialisation.

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.