#toponymy — Public Fediverse posts

@lproven #toponymy

(6/6) Modest spelling/pronunciation changes for country names, like #Nauru to #Naoero, usually don't result in a change in #Chinese, which adopts foreign names by picking eloquent full-syllable symbols with loosely similar pronunciations, since it doesn't have individual letters.

#geography #toponymy #linguistics #languages #micronesia #geopolitics #world #international

@geography @geopolitics @cartography

(5/6) #Nauru's change of official international name to #Naoero isn't just for English: Official name at #UnitedNations has also been changed in UN official languages #Spanish, #French, #Russia, and #Arabic (but not #Chinese - see below):

https://unterm.un.org/unterm2/en/view/d9b9e1d7-f1fa-4b1d-a396-b686c5c27806

#linguistics #geography #international #politics #UnitedNations #langauges #toponymy

@geography @geopolitics @cartography

(4/6) Govt also announced that the country's 3-letter code is changing from NRU for " #Nauru" to NRO for " #Naoero". However, world authority on country codes #ISO hasn't yet published such a change (it's normal for this to take months): https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:NR

#geography #namechange #toponymy #standards #international

@geography @geopolitics @cartography

(3/6) UN web page says #Nauru "informed the United Nations" of name change to #Naoero on June 26 (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states/naoero), but UN database seems to say it received notice July 6, for name change effective June 26 (https://unterm.un.org/unterm2/en/view/d9b9e1d7-f1fa-4b1d-a396-b686c5c27806)

#geography #namechange #toponymy #geopolitics #unitednations #standards

@geography @geopolitics @cartography

(1/6) Republic of #Nauru govt announces that change of country name to #Naoero is complete, after deciding no #referendum necessary after May 2026 constitutional amendment.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/836342/nauru-officially-changes-name-to-naoero-after-thoughtful-deliberation-bypassing-referendum

#geography #geopolitics #oceania #toponymy #namechange #microstates #micronesia #islands #pacific @geography @geopolitics @cartography

Now that #CaboVerde's #WorldCup run is complete, it's time you figured out why some people call it that and others call it "Cape Verde":

https://www.polgeonow.com/2014/01/icymi-cape-verdes-name-change.html (from 2014)

#CapeVerde #Fıfaworldcup #geography #toponymy #namechange #Portuguese #FIFA #sports #soccer #football #Africa #islands #FIFA2026 #fifa26 #worldcup26 #2026worldcup @geography @geopolitics

Abhainn, allt, uisge: Mar a tha a’ Ghàidhlig a’ sruthadh tron chruth-tire
River, stream, water: How Gaelic flows through the landscape
19 September, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh – free

Gaelic names for Scotland’s rivers & burns reveal reveal the spread of Gaelic across Scotland, & how medieval people understood their landscape

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/river-stream-water-how-gaelic-flows-through-the-landscape-tickets-1992814761597

#Scottish #Scotland #toponymy #placenames #Gaidhlig #Gaelic #medieval

Hey Ottawans 👋

Do you know where I can find the origin of your street names? I want to know the story behind “Data Centre Rd” and “Tremblay Rd”
- - -
Yo les Ottaviens•iennes 👋

Savez-vous où je peux trouver l’origine de votre toponymie? Je veux connaître l’histoire derrière « ch. Data Centre » et « ch. Tremblay »

#Ottawa #Toponymy #Toponymie

#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

Our new article is now published in the Journal of Geography, Politics and Society. A small but telling case: how one signature on Air Force One turned “Gulf of Mexico” into “Gulf of America” — and a new headache for authors and editors, choosing between scientific facts and political pressure:

:doi: https://doi.org/10.26881/jpgs.2025.4.05

#GulfOfAmerica #AcademicFreedom #Toponymy #ResearchIntegrity #ScienceAndPolitics

#30DayMapChallenge Day 24: Places and their names 🌍

I mapped toponyms linked to medieval cope contracts: agreements that allowed settlers to drain and farm peatlands.

Names ending in ‑cop, ‑koop, or ‑kop all trace back to these "ontginningen". The naming tradition even spread to northern Germany and Poland.

#Cartography #Toponymy #GIS #History #Maps #QGIS

#Egypt's New Administrative Capital has rebranded itself as "The New Capital". Officially, #Cairo is no longer the country's capital, though some government bodies still operate from there.

https://egyptianstreets.com/2025/11/09/egypts-new-administrative-capital-officially-renamed-the-new-capital/ #geography #toponymy #worldmap #rename #MiddleEast #Africa @geography @geopolitics

🔥🇦🇿Azerbaijan threatens to rename Russian cities (e.g., Kaliningrad to Königsberg) if TASS doesn't correct Armenian toponyms for Azerbaijani cities. #Azerbaijan #Toponymy

#ISO just updated its "country codes" database to spell "The Bahamas" with a capital T. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:BS

The change comes at request of country's govt, made to #UnitedNations (UN) in April 2025: https://unterm.un.org/unterm2/en/view/eaa3fead-a98e-4eb4-ae3b-5d0c7e167784

#TheBahamas #Bahamas #toponymy #the #geography #spelling #Caribbean @geography #placenames #names

How often does it happen that a place takes name from a company that occupies it? In #Warsaw, a whole city district of Ursus was named after a company that used to have a gigantic mechanical factory here, manufacturing tractors and other vehicles for about a hundred years. It had a few different names before that.

And yes, name comes from Latin "ursus", meaning bear.

#linguistics #toponymy

World’s largest “burg,” “burgh,” or “bourg” suffix cities – 2025 REW

By far the longest and most geographically diverse list to date identifies cities and towns of 10,000 residents or more whose name contains the suffix of “burg,” “burgh,” or “bourg.”  Cities/towns for four (4) continents are represented – Europe, North America, Africa, and Yekaterinburg, Russia, which is located east of the Ural Mountains and therefore is considered to be situated in Asia.

Given the number of places represented, it is somewhat surprising that variations of Middle(el)burg and New(Neu)burg lead the list with but four (4) examples each, followed by Petersburg and Pittsburg(h) with three (3) cities/towns each.

The updated list now includes the most recent population estimates (if known) and the new ranking for each city. Those that have changed position show the extent of the change in parenthesis. Since the original December 2019 post, the following cities have moved the most positions up or down on the list:

Upward:

1. Lichtenburg, South Africa +43
2. Fouriesburg, South Africa +30 (due to a numerical transposing error in 2019)
3. Lydenburg, South Africa +28
4. Middelburg, Mpumalanga, South Africa +18
5. Rexburg, Idaho +15
6. Brownsburg, Indiana +12

Downward

1. Korneuburg, Austria -10
2. ( tie)Vicksburg, Mississippi and Ellensburg, Washington – 9 each

Peace!

——-

1. Johannesburg, South Africa = 5,635,127 (2019) > 6,444,580 (2025 est.) #1 in 2025
2. Saint Petersburg, Russia = 5,351,935 (2018 est.) > 5,597,340 (2025 est.) #2
3. Hamburg, Germany = 1,822,445 (2018) > 1,787,710 (2025 est.) #3
4. Yekaterinburg, Russia = 1,468,833 (2018 est.) > 1,537,000 (2025 est.)  #4
5. Rustenburg, South Africa = 626,522 (2016) > 607,955 (2025 est.) #5
6. Gothenburg, Sweden = 575,597 (2018) > 643,993 (2025 est.) #6
7. Orenburg, Russia = 564,773 (2018 est.) > 570,039 (2025 est.) #7
8. Edinburgh, Scotland, UK = 518,500 (2018) > 563,564 (2025 est.) #8
9. Duisburg, Germany = 498,590 (2018) > 528,993 (2025 est.) #10 (-1)
10. Randburg, South Africa = 337,053 (2011) — Now part of Johannesburg.**
11. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania = 301,048 (2018 est.) > 303,572 (2025 est.) #14 (-3)
12. Augsburg, Germany = 295,135 (2018) > 338,747 (2025 est.) #13 (-1)
13. Strasbourg, France = 279,284 (2016) > 489,811 (2025 est.) #11 (+2)
14. St. Petersburg, Florida = 265,098 (2018 est.) > 266, 411 (2025 est.) #16 (-2)
15. Boksburg, South Africa = 260,321 (2011) — Now part of Ekurhuleni.**
16. Magdeburg, Germany = 238,697 (2018) > 255,790 (2025 est.) #17 (-1)
17. Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany = 230,241 (2018) > 274,408 (2025 est.) #15 (+2)
18. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa = 223,448 (2011) > 560,879 (2025 est.) #9 (+9)
19. Oldenburg, Germany = 163,210 (2018) > 181,461 (2025 est.) #18 (+1)
20. Salzburg, Austria = 153,377 (2018) > 152,675 (2025 est.) #21 (-1)
21. Sasolburg, South Africa = 153,038 (2011) > 179,425 (2025 est.) #19 (+2)
22. Regensburg, Germany = 152,610 (2018) > 174,014 (2025 est.) #20 (+2)
23. Würzburg, Germany = 127,880 (2018) > 126,325 (2025 est.) #24 (-1)
24. Wolfsburg, Germany = 124,151 (2018) > 134,809 (2025 est.) #23 (+1)
25. Luxembourg City, Luxembourg = 116,323 (2018) > 136,208 (2025) #22 (+3)
26. Rustenburg, South Africa = 104,612 (2011) (repeat)
27. Edinburg, Texas = 98,665 (2018 est.) > 109,191 (2025 est.) #25 (+2)
28. Ludwigsburg, Germany = 93,499 (2018) > 94,157 (2022 est.) #27 (+1)
29. Flensburg, Germany = 89,504 (2018) > 92,550 (2022 est.) #28 (+1)
30. Middelburg, Mpumalanga, South Africa = 87,348 (2011) > 388,907 (2025 est.) #12 (+18)
31. Lynchburg, Virginia = 82,126 (2018 est.) > 79,905 (2025 est.) #30 (+1)
32. Marburg, Germany = 76,851 (2018) > 77,845 (2022 est.) #31 (+1)
33. Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany = 73,939 (2023 est.) – Thank you, Mike H.! #35 (-2)
34. Schaumburg, Illinois = 73,509 (2018 est.) > 73,970 (2025 est.) #34
35. Pittsburg, California = 72,437 (2018 est.) > 75,435 (2025 est.) #33 (+2)
36. Aschaffenburg, Germany = 70,527 (2018) > 72,918 (2025 est.) #36
37. Gaithersburg, Maryland = 68,289 (2018 est.) > 69,615 (2025 est.) #37
38. Neubrandenburg, Germany = 64,086 (2018) > 64,390 (2023 est.) #38
39. Offenburg, Germany = 59,646 (2018) > 61,670 (2022 est.) #39
40. Queensburgh, South Africa = 54,846 (2011) — no update #40
41. Harrisonburg, Virginia = 54,033 (2018 est.) > 50,666 (2025 est.) #42 (-1)
42. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania = 49,229 (2018 est.) > 49,957 (2025 est.) #43 (-1)
43. Middelburg, Netherlands = 48,265 (2017) > 48,964 (2021 est.) #44 (-1)
44. Hattiesburg, Mississippi = 45,951 (2018 est.) > 48,199 (2025 est.) #45 (-1)
45. Blacksburg, Virginia = 44,678 (2018 est.) > 45,972 (2025 est.) #47 (-2)
46. Oranienburg, Germany = 44,512 (2018) > 47,752 (2022 est.) #46
47. Siegburg, Germany = 41,463 (2018) > 42,274 (2023 est.) #48 (-1)
48. Coburg, Germany = 41,249 (2018) > 42,139 (2023 est.) #49 (-1)
49. Ficksburg, South Africa = 41,248 (2011) > 50,998 (2025 est.) #41 (+8)
50. Fitchburg, Massachusetts = 40,882 (2018 est.) > 41,515 (2025 est.) #50
51. Fribourg, Switzerland = 38,358 (2018) — no update #55 (-4)
52. Reynoldsburg, Ohio = 38,278 (2018 est.) > 41,333 (2025 est.) #51 (+1)
53. Neu-Isenburg, Germany = 37,668 (2018) > 39,287 (2022 est.) #54 (-1)
54. Papenburg, Germany = 37,579 (2018) > 38,556 (2022 est.) #55 (-1)
55. Lydenburg, South Africa = 37,258 (2011) > 94,059 (2025 est.) #27 (+28)
56. Spartanburg, South Carolina = 37,013 (2010) > 39,328 (2025 est.) #53 (+3)
57. Cloppenburg,Germany = 34,913 (2018) > 37,056 (2022 est.) #56 (+1)
58. Merseburg, Germany = 34,080 (2018) > 34,335 (2022 est.) #58
59. Ahrensburg, Germany = 33,472 (2018) > 34,509 (2022 est.) #57 (+2)
60. Bernburg, Germany = 32,674 (2018) > 32,261 (2022 est.)b #63 (-3)
61. Naumburg, Germany = 32,402 (2018) > 32,289 (2022 est.) #62 (-1)
62. Petersburg, Virginia = 31,567 (2018 est.) > 33,251 (2025 est.) #60 (+2)
63. Nienburg, Lower Saxony, Germany = 31,550 (2018) > 32,126 (2022 est.) #64 (-1)
64. Fitchburg, Wisconsin = 30,170 (2018 est.) > 33,142 (2025 est.) #61 (+3)
65. Parkersburg, West Virginia = 29,675 (2018 est.) > 28,599 (2025 est.) #67 (-2)
66. Fredericksburg, Virginia = 29,144 (2018 est.) > 29,552 (2025 est.) #66
67. Rexburg, Idaho = 28,687 (2018 est.) > 40,344 (2025 est.) #52 (+15)
68. Rendsburg, Germany = 28,470 (2018) > 29,743 (2022 est.) #65 (+3)
69. Newburgh, New York = 28,164 (2018 est.) > 27,880 (2025 est.) #68 (+1)
70. Klosterneuburg, Austria = 26,466 (2015) > 27,726 (2025 est.) #69 (+1)
71. Brownsburg, Indiana = 26,367 (2018 est.) > 34,296 (2025 est.) #59 (+12)
72. Lichtenburg, South Africa = 26,338 (2011) > 85,943 (2025 est.) #29 (+43)
73. Quedlinburg, Germany = 23,989 (2018) > 23,313 (2022 est.) #76 (-3)
74. Bedburg, Germany = 23,531 (2018) > 25,196 (2023 est.) #70 (-4)
75. Waldkraiburg, Germany = 23,442 (2018) > 24,604 (2023 est.) #72 (+3)
76. Roseburg, Oregon = 23,379 (2018 est.) > 23,983 (2025 est.) #73 (+3)
77. Dillenburg, Germany = 23,365 (2018) > 23,480 (2022 est.) #74 (+3)
78. Warburg, Germany = 23,079 (2018) > 23,317 (2023 est.) #75 (+3)
79. Christiansburg, Virginia = 22,505 (2018 est.) > 22,024 (2025 est.) #79
80. Vicksburg, Mississippi = 22,136 (2018 est.) > 19,343 (2025 est.) #89 (-9)
81. Bad Harzburg, Germany = 21,945 (2018) > 21,738 (2022 est.) #81
82. Amherstburg, Ontario = 21,936 (2016) > 24,877 (2025 est.) #71 (+9)
83. Rotenburg an der Wümme, Germany = 21,798 (2018) > 22,656 (2022 est.) #77 (+6)
84. Vryburg, South Africa = 21,182 (2011) — no update #82 (+2)
85. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania = 21,029 (2018 est.) > 22,484 (2025 est.) #78 (+7)
86. Ellensburg, Washington = 20,977 (2018 est.) > 18,233 (2025 est.) #95 (-9)
87. Günzburg, Germany = 20,707 (2018) > 21,865 (2023 est.) #80 (+7)
88. Pittsburg, Kansas = 20,178 (2018 est.) > 20,424 (2025 est.) #83 (+5)
89. Miamisburg, Ohio = 19,941 (2018 est.) > 19,748 (2025 est.) #86 (+3)
90. Blankenburg, Germany = 19,817 (2018) > 19,161 (2022 est.) #90
91. Plattsburgh, New York = 19,438 (2018 est.) > 19,898 (2025 est) #85 (+6)
92. Bückeburg, Germany = 19,245 (2018) > 19,701 (2022 est.) #87 (+5)
93. Bad Driburg, Germany = 19,002 (2018) > 18,830 (2023 est.) #93
94. Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa = 18,861 (2011) — no change #92 (-2)
95. Moosburg, Germany = 18,510 (2018) > 20,027 (2023 est.) #84 (+11)
96. Martinsburg, West Virginia = 17,465 (2018 est.) > 19,042 (2025 est.) #91 (+5)
97. Valkenburg aan de Geul, Netherlands =16,416 (2017) > 16,365 (2021 est.) #96 (+1)
98. Tilsonburg, Ontario = 15,872 (2016) > 18,615 (2021) #94 (+4)
99. Steffisburg, Switzerland = 15,709 (2018) — no change #98 (+1)
100. Dieburg, Germany = 15,679 (2018) > 15,699 (2022 est.) #99 (+1)
101. Dillenburg, Germany = 15,583 (2018) repeat
102. Middleburg Heights, Ohio = 15,540 (2018 est.) > 15,337 (2025 est.) #102
103. Clarksburg, West Virginia = 15,480 (2018 est.) > 15,135 (2025 est.) #103
104. Neustadt bei Coburg, Germany = 15,257 (2018) > 15,089 (2023 est.) #104
105. Mainburg, Germany = 15,241 (2018) = 15,517 (2023 est.) #100 (+5)
106. Laurinburg, North Carolina = 15,033 (2018 est.) > 14,967 (2025 est.) #105 (-1)
107. Williamsburg, Virginia = 14,896 (2018 est.) > 16,171 (2025 est.) #97 (+10)
108. Rotenburg an der Fulda, Germany = 14,676 (2018) > 14,066 (2022 est.) #108
109. Ratzeburg, Germany = 14,652 (2018) > 15,553 (2022 est.) #99 (+10)
110. Shlisselburg, Russia = 14,425 (2018 est.) — no change #106 (+4)
111. Phillipsburg, New Jersey = 14,303 (2018 est.) > 15,397 (2025 est.) #101 (+10)
112. Greensburg, Pennsylvania = 14,192 (2018 est.) > 14,403 (2025 est.) #107 (+5)
113. Orangeburg, South Carolina = 13,964 (2010) > 13,353 (2025 est.) #113
114. Bedburg-Hau, Germany = 13,643 (2023 est.) #111 (+3)
115. Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania = 13,919 (2018 est.) > 13,391 (2025 est.) #112 (+3)
116. Philippsburg, Germany = 13,615 (2018) > 13,882 (2022 est.) #109 (+7)
117. Weilburg, Germany = 12,990 (2018) > 13,334 (2022 est.) #114 (+3)
118. Fouriesburg, South Africa = 19,425 (2011) — no change but erroneous number #88 (+30)
119. Wasserburg am Inn, Germany = 12,691 (2018) > 13,112 (2023 est.) #115 (+4)
120. Korneuburg, Austria = 12,552 (2015) > 13,764 (2025 est.) #110 (-10)
121. Frohburg, Germany= 12,470 (2018) > 12,305 (2022 est.) #119 (+2)
122. Vilsbiburg, Germany = 12,074 (2018) > 12,621 (2023 est.) #116 (+6)
123. Greensburg, Indiana = 11,916 (2018 est.) > 12,385 (2025 est.) #118 (+5)
124. Ladenburg, Germany = 11,537 (2018) > 12,517 (2022 est.) #117 (+7)
125. Lauenburg, Germany = 11,444 (2018) > 11,855 (2022 est.) #122(+3)
126. Scottburgh, South Africa = 11,403 (2011) –no update #124 (+2)
127. Fredericksburg, Texas = 11,369 (2017 est.) > 11,889 (2025 est.) #123 (+4)
128. Ventersburg, South Africa = 11,260 (2011) — no update #126 (+2)
129. Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany = 11,243 (2018) > 11,385 (2023 est.) #125 (+4)
130. Hammelburg, Germany = 11,037 (2018) > 10,826 (2023 est.) #128 (+2)
131. Lawrenceburg, Tennessee = 10,838 (2018 est.) > 12,224 (2025 est.) #120 (+11)
132. Boizenburg, Germany = 10,724 (2018) > 10,881 (2023 est.) #127 (+5)
133. Bad Iburg, Germany = 10,661 (2018) > 10,559 (2022 est.) #130 (+3)
134. Lenzburg, Switzerland = 10,569 (2018) — no update #129 (+5)
135. Ogdensburg, New York = 10,551 (2018 est.) > 8,928 (2025 est.) dropped below the minimum for this list
136. East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania = 10,384 (2018 est.) > 8,626 (2025 est.) dropped below the minimum for this list
137. Wallaceburg, Ontario = 10,098 (2016) > 10,323 (2021) #131 (+6)

