#toponymy — Public Fediverse posts

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

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

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

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

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

#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

#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

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 sem-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.

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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#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

Odd bit of history/geography:
Hawke's Bay (region of New Zealand), Hawke's Bay (town in Canada), and Hawke's Bay (beach in Pakistan) are all named after Lord Hawke - but not all after the same one!
The region and town are named after the 1st Baron Hawke, but the beach is named after the 9th Baron Hawke (who had a house there in the '30s).
#HawkesBay #history #geography #toponymy

Quelques nouvelles peu réjouissantes de ce qui se trame en Terre de Feu argentine : https://karukinka.eu/fr/la-toponymie-argentine-un-enjeu-de-pouvoir-pour-le-gouvernement-de-milei #toponymy #toponyme #toponymes #toponimia #tierradelfuego #terredefeu #geography #indigenousmapping #indigenousmaps

Toponymy – The Study Of Place Names
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy <-- wiki page
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy_of_England <-- wiki, toponymy of England
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_toponymy <-- wiki, Celtic toponymy
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #geography #placenames #placename #toponymy #propernames #study #history #historicmaps #origin #lingustics

Toponymy – The Study Of Place Names
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy <-- wiki page
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy_of_England <-- wiki, toponymy of England
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_toponymy <-- wiki, Celtic toponymy
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #geography #placenames #placename #toponymy #propernames #study #history #historicmaps #origin #lingustics

Toponymy – The Study Of Place Names
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy <-- wiki page
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy_of_England <-- wiki, toponymy of England
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_toponymy <-- wiki, Celtic toponymy
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #geography #placenames #placename #toponymy #propernames #study #history #historicmaps #origin #lingustics

Toponymy – The Study Of Place Names
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy <-- wiki page
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy_of_England <-- wiki, toponymy of England
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_toponymy <-- wiki, Celtic toponymy
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #geography #placenames #placename #toponymy #propernames #study #history #historicmaps #origin #lingustics

Toponymy – The Study Of Place Names
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy <-- wiki page
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy_of_England <-- wiki, toponymy of England
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_toponymy <-- wiki, Celtic toponymy
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #geography #placenames #placename #toponymy #propernames #study #history #historicmaps #origin #lingustics

The Palace at the Foot of the Walk: the thread about the many lives of an early cinema

The Foot of the Walk pub in Leith has been in the news recently as its owner has put it on the market for sale, to much local indignation. These premises first opened on 1st January 1913 as The Palace cinema (in reference to the term “Picture Palace“, which was in use at the time to differentiate the upper end of the cinema market from the lower), showing a programme of illustrated nursery rhymes, a film about a gang of horse thieves and other “pictures of a humorous kind, which were greatly appreciated“. The cinema, as built, had a proscenium 32 feet wide by 22 feet high which gave it the largest screen in all of Edinburgh or Leith. It had a capacity for 2,000; 900 in the pit, 650 in the pit stalls and 450 in the upper gallery and a feature was that both the roof and balcony were cantilevered, with no supporting pillars to get in the way of the view of the screen. Great attention was paid to fire safety; the Brackliss Motiograph projector was installed behind the auditorium, within fireproof walls, there were 8 emergency exits from the auditorium and lighting was electric, rather than gas.

It cost the Leith Public Hall & Property Co. around £20,000 to build (around £1.8 million in 2023) and was part of a syndicate of cinemas controlled by theatre impresario Robert Colburn (“RC”) Buchanan; a man described by Scottish Cinema journal at that time as being gifted to the trade “by the gods“. Buchanan was for a time the managing director of the Gaiety theatre in Leith, which stood on th opposite side of Constitution Street from The Palace. The latter site had long been the premises of Bell, Rannie & Co., one of Leith’s longest established wine merchants, where brothers Robert and John Cockburn served their apprenticeships.

A fire at Bell, Rannie & Co.’s George Street shop in 1910 led to the sale of their Constitution Street warehouse and offices. It was briefly thereafter occupied by the Rev. John Findlater and the Leith Methodist Church, which had recently become homeless after its church across the road was demolished to allow the construction of Leith Central Station. Shortly after this, it too was cleared, to make way for the cinema which was built on top of Bell & Rannie’s old vaults.

The cinema was surrounded at ground floor level with shop units on both Constitution and Duke Streets and at this time the opportunity was taken for the former street to be widened and a corresponding portion of the latter narrowed, to improve the road layout at the Foot of the Walk. Upstairs, on the Duke Street side, there was a hall that was long occupied by the Leith Central Snooker Club.

One thing that wasn’t included in the demolition and rebuilding was an adjoining bonded warehouse, the property of Cockburn & Campbell, wine merchants at 15 Duke Street. This sad looking, long-abandoned old building is actually one of the oldest in this part of Leith – dating from at least 1804!