SOURCES:

• en.wikipedia.org for each country, state, province, and city
• maps.google.com
• Rand McNally Road Atlas
• personal knowledge
• https://worldpopulationreview.com/cities

#1 #10 #100 #101 #102 #103 #104 #105 #106 #107 #108 #109 #11 #110 #111 #112 #113 #114 #115 #116 #117 #118 #119 #12 #120 #121 #122 #123 #124 #125 #126 #127 #128 #129 #13 #130 #131 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18 #19 #2 #20 #21 #22 #23 #24 #25 #26 #27 #28 #29 #3 #30 #31 #32 #33 #34 #35 #36 #37 #38 #39 #4 #40 #41 #42 #43 #44 #45 #46 #47 #48 #49 #5 #50 #51 #52 #53 #54 #55 #56 #57 #58 #59 #6 #60 #61 #62 #63 #64 #65 #66 #67 #68 #69 #7 #70 #71 #72 #73 #74 #75 #76 #77 #78 #79 #8 #80 #81 #82 #83 #84 #85 #86 #87 #88 #89 #9 #90 #91 #92 #93 #94 #95 #96 #97 #98 #980 #99 #bourg #burg #burgh #cities #etymology #history #placeNames #toponymy #towns

“Dis, pourquoi?” on toponyms and maps: Over the past two weeks, #RTS’s “Dis, pourquoi?” dedicated its episodes to an in-depth look at #toponymy and at #maps and #cartography, featuring Frédéric Giraut of the University of Geneva for the former and Pascal Marguerat and Raphaël Bovier of...
https://spatialists.ch/posts/2025/05-05-dis-pourquoi-on-toponyms-and-maps/ #GIS #GISchat #geospatial #SwissGIS

From 16th century fortification to 20th century cul-de-sac: the thread about Wardie House:

There is an interesting property listing that has recently come up for sale; “3 bed cottage for sale in Trinity” at number 2a Wardie House Lane. Offers over £550,000 if you’re interested! With “magnificent views over the Firth of Forth“, the estate agent describes it as a “charming stone built cottage requiring upgrading” but the name on the garden gate should give a clue that all isn’t quite what it seems: Wardie House. For a start, this property isn’t in Trinity, and this is no cottage – it’s actually the sole remaining part of a once grand mansion house, a reconfigured kitchen wing that survived the twentieth century wreckers’ ball.

Wardie itself is an ancient placename, recorded as far back as 1336 with spellings like Warda and Weirdie that suggest a root in the Anglian wearda or Norse varthi for a beacon or cairn. It is easy to imagine that such a structure may once have stood on this prominent position above the foreshore of Wardie Bay. The Blaeu atlas of Scotland of 1654 records the place as Weirdy along with the symbol of a tower house. That tower house had been built here in the early 16th century by the landowning family – appropriately the Touris (or Towers) of Inverleith – apparently to protect their estate to seaward. However when the English under Hertford landed at Granton in 1544 it offered little in the way of defence and was slighted, along with most of the city of Edinburgh and Port of Leith.

The tower was rebuilt by the Touris and a century later when another English invader took the city and Leith – Oliver Cromwell after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 – “the mannour place or house of Wardie” was sold for £60 by Sir John Touris to the occupiers; to be pulled down to provide construction masonry for Leith Citadel.

The Touris kept ownership of the land itself but granted a tack to the Commonwealth to quarry stone “betwixt the house of Wardie and the sea” for the construction of the Citadel and also for 100 “faggots of whins” (Scots, gorse) on the Wardie Muir (Scots, moor). The map below was made in 1682 and shows these places. The muir is recorded in 1588 when gunners from Edinburgh Castle were sent there to retrieve a cannon ball that had been fired in salute from its ramparts. It occupied most of the present-day district of Trinity on the northern bank of the Water of Leith, from Bonnington to Inverleith, and there would have been very little, if any, occupation beyond rough grazing and cutting the whins and some shallow coal pits.

In the 18th century Wardie was detached from the Inverleith estate and came into the possession of the Boswells of Blackadder, in Berwickshire, who rebuilt the house here. This holding was bounded by the Wardie Burn to its west – beyond which lay the estates of Granton (owned by the Dukes of Buccleuch) and East Pilton (owned by the Ramsays of Barnton). To the north was a short strip of coast fronting Wardie Bay and the Forth. To the south was Ferry Road and Inverleith and to the east were the former lands of Trinity, the border being on the alignment of what is now Netherby Road. In modern day toponymy many might consider Wardie to be either part of the districts of Granton or Trinity, traditionally it was in neither and was distinct. While traditionally Wardie was part of the parish of St. Cuthbert’s and therefore Edinburgh, in 1833 the line of the Granton road was taken as the boundary of the Parliamentary Burgh of Leith and thereafter it sat part in Leith and part in Edinburgh.

The Wardie estate was largely agricultural, centred on the farm with the charming name of Winnelstraelee, the winnelstrae being the Scots name for what in England they called windlestraw, a type of rough grass useful for making ropes. Remarkably this farm survived well into the 20th century, but its name was progressively Anglicised, first to Windlestrawlee and then to what Stuart Harris calls the “vapid invention” of Ferryfield.

You can see from the above map that before Granton Road, or Wardie Road, or almost any other road in this district existed, there was a road leading from Wardie House directly to the Ferry Road with a gate lodge where the two met. This road actually remains to this day, but only as an un-named stub at its southern end.

When Alexander Blackadder of Boswell died in 1812, his will disposed of his Wardie estate to one Lieutenant John Donaldson, RN, whose grandmother was in the line of the Boswells of Blackadder. A condition of his inheritance was that he take up the family name and so he restyled himself, by grant of the Prince Regent, as Captain Boswall of Wardie (note the “e” to “a” spelling change). Many streets in present-day Wardie now have Boswall in their names. Captain Boswall died in 1847 and Wardie House was split off of the estate, which remained with his heirs, and sold to Michael Anderson esq. a legal printer. On Anderson’s death in 1858 it passed in turn to a Leith merchant, Thomas Bell Yule, who had it considerably enlarged and remodelled in a Scots Baronial Revival style. Perhaps this largesse over-extended Yule, because in 1865 he was bankrupted and his creditors seized and sold the house.

Wardie House was bought at this auction by John Gillon esq., another merchant of Leith, for £3,760. By this time the area was undergoing change. The Donaldson Boswalls had allowed Granton Road to cut through their holding in the 1830s and began feuing along its length (the Scots legal term for splitting a landholding into smaller plots for sale and development). This exercise proceeded slowly but some impressive villas were built from the 1840s to the 1870s, such as Wardie Lodge (now St. Columba’s Hospice), Wardie Villas, Erneston and Queensberry Place. These somewhat overshadowed old Wardie House; being larger, grander and more impressive when viewed from the shore below. There was also commenced, but never completed, a Georgian-style crescent named Wardie Crescent. In the 1850s there was a short-lived brick and tile works in the western corner of the estate, making use of the local clay measures and potentially also the coal outcrops. As a result of this slow and somewhat piecemeal residential development of the district, the majority of the lands of Wardie would remain in agricultural use well into the 20th century.

John Gillon died in 1879 and on the death of his widow Wardie House was bought by Thomas Symington, a manufacturing chemist at Beaverbank Works in Warriston. Symington had gotten rich developing and popularising instant coffee essences and alternatives based on dandelion and chicory for the health-conscious Victorian.

Symington died at Wardie House in 1896 and once again the place found itself up for sale. It was subsequently owned from 1900 by James Roger, director of Garland & Roger timber merchants, who sold the house in 1931 to Archibald William Forbes, a retired engineer, who died there in 1953. By the time of Forbes’ death the rambling house had been split into three separate residences and was reported to be “falling down“. A mish-mash of Victorian additions on top of Georgian rebuilding on top of a Jacobean bones, it was “consumed by dry rot which ‘crumbled its flooring, warped its panelling, cracked its walls and sagged its painted ceilings“.

There was no preservation movement to step in and save it, Wardie was just another decaying old villa in a city full of decaying old villas and without the money or the will to do much about them. And so the pile was sold and all but the kitchen wing was demolished. It was survived by its garden cottages – the imaginatively named West Cottage and South Cottage and the developers erected six neat but anonymous semi-detached bungalows in its place on a suburban cul-de-sac renamed Wardie House Lane.

While most of the old lands of Wardie were finally covered in a mixture of municipal housing schemes in the 1920s, a significant portion of it escaped development entirely and remains open and under grass as it was purchased as the Wardie Playing Fields, which regular listeners will now be aware has an interesting and surprising history all of its own.

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Google Maps has history of appeasing govts who want names, borders shown differently. Often it shows different versions to people in different countries, and says it will do that here too.

https://www.voanews.com/a/google-maps-to-rename-gulf-of-mexico-to-gulf-of-america-for-us-users/7952630.html

#toponymy #geography #maps #mapping #cartography #geopolitics #GulfOfMexico #GulfOfAmerica #NorthAmerica #placenames #nomenclature @geography @geopolitics

#GulfOfMexico or #GulfOfAmerica? Competitive renaming of seawater is actually already a thing in #geopolitics: See Arabian / #PersianGulf, #SeaOfJapan / #EastSea, #SouthChinaSea / #WestPhilippineSea. But it implies the country doing the renaming feels threatened by equal or more powerful neighbor.

#geography #hydrology #maritime #nautical #ocean #toponymy #placenames #naming @geography @geopolitics

In interesting show of restraint, #USA president's order to change "#GulfOfMexico" to "#GulfOfAmerica" on govt maps seems to specify that only the part under US jurisdiction is being renamed.

(Order also renames "#Denali" back to "#MountMcKinley")

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-names-that-honor-american-greatness/

#toponymy #geography #mapping #hydrology #UNCLOS #maritime #names #policy #geography #GIS #placenames #Alaska #GulfCoast #nautical #hydrology #GNIS @geography @geopolitics

#Alberta #toponymy map! Find out the meaning of any Alberta place name https://geospatial.alberta.ca/portal/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=a297e74e4fb4445db337df3850652862

#USA president says he'll rename #GulfOfMexico to "#GulfOfAmerica". He could succeed at making US govt workers call it that, but other countries would likely ignore it...and it's not the first time it's been suggested.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-claims-hell-rename-gulf-mexico-gulf-america/story?id=117423165

#toponymy #geography #mapping #AtlanticOcean @geography @geopolitics #oceanography #placenames #Americas #Caribbean

Bellevue: the thread about the finest and least wanted house in the New Town

I got a nice message today (September 12th) from WordPress (the foundations upon which the walls and roof of this website sits) to tell me that it had just passed 100,000 views. If I had known this particular milestone was approaching, I might have tried to be more organised and have a thread ready that was somehow relevant. But I didn’t, and so I don’t. Sorry. You’ll just have to settle for one on Bellevue House, which I happened to be looking at today.

“Bellevue House? Where’s that?” I hear you ask. Well, it isn’t anywhere, not any more – it was demolished 180-odd years ago. But when it was somewhere, it sat in the centre of Drummond Place in the so-called Second New Town; a fine building, but one that sat awkwardly, offset and facing the “wrong” way to be a monumental centrepiece to the square.

The square itself was named for George Drummond – the Lord Provost of Edinburgh – who held that post a record 6 times between 1725 and 1764, and one of the driving forces behind the First New Town of Edinburgh and other great civic improvements such as the North Bridge and Royal Exchange.

Drummond’s own house and estate – Drummond Lodge – occupied this part of the park and farmlands north of the City – bounded by Broughton village to the east, the Canonmills Haugh to the north and Gabriel’s Road to the east.

Drummond died in 1766, his house and estate eventually being sold to Major General John Scott of Balcomie and Scotstarvit (in Fife), also known as Pawky Scott (“Sly Scott”) – a soldier, politician and gambler. The latter occupation was something he was rather good at and he allegedly won Dundas House (36 St. Andrew Square, now the Royal Bank of Scotland) off of Sir Lawrence Dundas in a wager. Dundas was unwilling to part with his brand new town house, so instead agreed to build a bigger and better one for Scott on the site of Drummond Lodge.

The new neoclassical mansion was built to designs by Robert Adam and had an extra bay on either side compared to Dundas House. The rear (north-facing) elevation had a projecting, rounded bay that contained a huge oval drawing room – a form unusual for Adam’s work.

Scott named his new house Bellevue , after the palatial chateau of that name built by Louis XV for Madam Pompadour in 1750 – but he died in 1775 shortly before it was completed. The builder was George Brown, who also built George Square in the Southside. His widow and 3 daughters lived there, with the title passing to his eldest, Henrietta. She married William Henry Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 4th Duke of Portland – the Marquess of Tichfield – in 1795, who sold it and the grounds to the City for £11,375 4s 0d in 1800. There was a £1,050 annual feu duty. They had the option to buy the superiority within 7 years for a further £20,200.

The city didn’t really want the house, it wanted its vast parkland. “The whole place waved with wood and was diversified by undulations of the surface and adorned by seats and bowers and summer-houses, nothing in the town could be more delightful“. And it wanted to rip that up and develop it – by October that year they were soliciting plans to develop it into a new New Town. This was for the planned northern expansion of the New Town – the so-called 2nd New Town – and once again, this pre-existing boundary determines some of those street features that still exist today, 220 years later

The elegant curve of Royal Crescent? It wasn’t intentionally like that, they just made good use of the working with the existing boundary between Bellevue and the Canonmills Haugh. The Haugh was owned by the trustees of Heriot’s Hospital, and they weren’t interested in the New Town scheme here. There was also a significant height difference between the two holdings here, so it was a natural boundary.

Bellevue Crescent? Well now you know where it gets its name from, you also know where it gets its shape from! The boundary here was between Bellevue and more land owned by Heriot’s Hospital. The old road to Canonmills that divided the two had a bit of a wiggle in it here, and it was expanded upon with the slender garden crescent with a monumental church at its centre.

Heriot’s also stood in the way of the development at “Old Broughton”, as did the other landowner, Mr Murray. And so here there’s an awkward and jarring series of roads and walls and lanes – the boundaries of the medieval village – that not even later attempts at regular, grid-aligned streets could make order out of.

And even the grand showpiece crescent of Abercrombie Place works it’s way around a pre-existing boundary – the garden was not part of the development land at this time, and it’s not quite symetrical at its eastern end, the old boundary roadway of Gabriel’s Road (marked in white) messes things up a bit. The original street plan had Nelson Street come straight through from Dummond Place, emerging awkwardly about 2/3 of the way along Abercrombie Place, but it was soon centred into the crescent to give a more balanced prospect.

So you have to admit, William Sibbald and Robert Reid – who laid out this phase of the New Town – did a pretty impressive job of working around some wonky boundaries while keeping things ordered and regular and elegant. Their three crescents, to the north, the east and the south, were practical ways to use the land, but were the first such curved streets in Edinburgh and became very fashionable addresses. They also managed to centre the whole eastern section of the plan on Bellevue House within the new Drummond Place. The City didn’t have a use for the house itself and had been unable to lease it for residential use and so instead it was leased to the Board of Customs in 1802. The City wanted them out of the Royal Exchange (the City Chambers) to make more room for itself. The Caledonian Mercury called this arrangement “very honourable to the Government and beneficial to the City“, the “style of exterior grandeur” corresponded appropriately to the importance of the public establishment within. It would be 1805 before the Customs moved in, by which time the planned streets around it were only just beginning to emerge from the ground, so at this time the house continued to stand prominently in open land.

Coincidentally, Lawrence Dundas – who had “lost” his house to Scott in that bet that would result in him paying to have Bellevue built – had died in 1781 and his house had been sold to the government who installed the Board of Excise there. The Boards of Customs and of Excise were separate institutions at this time, but Bellevue House occasionally gets labelled as the “Excise House“, when it was the “Custom House“; the former was on St. Andrew Square. The Customs couldn’t quite fit into the building initially, and so had an extra storey added by the Town Council before taking up occupation. They also required that the surrounding 1 acre of land be fenced of, which formed the nucleus of the later Drummond Place Garden. The Excise found at this time that many of the taxes they collected were being abolished and were downsizing as a result. They vacated Dundas House in 1825, (which was sold to the Royal Bank) and moved in with the Customs at Bellevue. But not even the joint establishments of the Customs and the Excise could keep the building filled – many of their functions finding themselves sent south to London, and the building soon began to empty. By the late 1830s, 17 of its rooms lay vacant.

The Town Council had hoped to buy Dundas House for itself, as a mansion for the Lord Provost but had been outbid by the Bank. They now found the government willing to sell their lease on Bellevue House back to them for £5,000, so they were keen not to lose out again. It was 1844 and the Lord Provost Adam Black had also heard rumblings that the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, planning to commence tunnelling its way under the New Town from Scotland Street to Canal Street station, might move to buy the house and the square of Drummond Place for itself and erect workshops or a station. He “considered it a matter dangerous to the city that this property should come into the hands of any railway company” who might cause “considerable danger of nuisance… in that part of the town, which it was of importance should be kept in as beautiful a state as possible“. Lord Provost Black had a particular concern in his matter; he resided in a house on Drummond Place!

On this subject, the Lord Provost was right – partially. The Railway did want to buy Bellevue House, but for no other reason than to demolish it. It was directly on top of the line of their tunnel and they did not wish the expense and difficulty of going around it, or trying to reinforce the foundations. And so in December 1845, the City struck a bargain with the Railway and the Board of Customs. The City bought the house for £5,000, with the Customs moving to smaller premises on Picardy Place. They in turn, after negotiations on the terms had completed, sold the house to the Railway for £3,200, who would then pay to demolish it. It was estimated that £1,200 of its materials would be of use in constructing its stations and buildings. Everybody won: the Railway saved much more in simplifying the construction of the tunnel than it had spent on the house. The City prevented the Railway building on the land, and the proprietors of Drummond Place got rid of an awkward building that spoiled the symmetry of their square and were able to buy the site and incorporate it into their private pleasure garden for the sum of £1,200.

By February 1846, the Edinburgh Evening Post reported “in a few days it will be levelled with the ground” and that its removal would be “a great improvement to Drummond Place, besides opening up the vistas from Duke (Dublin) Street northward and London street eastward“. And just like that, one of the biggest, but least wanted, houses in the New Town was gone and Drummond Place got its private garden in the centre and they all lived happily after. (Until, that is, someone dared to paint their door pink. And then green. And then off-pink.)

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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Around Craigentinny: the thread about Scots, English, Gaelic, Dutch, Cornish and Irish origins of suburban streetnames

I recently wrote a thread about the meanings of the street names on the old Easter Duddingston estate, and how nearly all are linked to the Abercorn family. So now it is the time to boldly stray north of Moira Terrace and the Portobello Road to see what lies on the other side and where its street names come from (spoiler: it’s Craigentinny, and once again they come almost entirely from one family!)

By Craigentinny I mean the area defined by the old estate on that name, which was itself the eastern portion of the older Barony of Restalrig. The origins of Craigentinny are somewhat obscure but the most frequently told version says it was land acquired by one James Nisbet1 from the Logans of Restalrig in 1604. Here he built a tower house (or improved an existing one) which for reasons known to himself Christened Craigentinny. The roots of that name are Gaelic but the precise meaning is lost to time, the usual explanation is Creag an t’Sionnaich or Fox Rock. You can read a bit more on the origins and history of the house over at Stravaiging Around Scotland.

After 160 years in hands of various Nisbets the house and estate was bought in 1762 by William Miller (1722-1799), a wealthy Quaker seed merchant from the Canongate who was known locally as “King of the Quakers“. He had a single surviving son late in life by his third wife, his heir William Henry Miller. William Henry inherited on his father’s death in 1799.

1. James Nisbet (1557-1621), son of Henry Nisbet of Dean, established the Nisbet of Craigentinny line.
   He was followed by his son Sir Henry Nisbet (1584-1667), who was followed by his 4th son Sir Patrick Nisbet (1623-1682). Patrick exchanged titles with his cousin – Sir Alexander Nisbet of Dean – in 1672 with the latter becoming Sir Alexander Nisbet of Craigentinny (1630-1682). He was succeeded by his second son, Capt. Alexander Nisbet (1688-1735), his eldest son Sir William having succeeded instead to the Nisbet of Dirleton line. The former did not have a male heir, so Craigentinny passed via Alexander’s sister – Christian Nisbet (1692-1738) – to his nephew John Scott (1729-1764), the oldest grandson of Sir Alexander Nisbet. John took the double-barrelled surname Scott-Nisbet to inherit the title and sold Craigentinny to William Miller the Quaker in 1762, whose father already possessed Fillyside Farm on the estate. ↩︎

The image below shows the 1847 estate boundary, which was altered slightly when the North British Railway came through this district to make sure there were no isolated parts of Craigentinny or Duddingston on the respectively wrong side of the tracks.