The Palace was designed around showing two programmes every night, at 7PM and 9PM, and so was laid out internally such that one audience could enter through the foyer while previous one exited through separate doors onto Duke and Constitution street, without any mutual disruption. The advert below shows the opening week’s programme, which described the venue as “a Lordly Picture House. The Largest. The Latest. The Best.“

The opening feature – “A Race For An Inheritance” (A Drama rushing from sensation to sensation) – was a Gaumont film that had only recently been released.

This wasn’t the only “Palace” cinema in the neighbourhood, there was Pringle’s Picture Palace at the other end of The Walk on Elm Row and they were joined by the Empire Picture Palace on Henderson Street in 1917. Further afield there was the St. Bernard’s Picture Palace in Stockbridge, which opened in 1911, The Palace on Princes Street, which opened on Christmas Eve 1913 and the New Palace on the High Street that opened for talkies in 1929. The Leith Palace was wired for sound in September 1930 to allow it to join that latest cinema craze. In 1931 the Cimarron with Richard Dix and Irene Dunne was one of the first such pictures being shown. Alterations were made at this time by renowned cinema (and roadhouse!) architect Thomas Bowhill Gibson, whose work includes the Dominion in Morningside and former George / County in Portobello. These may have included removal of the tower over the entrance that is seen in the first picture on this page.

The Palace quietly prospered in the 1930s and 1940s, although eclipsed by newer and larger and more modern houses (such as The Capitol on Manderston Street and The State on Great Junction Street, it remained popular. However by the 1960s, like many smaller houses it was beginning to struggle to compete with television and closed without ceremony on December 31st 1966, 53 years to the day since it opened, showing The Trouble With Angels starring Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills.

The cinema went on the market and was purchased by new owners, Norwich Enterprises Ltd, trading as Palace Promotions. It was shortly thereafter converted to serve the new craze of bingo, still under the Palace name. A fire in 1968 destroyed most of the auditorium roof of the building on March 24th 1968, fortunately some hours after the 1,000 patrons who had been playing had gone home. It was repaired thereafter and soon back in business.

In 1978 the Bingo hall closed and was replaced by Cuemasters Snooker and Social Club and in turn the long established Leith Central Snooker Club upstairs closed in 1983. In 1992 a small church called “The Potters House” moved in to the latter space.

The old cinema was refurbished and reopened as the Wetherspoon pub The Foot of the Walk on 27th June 2001. Few of the original features are visible inside, but if you use your imagination you can get a rough idea of the original layout. The upper balcony still exists, hidden away, with its seats, carpets and wall coverings as they were when the last film was shown in 1966. You can view pictures of it here on the excellent Scottish Cinemas website. After over 20 years of security in the guise of a cheap, cheerful and popular watering hole, its future is once again uncertain. In its life it has spent 53 years as a cinema, 12 years as a bingo hall, 23 years as a snooker hall and a further 23 as a public house; like many former cinemas it has now spent longer not being a cinema than the time it spent serving its intended purpose.

As for the name “Foot of the Walk“? It’s a name for this locality that’s as old as postal directories are in Edinburgh and Leith, appearing in Peter Williamson’s first directories in the 1770s. And we can push it back 40 years more in the newspapers, an advert for one of the first houses built here appearing in the Caledonian Mercury on January 4th 1737.

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.

Scotland + #language + #geography = relevant to my interests.

#Saobhaidhean of the #Gàidhealtachd | $Scotland's #Nature

#toponymy #Gaelic #Gàidhlig

https://scotlandsnature.blog/2023/07/28/saobhaidhean-of-the-gaidhealtachd/

So much more than just a bus destination: the thread about Clovenstone and the Wester Hailes housing scheme

This thread was originally written and published in December 2023.

I’ve previously jested that Clovenstone is a placename that only exists on bus timetables. This is of course silly. But is there anything more to say about Clovenstone than its where more than one bus route starts and finishes? Of course there is. Let’s go find out

First up – if Clovenstone actually exists, where is it and what is it? Well, it’s the southeast most neighbourhood of the vast Wester Hailes housing scheme that was built on the outskirts of west Edinburgh between 1968-75 and it was the last part of the overall scheme to be built.

The Clovenstone neighbourhood is a mix of low and mid-rise housing, centred around Clovenstone
Primary School. When built, each of the neighbourhood districts of Wester Hailes had a primary school at their centre, although some were intentionally temporary, planned to cope with the initial population boom as new families moved to the area and had children, growth which would taper off as the population aged and require fewer schools. Somewhat confusingly, the temporary wooden prefab school that had been built in 1957 in The Calders scheme (part of Sighthill) had been called Wester Hailes, so there was no Wester Hailes Primary School in Wester Hailes itself!