William Henry Miller became MP for Newcastle-Under-Lyme in 1830, spending most of his time on an estate he purchased in England, where he set about amassing one of the most important book collections of its time. It is he who is buried far beneath the magnificent Craigentinny Marbles mausoleum on his Edinburgh estate, which you will find sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the 1930s bungalows of Craigentinny Crescent.

When William Henry Miller died in 1848 he was unmarried and without heir (there are baseless antiquarian rumours that he may have been variously a Roman Catholic, adopted, a woman or even intersex, but those are beside the point here). His will disbarred his closest relations from inheriting and the estate was instead bequeathed to his “nieces” or “cousins”, Sarah and Ellen Marsh, who continued to lived at Britwell and Craigentinny. There is an unsolved mystery as to the precise relation of the Marsh sisters to Miller; they certainly weren’t direct relations and may instead have been close companions of his Mother. The sisters had to defend the will in court – there were years of legal wrangling and competing claims by other Miller relative – before they could inherit. When they did, the Lord Lyon granted them the use of the Miller title and arms.

On the death of the surviving sister, Ellen, the estate was inherited by a distant cousin of the Millers, Samuel Christy. He was an English hatter from the well known firm Christy & Co. and also a Quaker. As part of his inheritance Samuel formally changed his surname to Christy-Miller. This was was soon changed to the Scottish form of Christie-Miller (the Christys were, after all, descendants of an Aberdeen Christie).

Note that some sources will tell you that William Henry Miller was also known as Christiemiller; that’s patently not true. He died in 1848, and Samuel Christy didn’t fully inherit and change his name until fourteen years after his death in 1862! To confuse matters further, Samuel also had an unrelated uncle called William Miller Christy! It was this establishment of the new family name of Christie-Miller that gives us our first street name on this local history tour – Christiemiller Avenue (and later Place and Grove), which was developed from 1931 onwards.

Samuel Christie-Miller was predeceased by his only son so Craigentinny passed to his nephew Wakefield Christy in 1889, who thus became Wakefield Christie-Miller and gives his name to Wakefield Avenue. (Wakefield being his mother’s maiden name.)

At the other end of the bungalow belt from Wakefield Avenue is Britwell Crescent. Britwell is a medieval Cambridgeshire name (from Bright Well) and it was where William Henry Miller had bought the estate and house of Britwell Place as his southern residence on becoming an MP in 1830. It was here where Miller built a library for his book collection in a purpose-built, fireproof wing. This property passed via the Marsh sisters to the Christie-Millers and is now known as Grenville Court.

Moving east through Craigentinny again, we come to Sydney Terrace, Place and Park. These are named for Sydney Richardson Christie-Miller, who inherited the estate in 1898 on the death of his father Wakefield.

Bordering these last streets are Vandeleur Avenue, Grove and Place, which are named for Evelyn Vandeleur, wife of Sydney. She was of the Anglo-Irish gentry but Vandeleur is an old Dutch and Flemish name – Van de Laer or Vanderloo means one who lives in a grove. There have been Vandeleurs in Kilrush, Co. Clare, since Oliver Cromwell’s time. That Dutch / Flemish connection is highly unusual in Edinburgh place names (it may be unique!) and I think we can say the same of the next street along, Kekewich Avenue, which is Cornish! The connection here is that the Christie-Miller family lawyer when this street was formed was one C. Granville Kekewich, esq.

Up from Kekewich is the solidly Scottish Bryce Avenue and Grove. Andrew Bryce of Southside Bank Farm was the estate factor for the Christie-Millers. His Victorian farmhouse still exists, hiding in plain site between Vandeleur and Kekewich Avenues off the Portobello Road.

Off of Bryce is Goff Avenue. Goff is from the Anglo-Irish wing of the Christie-Miller family again, from the English Goffe or Gough – Wakefield Christie-Miller’s youngest son was Edward Goff Christie-Miller. The Goff branch descended from Major General William Goffe, or William the Regicide, a parliamentarian army officer and Cromwell loyalist who had put his seal and signature on the death warrant of King Charles I. This connection again may be unique in Edinburgh street names.

In the northern sector of the Craigentinny Bungalowopolis we find Nantwich Drive and Stapeley Avenue. Both are Cheshire placenames: Stapheley House in Nantwich was bought by the Christie-Millers in 1910 and Geoffrey Christie-Miller settled there. It was turned over to a war hospital in 1914-18. Geoffrey, another of Wakefield’s sons, was a decorated war hero in that conflict with the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He and his wife honeymooned at Craigentinny House in 1908 and he took an active interest in the running of the Craigentinny estate and family hat business

The last 2 streets with Christie-Miller connections lie to the south of Moira Terrace: Parker Road / Avenue / Terrace and Farrer Terrace and Grove. Christopher Parker and Helen Farrer were parents-in-law to Sydney Christie-Miller’s brother Charles and were godparents to a number of his children.

All of these streets are part of the bungalow belt sprawl (although there are some earlier Edwardian villa flats) dating from around 1934 and on the lands of the Southside Bank and Fillyside Bank farms. But the estate had a third farm in addition to these, that of Wheatfield. The Georgian farmhouse of Wheatfield is another of those “oh, I didn’t realise I’d been looking at it the whole time” buildings, it’s just down from the Marbles, set back far enough from Moira Terrace behind a tall, gateless wall to be quite unobtrusive and it does not lend its name to any streets.

Much of the lands of the farm of Wheatfield were purchased by the Corporation of Edinburgh in 1932, along with Craigentinny House and its gardens, the old Piershill Barracks and Piersfield portion of the Parson’s Green Estate for council housing and a new school. These streets were given Loganlea and Loaning names. The former comes from Loganes Ley, a field elsewhere on the old Logan Restalrig barony where the wappenschaw took place: the muster and demonstration of men and their weaponry who were obliged to perform military service for the town or laird. The latter street names come from loaning, a generic and common old Scots placename; a loan being a lane, and a loaning implying a public right of way along it. This refers to the old route across the Craigentinny Meadows, which began at the gates of Craigentinny House.

The Craigetinny Loaning lead across those “Irrigated Meadows” to the farm of Fillyside Bank. Most of the land of this farm was not built upon for housing, it instead was developed to form the Craigentinny Golf Course, with portions containing a Corporation refuse depot and sewage pumping station and the Meadows Yard railway sidings.

But there was some bungalow building on the farmland, inclduing the streets of Fillyside Road, Terrace and Avenue. Fillysydebank, also known as Greenbank, is first mentioned in 1553. It was also at times the East Mains and North Mains of Restalrig. Filly- comes from the Scots Falu-, a topographical descriptor for “yellowish” land. There is yet another old house hiding in plain site nearby, off Seafield Street, that takes the name Fillyside. However it took this purely as a loan when it was built in 1810 and was never on the Nisbet / Miller / Christie-Miller Craigentinny estate land, but just over the boundary from it.

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

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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Gabriel’s Road: the thread about how James Craig’s elegant and regular New Town grid is rudely interrupted

A tweet for #WorldTownPlanningDay from the The National Library of Scotland Map Library earlier (Nov. 8th 2019) threw up a reminder of one of my favourite, less weel kent features of Edinburgh’s first New Town. Namely, that James Craig’s otherwise regular Georgian grid of the First New town (red lines, principal streets of Princes / George / Queen Streets) of 1768 meets James Craig’s otherwise regular Georgian grid of St. James Square (green lines) of 1773 at a jarring, irregular and unsatisfactory angle. What’s this that about?

Clue 1 is in those dates. The two districts were planned 5 years apart. On Craig’s 1768 plan, the St. James area is still largely occupied by a portion of land known as Clelland’s Feu. (In Scottish land law, a Feu is a portion of land tenure.). This is a house with ample gardens and nursery land, all on a regular plan but offset at about 47 degrees from the New Town.

A map of land ownership drawn up for the city in 1766 by John Laurie shows that Clelland’s Feu was only one of a number of pre-existing portions on this particular grid alignment and gives us Clue 2: looking at the dotted line below (which I’ve highlighted in red for you), the City did not own all of these parcels of land.

Mapping of the area of the New Town before Craig’s Plan is pretty scant, as it usually centres on the Old Town (indeed the land that became to be the New Town, the Barefoot’s Park, wasn’t yet even incorporated into the City and Royal Burgh), however a magnificent 1759 survey by Robert Robinson and John Fergus of the land north of the Old Town all the way to the Forth does exist. This captures Clelland’s Feu (spelled Clealand’s Few) and others, unfortunately this portion of is badly degraded and poorly conserved.

But from this we can at least see that a decade before the winning design for the New Town was approved there were already buildings and streets in the area respecting older boundaries and alignments – offset at that awkward 47 degrees to Craig’s grid. Five years after the latter was laid that out for the City, a private citizen – the writer (solicitor) Walter Ferguson – commissioned him to design a new square on the Clelland’s Feu. Also involved were two other lawyers with a financial interest in the Feu, Gray and Steuart.

It should be noted that the Trustees of Heriot’s Hospital, as feudal superior (i.e. they held the land, on behalf of the Crown, and had sub-feud it to Ferguson, Gray and Steuart as vassals), tried to block this development in the courts but failed (they were trying to sue lawyers, after all!) Construction of St. James’ Square commenced at its southern edge in 1775, allegedly on or near the 17th of June and the British victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill, for which reason this corner became known as Bunker’s Hill. But that story might all be hooey! Stuart Harris – the historian of Edinburgh, who wrote the book on the street and placenames of the city – certainly thought so. He also notes that Ferguson, Gray and Steuart were all ardent Jacobites, and would meet annually in Steuart’s house to toast the birthday of Charles Edward “Bonnie Prince Charlie” Stuart. Harris goes on to suggest therefore that the St. James of St. James’ Square and the King of (Little) King Street is actually the Jacobite Old Pretender – James Francis Edward Stuart. This was something very risqué not 30 years after Culloden.

But that’s another story. Back on topic, in those early maps there’s something else tantalisingly hidden in plain sight. Clue 3: a loan (lane) that respects – but predates – the alignment of St. James Square. It runs in a straight line between the feus of Mr. Hogg and Mr Sim, and is walled in between them, before heading off northwest. I have highlighted it yellow below on Fergus and Robinson’s map.

This is very tantalising as despite all the efforts of the Georgian developers, the Victorian rebuilders, the 20th century destroyers and the 21st century re-destroyers, this lane (and the western remnant of St. James’ Square) are still there!

I am talking of course about the enigmatic Gabriel’s Road, a 126 foot (38.4m) long stretch of pavement that follows the ancient alignment of the lane which predates the Georgian city centre.

Rather than build over this section of the old lane, they built around, it and this block of West Register Street aligned its façades with it (Guildford Arms and Café Royal patrons will be more than familiar with this). Land ownership trumped town planning – as it frequently does to this day. Where the planners and builders hit an existing, irregular, land boundary which couldn’t be resolved, they simply went with it, and Gabriel’s Road became the boundary between the grid of the New Town and the grid of St. James’ square, aligned with the latter. This approach avoided the legal complexity (and cost) of trying to regularise it for the sake of a grid pattern.

Gabriel’s Road is an ancient right of way, which is why there is a gate and public access from Register Place through the Square outside the Royal Bank of Scotland head branch at 36 St. Andrew Square. So that is our case closed. Or is it? What have we here? Another Gabriel’s Road? Almost a mile away in Stockbridge? What’s that doing there? Surely just a coincidence?

No, it’s not a coincidence at all, because it’s the same road (or lane). While the middle part has long since been built over and disappeared from view, either end escaped and survives. If we look at the 1804 town plan, before Saxe Coburg Place was laid out, we can see Gabriel’s Road clearly marked as “Foot Road“.

This section of the path was long ago known locally as the Dummie Steps. The steps part is obviously because the steep path was stepped and the first because because over the wall was the Deaf and Dumb Institution (the Dummiehoose) of the city, built here in 1823. Dummie is the Scots for dumb. The building of the Stockbridge Dummiehoose is now part of Edinburgh Academy.

Dummie is where the Edinburgh district of Dumbiedykes (once Dummiedikes) got its name, from the institute for the dumb (the Dummiehoose) set up by James Braidwood there in 1763, and the walls (dykes) that enclosed the land in that neighbourhood. Walter Scott had borrowed the name for a comical character in Heart of Midlothian, but changed it by inserting the b-, to give us Dumbiedykes. The change stuck and the street names and neighbourhood took up the extra letter, even though it should be silent.

Anyway, back to the lane. What is it and why is it there? Looking back at – and zooming out a bit – on that amazing 1759 map by Fergus & Robinson, we can see it clearly cutting northwest across what was then farmland, where the Second or Northern New Town and the eastern expansion of Stockbridge would later be built. The lane forms as straight a line as possible (around old land boundaries) between Inverleith House and what at one time would have been the northern access to the city of Edinburgh down Leith Wynd.

At its very northern end, our map does not show what happens when Gabriel’s Road meets the Water of Leith, but this was long a ford, with stepping stones, across the river and is approximately where the Colonies houses of Collin’s Place are now.

Old & New Edinburgh records the “beautiful and sequestered footpath bordered by hawthorn hedges, known by the name of Gabriel’s Road, is said to have been constructed for the convenience of the ancient lairds of Inverleith to enable them to attend worship in St. Giles [kirk]“. The definite meaning of the Gabriel part of the name is lost to time. It may be a reference to it being used for attending church. A theory about it relating to an infamous murder is apparently spurious and an old tavern of that name in Broughton is said to have been named for the road and not the other way around.

If you keep on looking for odd angles in the modern property and street lines you can see for yourself a few other intermediate fragments of Gabriel’s Road. For instance along East Silvermills Lane:

And if you follow along to the eastern end of Abercrombie Place, where there is a short block of houses on the south side of the street (the only ones along its length), you will notice that there’s a section of garden boundary wall at an odd angle… That’s right, it’s perfectly aligned on Gabriels’ Road, another instance where the portions of land on either side were in different hands when it came to planning and building.

And back where we started off, with the boundary of Clelland’s Feu, this long and invisibly demarcated parish boundaries. St. James’ Square was a detached exclave of St. Cuthbert’s parish (the large parish that surrounded the old city of Edinburgh), where as Craig’s New Town was split between two new parishes of St. Andrew’s and St. Stephen’s.

Anyway, there you go. Hidden amongst the regular, monotonous Georgian grid of the New Town there are some little clues and reminders of Edinburgh in a much older time. You can read about another one at the other end of Craig’s New Town here.

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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The thread about St. Patrick and the 18th century Southside houses of Cabbage and Turnip

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, so what better way to start a thread than with the below photo of Edinburgh’s St. Patrick Square in 1914 (n.b. the street names here are, and always have been, styled as St. Patrick and not St Patrick’s).

In the background of the picture, below the spire of the Buccleuch Free Church, is the original row of 18th century tenements of St. Patrick Street, for which the square is named. But why was a street in staunchly Presbyterian Edinburgh named for a Catholic saint, in deed one who is the Irish patron? Well the simple answer is it probably wasn’t. It was most likely named for local merchant and landowner Patrick Tod. This would not be the first or even the second saintly Edinburgh placename to have a strictly civic root (see also St. James’ Square, St. Ann Street etc.) Those original and now demolished tenements had been built in 1782 by William Archibald, a slater, who had acquired “five acres and a bit” of ground known as Cabbagehall from the late James Carfrae.

In the mid-18th century Cabbagehall was one of a number of feus (portions of land that had been split up from a larger one under the Scottish system of land tenure) to the south of the city that formed an early suburb outwith the confines of the ancient walls. Most of this suburb was villa houses with portions of market garden. The feuars here clearly had a practical sense of naming; other plots included Gairnshall, Huntershall, Summerhall, Orangehall and Turniphall.

Cabbagehall had been built in the garden of David Stevenson in 1734 and he lived there with his wife and daughter. He took the unusual step of conveying it to his daughter to provide her with an income from which she could maintain her father and stepmother in their dotage. The daughter – Elizabeth – was a widow but remarried a preacher called James Robertson who attempted (and failed) to run some sort of mission from Cabbagehall, pompously referring to himself as “Minister of the Gospel at the Collegehall“. In the 1780s Cabbagehall was the location of the public sale of municipal “street dung“. Those old tenements of St. Patrick Street were built on part of the Cabbagehall garden by Archibald.

The end tenement of the square, above the pend through to Buccleuch Place, was demolished in the 1970s. It is reputed to have been the final lodging place of Robert Burns during his time in the city.

There were other Cabbagehalls in the east of Scotland; at Inveresk (near Musselburgh), Peebles and also an estate in Fife near Leslie, where there was a Laird of Cabbagehall. Turniphall however may have been a unique place name. It was further east, closer to the Pleasance, and tenements were built on it in 1758 by James Carfrae. Part of the Turniphall grounds were sold in 1786. The Nicholson referred to here is from the family who were the ancient landowners, and thus gave their name to Nicolson Street, Square etc. further to the north.

Around 1777, the new road of Nicolson Street was pushed southwards through this district as a grand new road into the city and in doing so cut through the lands of Cabbagehall and Turniphall. The land to either side of the road was then progressively sub-fued to build new tenements. This planned road is shown below in Edgar’s 1765 Town Plan.

Kincaid’s Town Plan of 1784 shows that St. Patrick Square was not the original plan for this area, it had been intended to run Buccleuch Street further east to join up with Nicolson Street.

By 1804 howecwe on Ainslie’s Plan we can see the garden square has been formed and the early 19th century wing of tenements on the west and south sides are planned and shown as a dotted outline. Notice that at this stage, the road that extends Nicolson Street south is shown as “Intended” and Clerk Street does not yet exist.

If you want something actually named for St. Patrick in Edinburgh, then you need to go to St. Patrick’s Catholic Church on the Cowgate. But it wasn’t always so, it started life as an Episcopalian Chapel (the English Chapel as it was known) in 1770. By 1821 it was occupied by the Relief Church (an organisation that split off the Kirk in Fife in 1763 as the Presbytery of Relief for the “Relief of Christians oppressed in their Christian privileges”, and later the United Presbyterian Church

The Roman Catholic Church bought the chapel, with a 50% contribution by local public subscription, and it was consecrated and opened for Mass in 1856. This reflected the swelling number of Irish immigrant Catholics in the Cowgate at this time. Up until 1918, the RC Church controlled education for Catholic children in Edinburgh (and indeed in Scotland) and it was not until after this that St. Patricks’ School became a school under the control of the Edinburgh Education Authority for RC children in the Cowgate and Dumbiedykes area. Like many RC schools in the city, it had a wandering start to life, moving first to a building on St. John’s Hill formerly occupied by an Industrial School (a form of reformatory school that taught basic skills related to trades to children) before occupying part of what had been South Bridge School. Rather like the case of St. Patrick Square, the late Stuart Harris (author of the go-to reference on Edinburgh street and placenames) provides ample evidence that there is no authentic link between the place name of St. John’s Hill and any Christian saint of that name or indeed the Order of the Knights of St John!

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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The thread about the Twelfth Day of Christmas; the Drum and Drum House

This thread was originally written and published in December 2019.

This part in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread is preceded by a post about Pipe Street in Portobello and why it was so named.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; The Drum. Drum is very common in Scottish place names, and comes from the Gaelic Druim meaning literally a “back” and figuratively a ridge of raised ground; in Edinburgh there are examples such as Drum Brae, Back Drum in Leith, Drumdryan (but not Drumsheugh, which is a shortening of Meldrumsheugh). But the Drum to which I am referring is The Drum, an estate and stately home on the outskirts of Edinburgh near Gilmerton.

The place name here refers to the “back” of high ground south of the city and is recorded as early as 1406. The earliest map to show it is John Adiar’s 1682 Map of Midlothian, and we can see it occupies the space between Edmonston, Woolmet, Sheriffhall and Gilmerton. The entire area was part of a hunting forest dating from the time of King David I and which was known as the Drumselch, or Willow Ridge.

The lands of The Drum came into the possession of Sir Walter de Somerville, Lord Somerville of Linton and Carnwath, when he acquired them through marriage to the daughter of the landowner Sir John Herring of Gilmerton. The Somervilles are yet another Norman noble family brought to pacify and civilise Scotland by King David I. A house was first built at The Drum in 1584 for Hugh Somerville, 7th Lord Somerville, after a court case ruled ownership in his favour over another family branch in Cambusnethan. The 11th Lord , James Somerville (who did not claim the title) wrote of it; “the rooms are few, but fair and large; the entire and staircase extremely ill-placed, neither is the outward form modish, being built all in length in form of a church.”

A tragedy befell the Somerville family in 1589 when William Somerville, heir to the Lord, accidentally shot his younger brother John, while drying and cleaning a loaded pistol that had gotten wet. Their father, in a fit of grief and rage swore vengeance upon his older son, who fled before him before the Lord Somerville came to his senses. King James VI on hearing of this, reprimanded the Lord and “commanded him to send for his eldest son, and be reconciled to him, for he knew he was a sober youth, and the very thoughts of his misfortune would afflict him enough, albeit he were not discountenanced by him“. William Somerville, “the Good Master of Drum“, never got over accidentally killing his brother and when he was stricken with fever two years later he suffered with it for 10 months before passing unhappily away.

The original house was replaced in 1720 by the 13th Lord, also James Somerville, who commissioned William Adam – father of Robert and James – to build a fashionable new Palladian country mansion. Writing of Adam’s masterpiece:

Had he never executed another edifice than Drum House, this alone would suffice to merit his distinction… There is an air of refinement about this residence almost equivalent to that which pervades the “Petit Trianon” at Versailles, where Marie Antoinette sought seclusion from the excitement of French Court and the distractions of the later years of her troubled life.

The Architectural Record, Volume 47, Issue 6, June 1920

The original house was remodelled into a wing pavilion; a matching reflection on the other side was never completed.

The interior of the new house was as fine as the outside, the stucco being by the Dutch master Josef Enzer, who was also responsible for the interior of another of William Adam’s Palladian masterpieces in the Lothians, Arniston House.

From 1756 to 1866, The Drum was the location of the Edinburgh Mercat Cross after its removal to widen the High Street. An alternative reason for removal was that the Merchants of the city had persisted in meeting around it to do business, rather than using the fine new Royal Exchange built at great public expense only yards away! The cross was subsequently relocated back to a spot near its original in 1885, at the expense of William Ewart Gladstone. It was raised up on a reproduction podium and plinth to the designs of Sydney Mitchell. The head of the cross was replaced with a royal Unicorn, the original having been pulled down by the occupying forces of Oliver Cromwell as symbols of the monarchy when the city was occupied after the Battle of Dunbar.

The Drum was sold by the 19th Lord Somerville, Aubrey John, in 1800 to James Hay of Bhagalpur, who worked some of its lands for coal at Drum Colliery. He in turn sold it to Robert Cathcart WS around 1809. It then went in 1820 to Gilbert Innes of Stow and on his death to his sister. On his sister’s death it went to Alexander Mitchell of Stow who sold it in 1862 to John More Nisbett of Cairnhill in Ayrshire. More Nisbett bought back the estate park and farm lands at the same time, which had been gradually split up in the earlier part of that century.

More Nisbett’s second son, Hamilton, became an architect, his work mainly being monuments, church alterations and domestic. He succeeded to the estates of Drum and Cairnhill on the death of his older brother, North More Nisbett, in 1939 at which point he moved his practice from George Street to Drum House. He did much of his own work making improvements and alterations to the estate and its buildings and died there in 1955. He designed the Gilmerton Junior Friendly Society Hall, now Gilmerton Village Hall, which appropriately is on Drum Street. The Drum remains in the hands of the More Nisbett family to this day.

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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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 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).

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.

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 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.

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.

The Primrose Lady of Lady Fife’s House: the thread about the Ninth Day of Christmas

This part in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread is preceded by a post about the “Maiden Castle”.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Ladies (dancing). There are many options to choose from with respect to Edinburgh and Leith placenames – there’s at least 16 sets of street names with a Lady or Ladie in them in the book of Edinburgh place names. I shall go somewhere close to home with Lady Fife (sometimes spelled Lady Fyfe) who lent her name to a house, a “brae”, a well, and a street in Leith. Lady Fife was Dorothea Sinclair (1739-1818), wife of James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife.

Lady Fife’s House was more commonly known as Hermitage House and had been completed prior to 1744 in the lands of Coatfield Mains, just to the south of Leith Links between the roads to Lochend and Restalrig. The origin of the Hermitage name is unclear, but when the house was built, it was advertised as being the house “large new house in Hermitage Park“, which suggests the name was already known for the area, and was not taken from the house itself. It was described as having “Kitchen, 12 fire rooms, garrets, closets and other conveniences, all neatly and substantially finished, with a stable, hay loft and brewhouse, and other offices“. In January 1744 it was advertised for sale in the Caledonian Mercury and described as “new built” and extending to 42 acres of lands. It was at this time the property of the estate of the recently deceased Thomas Mercer of Binhall; his widow, Elizabeth Jamieson, was then still resident in it.

The house continued to be advertised for annual let from 1753 to 1760 (it’s unclear if it was formally occupied during this period) and was optimistically described as being “newly finished” at least 16 years after completion! Lady Fife had bought the house in 1794 after she separated from her husband as a result of there being no legitimate heirs (and probably helped by him siring numerous children through extramarital affair). One of the main conveniences of the house was said to be “a pipe of fine water brought into the kitchen“, making it one of the first houses in Leith to have running water. It’s not clear if the water came from the new public supply for Leith from Lochend Loch or if it was tapped off of the well of the name Lady Fife’s Well opposite the house on Leith Links. A large rookery is described as being kept in the grounds.

The distinctive cruciform footprint of the mansion, with four detached wings arranged around the main building, is clear on Roy’s Lowland Map of the 1750s, the house would have been relatively new at this time.

It is described as having “three pavilions, presently used for summer lodgings“, which I assume account for three of the 4 structures at the end of the “arms” extending from the main block of the house. It also had a walled kitchen garden that grew fruit trees and 8-20 acres of grazing.

You will notice that in the 1804 map above, the land ownership is recorded as “Miss Primrose” (the same is true in the 1817 town plan also). This is on account of Lady Fife’s mother being Margaret Primrose, Countess of Caithness; Dorothea had obviously foregone using the title of her philandering husband – at least for the purpose of land ownership. She gives this family name to the current day Primrose Street which is just to the west of where the house once stood.

By 1839, the house was in the possession of the Wood family, merchants and shipowners of Leith. The end of the Wood line of ownership was Miss Mary Wood, who died there in 1871 age 80. She left a huge legacy, including £1,000 for the Leith Ragged School, £2,000 each for Leith Hospital, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Blind Asylum and £15,000 for the reconstruction of St. James’ Episcopal Church and school on Constitution Street. These bequests alone totalled c. £3.3 million today.

The grounds of Hermitage House were once filled with many species of hardwood trees, but this land was gradually swallowed up by building – the first plots, those along the Lochend and Restalrig Roads, were advertised for sale for “building houses upon” as early as 1771. On these plots were built villas including Upper Hermitage, Hermitage Hill, Hermitage Cottage and Hermitage Park. A row of Georgian villas – Hermitage Place was built along the Links. In 1868 the trees of Upper Hermitage were cut down to be replaced by the model streets of the “Lochend Road colonies” houses that took their name; Oakville, Ashville, Thornville, Woodville, Woodbine, Elmwood and Beechwood Terraces. The Hermitage House itself was demolished about 1877 and the Edinburgh Cooperative Building Company was granted a warrant in October 1878 to complete the Leith Links colonies houses on the site (Rosevale Place). Hermitage Park went around 1910, when new tenements were built on Lochend Road and a new public school taking the name Hermitage Park was built on the parkland.