The scheme name – Clovenstone – is a fanciful one and is actually a bit of a misnomer. The Clovenstone, as its name suggests, was a split stone that formed a landmark. However it was over 1km away from the housing scheme, and was lost by quarrying at Redhall in the 1860s. The stone stood in what is now Dovecot Park off the Lanark Road. This was greatly quarried out for the prized Redhall stone (proprietor one James Gowans of Rockville fame), before being worked out by the 1890s. The hole that was left behind was backfilled with the city’s refuse in the 1930s-50s and later landscaped as a park.

Quite how the name of a distant, long-gone and probably forgotten standing stone came to be applied to a 1970s council housing scheme is anyone’s guess. It is never mentioned in any of the usual sources for Edinburgh local history; newspapers, antiquarian books, the Books of the Old Edinburgh Club, etc. One wonders if it was the diligent work of Charles Boog Watson, semi-official custodian of the city’s place name heritage from 1908-47, that had anything to do with the name still being remembered in some City Chambers filing cabinet when it came to naming the housing in the 1970s. Edinburgh Corporation Transport, as it was, launched the Number 30 bus to Clovenstone in January 1972, and for the last 51 years that bus (and the number 3) have shown this intriguing name on their westbound destination blinds.

The Clovenstone neighbourhood actually sits almost slap bang on top of the old Wester Hailes Farm, 287 acres of which were acquired by the Edinburgh Corporation way back in 1963 for the purposes of building a new housing scheme. This was controversial at the time as it was already designated as green belt land. But Edinburgh was desperate for new housing at the time (sound familiar?). The city was trying to cope with an energetic new wave of slum clearance in the wake of the collapse of the Penny Tenement, coupled with the life-expiry of thousands of the temporary post-war prefabs which had been rapidly built in a short period of time and so all needed replaced in short order. But it would take years of political wrangling within the council and with the Scottish Development Department to get the project going. The Wester Hailes scheme was controversial enough that Midlothian County Council opposed it – they did not want development on green belt land, they felt it was too close to the proposed outer ring road (what would become the City Bypass) and they worried it would swamp nearby villages like Juniper Green, which at that time were not within the jurisdiction of the City of Edinburgh. The residents of Juniper Green agitated against it, as did the Wester Hailes Smallholders – there were many smallholdings in the area as part of a post-WW1 scheme set up in the 1930s under the terms of the Agricultural Smallholdings (Scotland) Act, 1923.

The scheme got going in 1968 finally at Dumbryden but its scope had grown by this time. It was initially intended to be of 3,500 houses but was expanded after the Corporation lost a long and bitter local and national political fight – which culminated in a public enquiry – to build 4,000 houses at Alnwickhill. As a result, it had to get more out of the Wester Hailes scheme and increase the density to try and provide dwellings for 17,000 persons. As such it was one of the biggest schemes in all of Scotland.

It was said by its opponents, before it was even built, that nobody would want to live in Wester Hailes; the peripheral housing schemes built by the council in the 1920s, 30s and postwar had proved unpopular on account of their distance from the city centre and employment and on account of the lack of facilities provided in them. But the scheme’s problems did not end with its difficult gestation and it faced a swathe of planning and construction issues from the offset. Costs vastly increased due to inflation – by 31% in a few years. At the same time, the Scottish Development Department (the same department that specified the housing standards) refused to increase its yardsticks for calculating funding – the local authority found itself squeezed financially by having to meet a specification that the specifier would not pay for, and so cost-cutting was needed everywhere. Oversight, workmanship and construction quality suffered as a result.

Other classic mistakes of peripheral council housing schemes were repeated. Neighbourhoods were carved up and cut off by dual carriageways in an area with low car ownership, with many of the few crossing points being unwelcoming underpasses. The shopping facilities were concentrated almost entirely in a central mall – this wasn’t completed until 1973, after most of the housing was built and a whole 5 years after houses started completing. A railway line ran through the middle of the scheme, which would provide quick transport to employment centres in Edinburgh, West Lothian and Glasgow, but no station was opened until 19 years after the first houses went up. Although primary schooling had been well provided for, high schooling had not. Wester Hailes Education Centre did not open until 1978, by which time neighbouring Forrester High was overcapacity, with almost twice as many students as it was designed to cope with and was bursting at the seams. To compound matters WHEC (as it is universally called) was built too small. As early as 1974, before the scheme was even complete, it was highlighted as “an area of potential deprivation” on account of the lack of public and commercial facilities and services and public transport

To increase the housing density of the scheme, many multi-storey flats were planned at Westburn, Wester Hailes Drive and Hailesland. These were criticised as unlettable – something which proved to be partially true. The Ronan Point Disaster disaster of 1968 highlighted the structural flaws of the Large Panel System multi-storey flats and well and truly put the public off them. Many of the multi-storey flats planned for Wester Hailes were to be built on the Bison System and the Corporation had just completed new Skarne System flats nearby at Sighthill. Build quality in these flats was so poor that they were plagued with damp, walls ran with condensation and mould was endemic. An unskilled workforce, under pressure to deliver, was found to have simply cut off the fixing points of the poorly-fabricated wall modules when they couldn’t get them to fit; many were being held up simply by gravity and their own weight! Obsolete before they were even built, they were literally falling apart and fundamentally condemned within 10 years, when repairs were estimated at over £10 million. Nearly all were demolished within 20 years of construction.