In Lady Fife’s day, she was reputed to be fond of taking a walk on Leith Links. Outside the gates of her house, a public well took the name Lady Fife’s Well. The Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1852-3 records the well as “a spring on the east side of the Links near to Hermitage House, [which] was a favourite walk of Lady Fife residing in Hermitage House“. Beyond the well was (and is) the raised mound of earth given the optimistic title of Lady Fife’s Brae (the latter word being the Scots for a hill, and usually a steep one).

So what is the brae? Is it natural or man made? The Ordnance Survey marked it as an antiquity, “Remains of Pelham’s Battery” on the map of 1849. Pelham’s Battery, or Mount Pelham, was one of three English siege-works constructed as artillery firing platforms during the siege of Leith in 1560. It was named after its commander, Sir William Pelham. The Ordnance Survey Name Book says of it: “An ancient fort said to have been thrown up by the English Army at the Seige of Leith, it is situation about one chain west of Lady Fife’s Well“.

The naming authority was quoted as the antiquarian, Dr. David Henderson Robertson. Robertson had produced in his 1850 book, The Sculptured Stones of Leith, a map showing the hypothetical arrangements of the fortifications of the town during the siege of 1560. It was in this book that Robertson determined that the two remaining “braes” on Leith Links were the remains of the 16th century siege batteries.

Unfortunately Robertson’s map is only partially correct and wrong in a number of respects. The outline of the fortifications he shows is directly contradicted by numerous earlier maps, including a contemporary and accurate one made during the siege. The latter map also accurately shows the siege positions, and that these do not correlate with the mounds on the Links. The mounds are much too close to the walls of Leith for instance, and they are much too small. Plotting the locations of the English siegeworks onto a modern map, based on the contemporary map evidence and subsequent research, puts Mount Pelham (reputed to be Lady Fife’s Brae) on the slopes to the south of Hermitage House. Mount Somerset was categorically not the Giant’s Brae on the Links, but in the grounds of Pilrig House.

So if Lady Fife’s Brae isn’t the last remains of an artillery fortification, what is it? I think a far more logical explanation is that these are natural. The Leith Links are an ancient raised beach system; the earliest illustration I can find of them is from a painting by David Allan in 1787 showing William Inglis, captain of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers who played that game on them. We can see Inglis is standing atop a prominent mound, with the spire of South Leith Kirk, the cones of its glass kilns and North Berwick Law in the distance. This means we are looking north across and the view is over an obviously uneven landscape.

The 1804 Ainslie and 1817 Kirkwood maps both also show the area to be extremely lumpy and bumpy, with many prominent hillocks. The most simple explanation is that when the Links was was being flattened and landscaped in the 19th century these two most prominent mounds were left behind because local lore – supported by Antiquarians – attached a historical significance to them. This is backed up by a letter of 1888 to the Leith Herald, which writes of the intention of Leith Town Council to “level the Links” as “the holes and pitfalls are still so numerous there is a chance of breaking one’s leg if there is a deviation from the pathway“. The author of this letter notes that two “braes” – those of the Giant and Lady Fife – were to be excluded, for what he called a mistaken, sentimental idea of their heritage. He thought they should also be levelled!

Unfortunately, Robertson’s theories have been taken as fact and the story of the two mounds on Leith Links being Marian siege-works have lasted the test of time. Many books have reproduced this story in good faith and the official monument plaques in the park also use this attribution. That doesn’t mean the “braes” aren’t interesting, it’s just not for the reasons that are most commonly assumed.

The Edinburgh and Leith-themed Twelve Days of Christmas Thread continues with a post about Lord Russell Place and Lord John Russell.

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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The thread about the Eight Day of Christmas; who were the Maids of the Maiden Castle?

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 Swanston.

On the eight day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; the Maiden(s, a milking). This, perhaps surprisingly, is the first documented name applied to Edinburgh Castle, in a Charter of King David I in 1142; Castellum Puellarum – the Castle of Maidens. It was not until a century later in the time of King Alexander III, 1265, that it is referred to as Castrum de Edynburgh or Castle of Edinburgh. The oldest remaining structure in the castle, St. Margaret’s Chapel, was built in David I’s time in the middle of the 12th century.

No clear explanation exists for the Maiden reference. There are a number of Maiden Castles in England, all except one of which are Iron Age hill forts. This might be a descriptive tame for a “fortification that looks impregnable” or a euphemism implying that it has never been taken in battle. It may also be the evolution of a Brythyonic language term Mai Dun, meaning a “great hill”. Stuart Harris, the man who wrote the book on Edinburgh place names, discounts this theory for Edinburgh; “there is nothing whatsoever to suggests that this was a translation of some[thing] earlier“. He points out that the original references is the Latin – Puellarum – which was translated in the 13th century to its English and French equivalents – Maidens and Pucelles.

Some of the more improbable tales include an early 14th century reference in the Chronicles of Lanercost to a community of nuns who lived here in the 6th century under the Irish Saint Moninne or Modwenna, before being ejected, or to it being a safekeeping place for Pictish princesses. More likely is that it was a romantic term taken from Arthurian legend, one that may have been applied by David I himself. In Arthurian lore, the Land, Island or Castle of Maidens, is a place visited by a man in his dreams where only women live.

In the 12th century, the Welsh chronicler Geoffrey de Monmouth – who was one of the prominent figures in popularising the Cult of Arthur at the time – wrote in his History of the the Kings of Britain of the Castellum Puellarum as “facing Albany” i.e. looking towards the Lands of the Picts and Scots. At this time, these would have been north across the Forth from Edinburgh. He is also credited with the invention of the Duke of Loth – husband to a sister of Arthur – and from where Lothian takes its name. Geoffrey de Monmouth’s chief patron was a nephew of David I and it is probable that David had met him. The sixteenth century Scottish historian and intellectual George Buchanan and the 20th century Arthurian scholar Roger Sherman Loomis both lend credence to this theory.

In Edinburgh lore, the term Maiden also has a much more grisly connotation; it was an early modern device of public execution, a form of guillotine.

The Maiden was introduced to Edinburgh in 1564 to replace the town’s sword, which was worn out and needed replaced. The Provost and Magistrates of Edinburgh ordered its construction by the carpenters Adam and Patrick Schang and George Tod. The whole contraption could be disassembled for storage, only being moved to the point of execution and erected as required. It was returned afterwards, and this is referred to in the town records as “careying of the Maiden ther and hame agin”.

The Scottish machine is made of oak and consists of a sole beam 5 feet in length into which are fixed two upright posts 10 feet in height, 4 inches broad and 12 inches apart from each other, and 3½ inches in thickness, with bevelled corners. These posts are kept steady by a brace at each side which springs from the end of the sole and is fastened to the uprights 4 feet from the bottom. The tops of the posts are fixed into a cross rail 2 feet in length. The block is a transverse bar 3¼ feet from the bottom, 8 inches in breadth and 4½ inches in thickness, and a hollow on the upper edge of this bar is filled with lead…

The axe consists of a plate of iron faced with steel; it measures 13 inches in length and 10½ inches in breadth. On the upper edge of the plate was fixed a mass of lead 75 lbs in weight. This blade works in grooves cut on the inner edges of the uprights, which are lined with copper…

Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland, Vol.III, 1886-8

Notable victims of the Maiden include James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, one time Regent of Scotland and the man reputed to have introduced its concept to the country, Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll and his son Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll. The Maiden was last used in 1716 to execute John Hamilton at the Mercat Cross for the murder of the landlord of a tavern during a brawl. It was again taken down and carried hame agin but was thereafter forgotten about. The original was rediscovered over a century later and is now on display in the National Museum of Scotland.

The Edinburgh and Leith-themed twelve days of Christmas thread continues with a post about Lady Fife, her house, well and “brae”

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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The thread about the Seventh Day of Christmas; Sven Swans a Swanstoning

This thread was originally written and published in December 2019. It has been edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

This post in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas is preceded by a thread about the Guse Dub.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Sven Swans a Swanstoning. I refer of course to Swanston, in the far south of the modern limits of the city, beyond even the Bypass. A veritably ancient name, one which is probably as old as Edinburgh itself, and even today distinctly rural in character.

The name is first recorded in 1214 and unfortunately doesn’t actually have anything to do with swans. It is of Norse origin, from the given name Sveinn (modern, Sven). Sveinnstun meaning a farmstead belonging to a man called Sven. This puts the probable origin 1 or 2 centuries before the written record in the 10th or 11th centuries. It is recorded as part of the medieval barony of Redhall, which occupied much of the land between the northern slopes of the Pentland Hills and the back of the rising ground south of Edinburgh.

As a farm, Swanston was part of the feu of Templelands; ground granted by the Knights Templar in the 12th or 13th century to Thomas, Lord Binning, a nobleman based in East Lothian. In the 15th century the farm was sub-fued (the feu, or primary plot of land held for the Crown by the laird, was split and granted to two subordinate (or vassal) lairds. These became the separate holdings of Easter and Wester Swanston, with the Swanston Burn forming the boundary, before being reunited in the late 17th century under the Trotters of Mortonhall. And so it was for the next 4 centuries, with not a lot changing; the road beyond Swanston leads nowhere but to the hills and the city was hardly visible 4 miles away beyond the rising ground of the Braid Hills to the north, with its southern boundary a full 2½ miles away in the middle of the 19th century.

The settlement was dominated by the principal farmhouse, formerly Wester Swanston, with the collection of thatched cottages that housed most of the population being on the locus of Easter Swanston.

While Swanston for most of its existence has been fundamentally detached from the metropolis within whose boundary it sits, in the middle of the 18th century it became linked to it when the City gained an Act of Parliament that allowed it to extract drinking water from the springs in its vicinity. A cistern house and three filter beds – gravel and sand filled reservoirs to settle any sediment and silt out of the water – were built south of the village and it was connected to the city by wooden pipes.

A house was added by the City in 1761 for the use of the water engineer and officials, and in 1830 this would be modernised and expanded into the villa of Swanston Cottage. Gargoyles and tracery added to an extension at this time are reputed to have been removed from St. Giles Cathedral by the architect William Burn when he “modernised” the ancient church in a manner befitting the style of the time. The cottage garnered a reputation as being something of a “municipal pleasure house“, where City officials would come to make merry. From 1867-1880, the family of Robert Louis Stevenson rented the cottage in the summer as a holiday house. The teenage Robert spent much time here, including walking to and from the city, and refereed to the place as “a stilly hamlet that vies with any earthly paradise“. Robert’s nurse, Alison Cummingham (“Cummy”), was the sister of the resident waterman, and lived with him in his cottage from 1880 to 1893. Her initials are on the lintel above the door of that house.

On his walks from the family home in Edinburgh’s New Town or from the University to Swanston, the young Robert would pass the water house of the Comiston Springs, which also provided the city with clean drinking water, and where the four springs were named after animals. Coincidentally, one of these was a swan, the Swan Spring emerges in the water house through a pipe crowned with a cast lead swan.

The name of Swanston has been applied to housing built between the 1930s and 1970s to the north of the City Bypass in the district of Fairmilehead. By the middle of the 20th century, these ancient farmhouses of the village were verging on unfit for habitation. They still had floors of compressed earth; their roofs were still thatched with reeds from the Tay (the only such lowland houses in Scotland); running water had only arrived in 1934 and they were without electricity until 1949. The City bought the cottages in 1956 and restored them, for which they earned a Scottish Civic Trust award in 1964. They were leased them out as council housing. Most were purchased under “Right to Buy” legislation, but one survives under municipal ownership and is probably Scotland’s only thatched council house.

In 1927, a woman by the name of Margaret Carswell took a lease of land from Swanston Farm to create a 9-hole ladies’ golf course, having found it impossible to gain access to any of the city’s many other golf courses. Men were later admitted (by popular consent of the membership) and it was expanded to a full 18 holes. It is the only visitor attraction of the “village”, which boasts no public facilities, having lost its school in the 1930s.

The Edinburgh and Leith-themed Twelve Days of Christmas continues with a post about The Maiden Castle.

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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The thread about the Sixth Day of Christmas; the geese of the Guse Dub

This post in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas is preceded by a thread about “Fiveways” and Goldenacre.

On the six day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; the Guse Dub (a laying), where Guse is the old Scots word for a Goose (see also the Guse Pye or Goose Pie house), and the Dub refers to a pond and spring where geese or ducks were once kept. Guse Dub was a common Scots term for a farm or village duck pond. If you are interested in golf, you may know it as a the name of the 14th hole of the Prestwick course, which at one time was alongside an old pond.

But in the context of Edinburgh, this place name has long been applied to a little gushet* of the Southside, where the Crosscauseway meets Causewayside (* = Gushet is the Scots term for a triangular portion of land). The dub itself, described as “rather an unsavoury pond” was sold by the city in 1681 to one John Gairns, who built a house hear called Gairnshall and is first directly referred to in 1698 when the then proprietor of the house and land wanted to be freed from his feudal obligation of watching and warding (i.e. enforcing the law) of the district.

The pond itself was recognised as a health hazard and drained around 1715 (in connection with the draining of the nearby Boroughloch for the same reasons) and turned into gardens. It originally drained naturally east, towards St. Leonards, and then down through Holyrood Park towards the Canongate, where it joined the East Foul Burn.

A house of this name once stood here, on 2 acres of ground, which was also known as the Yardhall. In 1786, an avert in the Caledonian Mercury lists a shop and house for sale in this area, described as being “on part of the lands of Goosedub and Yardhall, lying on the east side of the street, leading from Bristo Street and Chapel of Ease to the Sciennes”. In 1788, there is an insurance record for Peter Stewart, described as a baker in the “Goose Dub, near Edinburgh“. From 1805, William Brown, blacksmith, is listed as resident here in the city’s postal directory. He is joined in 1809 by James Reid, a grocer. In 1815, a Mr McCrea, resident in the Goose Dub, subscribed one pound to the city’s Waterloo Patriotic Fund. Brown is still listed under Goose Dub in 1822, at which point the place name disappears from the directories.

Walter Scott refers to the place in his Waverley Novels, where a Scot in London attempts to argue that Edinburgh is indeed a riverine city:

“The Thames!” exclaimed Richie, in a tone of ineffable contempt- “God bless your honour’s judgement, we have at Edinburgh the Water-of-Leith and the Nor-loch!”
“And the Pow-Burn, and the Quarry-holes, and the Guse-dub, fause loon!” answered Master George, speaking Scotch with such a strong and natural emphasis.

The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822

Since the pond was drained, the Guse Dub has been a bit of a neglected wedge of open space that can’t seem to find a purpose. For many years it was the site of a drinking fountain and horse trough, but since the city turned itself over to motorcars it has been little more than a forlorn tarmac island-cum-carpark. The Causey Development Trust have been trying for a long time to improve this situation, they’ve more on their project and the history of the Guse Dub here;

It is probable that Scott’s decision to list it that kept the place name in the popular imagination after this, and left a well known record of it that was rehabilitated in more recent times when the traditional place name signs were put around the city.

The Edinburgh and Leith Twelve Days of Christmas thread continues with a post about Swanston and the Swan Spring.

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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The thread about the Fifth Day of Christmas; A theme of Five and Golden but not rings

This thread was originally written and published in December 2019.

This post in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas is preceded by a thread about Burdiehouse.

The part of the song that all children love to belt out with gusto; On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Fiveways and Goldenacre. I’m really quite pleased with this one, although it does mean there’s actually two places to describe, even if they are quite close together.

Fiveways might not be familiar if you if you aren’t a regular cyclist, stroller, jogger or dog walker on the North Edinburgh Path Network in the Trinity area of the city, but it’s a rather obvious placename for where five different paths converge.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/131232392@N06/52144261048/

These paths are all old railway trackbeds, acquired by the then Lothian Regional Council in the 1980s and resurfaced for use as walking and cycling routes. There weren’t ever 5 railways here though, there was one railway crossing another which had a junction just north of the crossing.

The first railway here was the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven which opened a route from Scotland Street in the north of the New Town to Trinity (to serve Newhaven) in 1842. This line was extended into the city at Canal Street Station via the Scotland Street Tunnel, but in 1868 this awkward approach was bypassed entirely and a new connection was made from Abbeyhill, under Easter Road and Leith Walk, through Powderhall and connecting with the line to Trinity and Granton at Trinity Junction. This new branch had to pass under the Caledonian Railway, which in 1864 had built a line to North Leith (a station usually referred to as Leith North!) around the north of the city from a junction at Dalry Road station.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/16868866237/in/photolist-naHqPR-2nKb7m2-2np3REh-2kYmyVj-2kHZao6-2nqrLov-2mVjVvR-2n4mPiw-TmSfdE-2iQs9Lj-2me1CRR-2mzQVLP-2iRHes2-DwZ41b-2eBEgca-2iKXUbc-rGDmek-n6cqRi-QwvPCQ-28PnJE6-2iufbUx-6nxF5z-6nBPoj-oSAzFv-6nxFVT-6nBQGL-6nBQfE-CJ7Rue

The lines from Scotland Street and Roseburn were closed and lifted in the 1960s, the diversionary route from Abbeyhill hung on for occasional traffic to an oil depot in Granton until 1984.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/117983829@N03/13842304435/in/album-72157643950735923/

When the trackbed was acquired by the council, it was landscaped into a level crossing, with the appearance of five distinct paths meeting here.

The fingerpost at the top of this post is a neat link to the Golden part of this thread as one of the signs is of course pointing to the nearby area of Goldenacre. As a place name, it is relatively modern; from the late 18th or early 19th century. Older forms go back to the later part of the 17th century as Goldenriggs or Goldenaikers. A rigg, an aiker or an acre all obviously referring to a unit of measurement for farmland. The “golden” part is either a colour reference; as is frequently used around the Lothians in reference to the wildflowers or crops that once grew here; or is a reference to the monetary productivity of the farmland at one time.

There were no structures at Goldenacre in a 1759 feuing plan of the lands of Wariston by Robinson. A house is marked, but not named, here on the 1804 town plan by Ainslie in a plot of land owned by the Duke of Buccleuch, which was at this time a salient of North Leith Parish on the south side of the Ferry Road. The principal house and name for the area at this time was Bangholm, with Goldenacre named and shown in the 1817 plan by Kirkwood.

Villas, and later tenements, began to appear along Inverleith Row and the Ferry Road throughout the late 18th and into the 19th century, but Goldenacre remained a nursery and market garden along with most of the land in the district. The 1876 town plan shows it clearly, with a range of garden structures and planting to the south of the house.

A noteable resident of Goldenacre was Lieutenant General Sir William Crockat (or Crokat), who retired to No. 52 Inverleith Row in 1830 after a 23 year career in the army which had left him invalided. He defied expectations of the fever received at Walcheren and injuries received in Spain and from which he suffered for the rest of his life and spent a long 44 years retirement here. Crockat was the youngest son of John Crokat Esq. of Hawkfield in South Leith, a master slater. It was as Captain Crockat that he was the last officer who had been in charge of the imprisonment of Napoleon Bonaparte on St. Helena, who had been present at his death and who had arrived back in Britain with the despatches that brought news of his death. For his efforts, Crockhat was awarded £500 and a promotion. It is alleged that he cut a lock of hair from the head of the deceased and presented it to his sister as a keepsake. In his obituary it was noted that among his keepsakes from his time on St. Helena, he had in his possession a silver plate and knife used by Napoleon and which bore the Imperial eagle; a portrait of him as a boy, taken from his Imperial snuff box; a wooden spatula that he used to clean his gardening spade in exile; a cordon worn by him during the “100 days campaign”; his silk stocking and garter; and a carved spirits case of cocoa nut wood.

In 1887 the suburban tranquillity of Goldenacre changed when the Edinburgh & Northern Tramways cable hauled tramway reached here as its northern terminus. Suddenly this quiet patch of market gardens was a desirable development plot just a few minutes away from the city centre by tram car and inevitably it was soon feud for building. Within 2 years of the arrival of trams, the old house and its gardens and nursery were gone, and new streets of tenements had sprung up; Bowhill, Montague, Royston, Monmouth and Goldenacre Terraces. These other street names were all derived from family connections of the landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch.

Goldenacre has its place in Scottish rugby lore, the playing fields of George Heriot’s School being created from the old Banholm Nursery in 1899, the school trust having long been the feudal superior landowner of them. The centrepiece to the playing fields is the red brick 1901 sports pavilion.

The sports grounds were extended in 1926 with the opening of New Goldenacre, a senior rugby pitch for the Heriot’s FP team complete with a grandstand. At the time this was one of the finest rugby grounds in the country.

The Edinburgh and Leith twelve days of Christmas thread continues with a post about the Guse Dub.

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The thread about the Fourth Day of Christmas; the Birds, Bards or Bords of Burdiehouse

This thread was originally written and published in December 2019.

This post in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas is preceded by a thread about Little France.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Four Collie Burdiehouses. I thought I had a really clever link here with the old Scots for blackbird, but it was a red (black?) herring. So let’s instead turn our attention to the suburb of Burdiehouse. This name goes back in record to the 17th century, as Burdehouse and other forms such as Burdiehouse, Bordiehouse and Burdihouse. But what does it mean and does it have anything to do with wee birdies?

There is an intriguing and (most probable) dead-end theory that this – like Little France before it – is another one of those Mary Queen of Scots and her French connections; some early references referring to it as Bordeaux. But that does not happen until a century after the mapmakers began to write it down and the confusion may arise because of a simple misunderstanding. Burdeous was one of the principal ways that the French town is spelled in Scots. It’s not a huge leap to imagine a mapmarker removed the “h” by mistake from Burdehous, leaving Burdeous, which inevitably lead to modernisation as Bordeaux.

The “Great” mapmaker William Roy gives us a clue as to another, more likely meaning of the placename in his 1750s Lowland map of Scotland (even though he can’t always be relied on to give accurate place names – the ones he gets wrong are usually pretty obvious and far from the mark); he calls it Bardy Burn.

Bardy may be the Scots Borde, from the Anglian Brerd, for a bank or a border, which would be a perfect toponymy for the Burdiehouse Burn that has long defined a boundary here. An alternative may be Bord house; a farm that supplied the laird’s table, although to me the former seems preferable. Anyway, by the time the Ordnance Survey came along and formalised spellings, it was recorded as Burdiehouse in the Name Books for Midlothian of 1852, as was the story about the French connection:.

This name is corrupted from the French word Bordeaux which was given it in the last century when the first house was built.

Ordnance Survey Name Books 1852-3, Midlothian, Volume 17, OS1/11/17/101

Burdiehouse gives its name to a thick and regionally important layer of limestone that was first quarried here, and on the slopes above the village are the remains of its old lime kilns, which were worked right up until the early 1930s.

These extensive quarries are situated on the farm of Burdiehouse Mains, the property of Mr David Baird who continually keeps about 20 men employed constantly at them. They are of immense depth and present to the the eye prodigious arcades, supported by natural Gothic pillars

Ordnance Survey Name Books 1852-3, Midlothian, Volume 17, OS1/11/17/103

The 1842 Gazetteer of Scotland recoded that Burdiehouse produced 15,000 bolls of lime annually. The landowner and proprietor of the quarries at this time was noted as being Sir David Baird of Newbyth in Haddingtonshire – it might be a reasonable avenue of exploration to see if the place was owned by the Bairds in the 1750s when Roy came along and called it “Bardy House“…

For much of its existence, the village was a “neat and commodious” little roadside hamlet, with two-storey cottages for farm and limestone workers, a mains (the principal farm of an estate), the lime quarries and kilns to the south, a school and a public house – the romantically named Old Bordeaux. Later, Shale was mined just to the south of the lime workings and nearby at Straiton too by the Clippens Oil Company, but working stopped in the 1890s after a dispute with the Edinburgh & District Water Trust whose pipes ran above the workings and directly underneath the village.

In 1929, as suburban Edinburgh marched ever southwards, the section of what was then known as the Penicuik Road here was renamed as the Burdiehouse Road. New streets were drawn up off of it named for one of the old farms in the area – Southhouse Avenue, Road, Terrace, Broadway – for those typically prim but dreary streets of interwar suburban bungalows. In Burdiehouse itself, Edinburgh Corporation built a small addition of 18 cottage flats arranged around Burdiehouse Square in 1938, completed just before the outbreak of war.

The war put paid to any more bungalows, but the Southhouse scheme was revived post-war as one of permanent, prefabricated council housing. The streets to the north of Southhouse Road kept that name, those to the south of it took the Burdiehouse name. The prefabs were a mix of types provided by the Scottish Housing Group, a portion of which were intentionally temporary until permanent houses could replace them, others were permanent, being a mix of BISF Houses, the Framed Orlits and Whitson-Fairhurst Houses. These all remain to this day, but heavily updated with new insulation and rendering, roofs, windows and doors.

The vast expansion of housing in 1947 relocated the epicentre of Burdiehouse to the north, with a parade of shops and a new (temporary) school. A modern, permanent school was completed in 1957 ( closing due to falling rolls and council cuts in 2009).

The little village became left behind as Old Burdiehouse; when it was decided to upgrade the Penicuik Road to dual carriageway in the late 1960s, the road was bypassed around it and cut it off as a cul-de-sac, with the road renamed Old Burdiehouse Road. More recently, acres of new-build housing estates have begun to spring up between Burdiehouse and Gilmerton, totally changing the character of the village once again.

The Edinburgh and Leith twelve days of Christmas threads continue with a post about “Fiveways” and Goldenacre.

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 the Third Day of Christmas; an Edinburgh French Connection

This thread was originally written and published in December 2019.

This post in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas is preceded by a thread about The Lochend Dovecot.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Three (Little) French Hens. This refers to Little France, a charmingly named area to the south of the city where one will now find the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. As a place name it is recorded from 1655 onwards and the popular convention is that its origin comes from the French retinue surrounding Mary Queen of Scots at nearby Craigmillar Castle. However, as early as 1786 we are cautioned about this tale, in “An Account of the Parish Of Liberton in Mid-Lothian”, by the parish minister, Rev. Thomas Whyte. Stuart Harris, author of The Place Names of Edinburgh, describes the evidence for it as “thin” and “circumstantial“. The Mary Queen of Scots myth here was popularised by an ancient tree, shown on Ordnance Survey maps as Queen Mary’s Tree, a sycamore said to have been planted by her here in 1561. Given she only returned to Scotland in August 1561, it is perhaps unlikely she found the time to plant a tree this soon.

In 1735, the Caledonian Mercury advertised the Lands of Little France as being for lease, paying a yearly rent of £432 12/- in old Scottish money and that there was a “good and sufficient” farmhouse and cottages here. In William Roy’s c. 1755 “Great Map” of Lowland Scotland, he records this place as the French Mills. This gives a hint at a more likely origin for the placename; it may be there was at some point a community of French cloth millers here working a mill powered by the Burdiehouse Burn. Indeed, the modern street name here is Little France Mills.

By 1795 the farm was again for let, and is described as extending to 27 acres and 12 falls. An 1825 sketch by Daniel Somerville entitled “Little France near Craigmillar” shows a row of cottages and a building that may be a drying house of some description. In the foreground we see the mill pond that is recorded on Ordnance Survey maps of this time. By the 1880s, maps show that the mill pond here had been drained and a more substantial farm occupies the spot.

Little France does have a real claim to fame beyond improbable associations with Mary Queen of Scots; it was the terminus of the first railway to serve the city; the Edmonstone Waggonway. It was not the first railway in the Lothians however by some stretch; as early as 1722 a waggonway had run between pits around Tranent to Cockenzie and Port Seton.

The Edmonstone Waggonway was built by Alexander Laing, tacksman* of the Newton estate and colliery to Lt. Col. John Wauchope, landowner of the Edmonstone and Niddrie Marischal estates. It was built across Wauchope’s land to move coal from the pit at Old Millerhill to a depot at Little France. While this railway did not enter the boundary of the city itself, it was built explicitly to serve the city; cutting the cartage distance to it in half, and therefore the overall price of coal. The consulting engineer was Robert Stevenson, who proposed both a completely level line to a terminus at The Wisp or a gentle 1/1000 incline to Little France. Laing chose the latter option, on a marginally different alignment. It likely used wrought iron “edge-rails” which were favoured by Stevenson at the time. The waggons were horse-drawn, and could carry between 8 and 11 tons of coal.

* a tacksman was a senior class of tenant, who leased a “tack” of land from the feudal superior (Wauchope in this case), and had rights of sub-leasing it, at the same time as acting as a form of agent for the superior.

The line was announced to be open for business in August 1818, not much is known about its operation however as it only placed this single advert in the newspapers. Alexander Laing of Newton died in his home on May 12th 1825, and the tack of Newton, its colliery and the Waggonway were taken up by Messrs. Alexander & Mowbary Stenhouse of Whitehill.

The Waggonway was soon threatened by the coming of the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway, to bring Midlothian coal more directly into the city at St. Leonards. Its 1825 Parliamentary Bill failed, but it succeeded in 1826. Although Wauchope had been an objector to the 1825 bill and the Stenhouses initially acted likewise in 1826, they eventually came to an agreement with the railway whereby it would make use of some of the trackbed of the Edmonstone Waggonway and lay a connection to the Stenhouse’s pits.

In December 1833 the Edinburgh & Dalkeith advertised that Edmonstone Coal was now for sale at the St. Leonard’s depot, direct from the pit head. Some of the Edmonstone trackbed was later re-used in the 1890s by the Niddrie Coal Company, who laid a tramway to the old depot at Little France from their No. 14 and No. 15 pits sunk around The Wisp area. For most of the 20th Century, Little France was an entirely unremarkable place on the outskirts of the city, most notable for its quaint name. All that changed in 1998 when it was announced that the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh would relocated to a greenfield site here, away from Lauriston Place in the city centre. It opened in 2003.

The Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas continues with a thread about Burdiehouse.

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.

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The thread about Peat Loan; an old house in Trinity on the “wrong” orientation is “wrong”

Here is an interesting house which was recently for sale in Trinity. Whenever there is a building like this, it piques my interest. Why is it at an irregular angle to its regularly ordered Georgian and Victorian neighbours, all of which are in neat plots perpendicular to the road? Why does the boundary follow that line? Shall we find out?

We can quite easily answer these first 2 questions by a quick glance at an old map. Even in 1804 our building stands out like it does now. The boundary is at an angle because it follows a much older property boundary – in this case the stream of the Anchorfield Burn, and the property is at an angle because it pre-dates the others and has been aligned to the burn rather than its neighbours.

Our house of interest is Peat Loan: it’s fairly obvious to look at that it’s a 3 bay building that has been extended at either side with additional wings, then end result being rather barn-like. The entrance door has been narrowed, making it somewhat awkwardly offset from the window above it. The whole building seems quite a bit lower than the modern (actually Victorian) road surface over the tall wall to the left

William Roy doesn’t record any buildings on the Newhaven Road in the 1750s, neither does a map of 1759 or one of 1765, so Peat Loan must be built in the later third of the 18th century. It is therefore amongst the oldest surviving buildings in the neighbourhood of Trinity. You can see below that a road marked by Roy is missing in the 1804 map, it runs from Ferry Road, to the west of Leith Mount in a direct line to the houses of Laverockbank and Lilliputhall, intersecting the Newhaven Road at almost exactly where the house of Peat Loan is marked in 1804. Note that in 1755 the Ferry Road was slightly further south than its current alignment, running about 150m closer to the houses of Old Bonnington and East Warriston, being widened and straightened by 1759 when a feuing map shows that it has moved to its current position.

Peat Loan means Peat Lane, loan being the Scots name for a lane. There was a Peat Neuk (a corner for storing peat) in Leith near the Coalhill since the 17th century, suggesting that peat was being transported to the town and stored for fuel. If it was being gathered on the Wardie Muir it stands to reason that this route to Leith would cross the Newhaven Road here, as there would be a way across the Anchorfield Burn. It is also obvious why it would be known as the Peat Loan.This track was removed by 1804, as the lands of the Trinity House and Hospital of Leith were laid out in plots for building villas and gardens on, and the Ferry Road and Newhaven Road were widened and improved.

The house of Peat Loan sits on a plot that Ainslie puts in the ownership of Mr T. Williamson, alongside villas called St. Catharines Bank (possibly named for his daughter, Catherine) and Northfield. The latter had been a farm, unsurprisingly referring to a subdivision in the northern part of an older landholding. Thomas Williamson of Northfield (1756-1838) was a merchant who had premises on Quality Street and is listed in the 1804-5 Post Office directory. His wife was Elizabeth Ramsay, daughter of his business partner Robert Ramsay of Camno.

He became Thomas Williamson of Lixmount when he bought the villa of this name in 1812. Lixmount had been built in 1792 by a lawyer, George Andrew, whose wife had a family connection to Lix in Perthshire.

Thomas became Williamson-Ramsay of Lixmount and Maxton in 1832 when he succeeded to this estate and its title on the death of his wife; her father having died in 1814, it fell to Thomas who himself died in 1838. He left a substantial legacy to Leith Hospital, which funded a £25,000, 7 ward extension in 1871 that was called Williamson-Ramsay House. The titles and property were inherited by George Williamson-Ramsay, eldest son of Thomas and Elizabeth.

By 1817, St. Catherine’s is owned by a Dr. Ireland. Northfield remains in the posession of a Mr Williamson, who I think Thomas Williamson junior, son of William-Ramsay of Lixmount. By 1849 Peat Loan was known as Northfield Cottage and by 1857 was in the ownership of Mrs Barbara Notman, who had inherited it through an aunt, Susan Williamson, suggesting it had stayed in the Williamson family all this time. The resident is later Mr James Hume Notman, son of Barbara, he was a law agent and was still there in 1884. By 1891, James is resident in Edinburgh. His father, William Notman, died at Northfield Cottage in 1893 and his mother Barbara dies there in 1904.

William Notman was an architect and the house was used as both the family residence and his place of work and had apparently lived at Northfield Cottage since the age of 11. He was apprenticed to William Henry Playfair, the architect of Edinburgh’s Third or Calton New Town and many of its neoclassical monuments, at the age of 14. He was Playfair’s assistant before setting up his own practice, the work in his own name being mainly shops, farmhouses, domestic and alterations to existing buildings.

The house in the property listing is stripped back to a bare shell however photos taken by Canmore show the building before it was gutted in 2016. It largely looks untouched since the 1950s and 60s, but a few older features peek through, DSL suggests they are the work of Notman. Its new owners got in touch in 2023 to let me know that they had finished renovating and restoring it after much effort and were now enjoying living there.

And what of the Anchorfield Burn? Well, the little stream is still there, long since hidden underground within a culvert. You can still see it seeping out of this culvert and feeding a swamp alongside the cycle path on the old railway running through Trinity between the bridges which carry Clark Road and South Trinity Road across the path. The burn flowed out into the sea east of Newhaven, where there stood an early 18th century house – appropriately enough known as Anchorfield. It’s nice to think it’s a fancy name with a nautical connection. But… you’d be wrong. Anchor is a mis-spelling of an older word, Anker, which refers to a winding or hook-shaped stream. The –field part of the name was simply a common suffix with which to name a house at the time..

The Mr Morrison referred to on the map was Sir Alexander Morison (1779 – 1866) who was born here. Sir Alexander specialised in mental health and treating a wealthy clientele. He was one of the consulting doctors to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London in 1835; from where the word Bedlam comes from. An image of Morrison at Anchorfield was painted by a patient in Bethlem, the artist Richard Dadd, in 1835. Dadd had never seen this scene but based it off of drawings and descriptions from Morison’s daughter.

Anchorfield now lends its name to a late Victorian tenement built on its site, which is in the news as of January 2024 as one side has had to be evacuated over severe structural concerns.

Footnote: Since this post was first written, the new owners of Peat Loan have been very hard at work renovating and restoring the house. They were kind enough to invite me around to see for myself and I am very pleased to say they have done a wonderful job and made the most amazing home.

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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The thread about Bread Street and whether its name has anything to do with bread or baking

This thread was originally written and published in October 2021.

In October 2021, a certain celebrity chef opened a high-end chain restaurant in Edinburgh called “Bread Street”. Confusingly, it’s on St. Andrew Square, and nowhere near Edinburgh’s Bread Street.

The real Bread Street is on the other side of the city centre, between the West Port and Fountainbridge. But why was it called Bread Street? Let’s see if we can find out more. But first let’s understand some of the history of the street and the area… The West Port was the old western gateway to the city of Edinburgh and lends its name to the current road here, the principal route into the city from the west and southwest before the middle of the 18th century. On either side of the road lay the small burgh of Wester Portsburgh – no prizes for guessing how it got its name! This settlement was an partially independent jurisdiction which grew up right outside the city walls.

Looking at a map of the early 19th century we can see the “Three Great Roads” into the city; from Falkirk, Stirling and Linlithgow in yellow, known as Orchardfield; from Lanark, Glasgow and Mid Calder in Green, Fountainbridge; and from Penicuik, Peebles and Biggar in Blue, Cowfeeder Row. In Orange is the high street of Portsburgh and in pink is the West Port itself, where the gate once stood.

It is Orchardfield that would become Bread Street, but not until 1824, when it begins to be mentioned in newspapers. The old name is one of some antiquity, recorded as far back as a charter of King David I in 1120 where it is referred to as the King’s Garden. It’s a fairly simple etymology, when taken with the nearby King’s Barns, these were Royal orchards and market gardens for Edinburgh Castle, and barns for the storage of produce. A map of 1784 by Alexander Kincaid shows that the although there were a buildings lining these roads at the end of the 18th century, the areas was still largely pastoral in character, covered in orchards, fields and market gardens. Ainslie’s map of 1804, as seen above, again shows much of the land remains undeveloped. But by now the city is beginning to creep more visibly westwards along the roads..

The town plans from 1804 to 1831 show a range of development proposals for this area. This latter map, by John Wood, shows that Bread Street has now acquired its name and a blocks of new tenements have been completed (in grey shading) along Lothian Road and the south side of Bread Street, and further blocks are planned (red shading). This plan would never be fully realised; the buildings along Lothian Road were completed, the space for “Brunswick Place” was left, but the public square never really materialised, and only the block between Grindlay Street, Bread Street and Lothian Road would be completed, and to a different and less formal layout.

By the time of the first detailed Ordnance Survey town plan, in 1849, Bread Street is formed more or less as it is to this day, although to its eastern end it is called Orchardfield Street – so we can suppose that whatever Bread Street is named for is centred around its western end. Note too that the individual blocks of Lothian Road still have their earlier names, the part here being Downie Place; the Road referred to the whole length, a common Edinburgh practice.

But why Bread Street? Well, there is perhaps a clue in the name of the confluence of the “Three Great Roads” at Portsburgh, an area known traditionally as the Main Point; or to a different sort of person (invariably a tourist) as the pubic triangle (on account of the triangular portion of land, aptly called a gushet in Scots, and the sort of entertainment offered at the bars on the corers of the street here).

You see, in the very olden days, Main was the name given to the best bread (that’s Main, not Plain breid!). This is from the French Paindemain, which in Scots became Maine.

It is … ordanit that na baxter baik na mayne breid to sell fra hine furthwart, saiffing allenarly at Witsounday1

Edinburgh Burgh Records, 1443

1. English – It is ordained that no baker bakes any main bread to sell from henceforth, except only at Whitsunda) ↩︎

Was this an area where bread was once baked? It’s a nice idea – although we have no specific record that this is the case. It would not have been where the city of Edinburgh baked its bread, given it was outside the city walls and therefore the restrictions of its trades incorporations. The area name is recorded in a post-office directory of 1775, and by the end of the 18th century a baker was established here and apparently too a “bread society”. It may be all to convenient however, as I think by this time the word main for the best bread had fallen out of favour for the best part of a century and had been replaced by the concepts of plain and fancy bread to distinguish between cheaper and more expensive loafs.

Whether or not the bread theory holds any weight, it should be noted that the Main Point was the name of the building, not a reference to it being at the point of the two gushets (Gushet. n. Scots. “A triangular piece of land, esp. one lying between two adjacent properties“) formed by Bread Street, East Fountainbridge and Cowfeeder Row. This spot was long the location of a toll house known as the Tupenny Custom. This toll has nothing to do with the local placename of Tollcross. It also has nothing to do with even a cross or a cross roads. It’s an 18th century corruption of the much older name Tollcors, a Brythonic toponym meaning a boggy hollow. It’s written as Tolcors in the 15th century and Towcroce and Tolcroce in the 16th.

Anyway even if it is fanciful that Bread Street and the Main Point are named after baking, it’s somewhat appropriate, as much of the block on the south side of Bread Street would from the late 19th century onwards, and well into the 20th, be acquired by and rebuilt for the St. Cuthbert’s Cooperative Society as a showpiece department store.

Fountainbridge is the spiritual home of the St. Cuthbert’s, named for the parish to the west of the city in which it was founded. Its original store was here, and later its administrative offices, its main bakery, its dairy, its transport department and its workshops. The litmus test of a real Edinburgher of a certain generation is to mention St. Cuthberts; if their eyes glaze over and they drift off into pleasant reminiscences for at least a few hours about getting taken there for school shoes and can still tell you their Divvy number, then you know they are the real deal. (Leithers went to Leith Provident Co-op of course.)

I’m afraid I can’t find many decent photos of Bread Street and St. Cuthberts that have appropriate permission to share, but there are loads on Scran, here (top tip, use your library card option in logon and see them all in high res) or some on Canmore, here. And the seemingly endless collection on Flickr of Mike Ashworth has this lovely promotional cover with a coloured illustration of the store (before the 1930s additions)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@N00/3552162236/in/photolist-mipbgh-mio4Hi-mio6Jx-mio6ZH-aFev4c-2kWTNSz-kWJ9Se-6pTL5u-moR6zG-FJhwEU

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.