As a result of the failures of the multis, Clovenstone was respecified while under construction and was built entirely of mid and low rise stock, from 2 to 5 storeys. Reducing the density pushed up construction costs further and also the rents, but the housing was at least more attractive to tenants and so it slowly filled up.

But I don’t want to make this thread all too negative though – the faults and problems of the scheme in construction and design are not a reflection on its residents, who have found themselves fighting against the failure of the authorities since the get go. They have amply demonstrated a resilient ability for local organisation and self-improvement in the face of official indifference. Much of the estate has been rebuilt or renovated in the last 20 years, through no small part of local activism. It is testament to that, that when the multis started coming down at Westburn in 1993, they were replaced by low rise, lower density housing provided by the Wester Hailes Community Housing Association, a local organisation set up as an alternative to the Council as a housing provider, and which now controls nearly 900 homes in the area.

It might seem like the unlikely setting for a movie, but Wester Hailes is the backdrop to the excellent 1985 coming-of-age adventure film “Restless Natives“, where Ronnie and Will break free from their monotonous lives on a housing scheme by becoming modern-day highwaymen. Many of the scenes are shot around the wider estate, including in Clovenstone. I recommend you watch it, if you haven’t already

You can read more about the other bits of the Wester Hailes housing schemes, where they got their names and just how bad much of the building quality was over at this thread.

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

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Kaimes: the thread linking the “magnificent madness” of a Victorian gun collector to Leith, Corstorphine and Peeblesshire

Kaimes is one of those local place names you just seem to take for granted, without it having any particularly obvious meaning. It comes from the Scots word came or kame, for a comb or crest – describing the landscape feature of a hill or ridge – in turn coming from the Old English Camb. Indeed there is a Kaimes house and Kaimes Hill out by Dalmahoy where the 17th century spelling by mapmaker John Adair is Combs and that by William Roy in the 1750s is Kaims.

The Kaimes in the south of Edinburgh was a small village at the crossroads of the Burdiehouse, Howden Hall, Frogston and Captain’s1 roads (and is also known as Kaimes Crossroads) and has exactly the same meaning, describing two ridges on the rising ground south of the city. William Roy spells this one as Cames and in An Account of the Parish of Liberton in 1792 it is given as “the two Kaims“. The east-west route of Frogston and Captain’s Road was formerly the Kames Road, running from Fairmilehead to the Lasswade Road. By the 19th century the spelling had settled on Kaims – an Ordnance Survey name book of 1852 records it being updated from Cames at that time – and an e was inserted later to give us the modern spelling.

1. Captain’s Road is one of those place names whose meaning has been lost to time, it was only so named in 1900, apparently based on local convention, and is recorded in newspapers in the 1890s. But who the Captain was, nobody troubled to record. ↩︎

You can still find Kaimes Cottage, it’s a quite obvious older interloper in 20th century suburbia of the district. It was, in the 1850s and ’60s, the home of Mr Robert Grieve; a horticulturist noted for his pinks, his pansies and his picotees. His collection of over 1,500 plants was publicly auctioned after his death in 1866.

Kaimes School was opened in 1976 as a purpose-built school for partially sighted children. It is in the grounds of Gracemount High School, where it had been established as a unit in the late 1960s following a recommendation for such a facility as far back as a report in 1950. It could accommodate 100 children of primary and secondary age, from all across Scotland. Particular attention was paid to lighting, a special window coating used to keep out glare from the sun and all rooms being controllable up to a level 3x that of a standard school setting.

There is also a Kaimhead on the Salisbury Crags in the city, with the same OS name books confirming the toponymy:

This name applies to the crest of a low ridge or mound situated a little to the eastward of “Jeanie Deans’ Cottage” in the Queen’s Park. It is derived from the Scottish word “Kaim”, a low ridge, the crest of a hill, and is generally known in the locality

Ordnance Survey Name Book for Midlothian, 1852-53, OS1/11/112/75

And there is of course yet another Kaimes in the city and it’s on a hill too. I speak of course of Kaimes Road in Corstorphine and it’s fiendishly steep as you’ll know if you’ve ever walked or tried to cycle up it.

But this Kaimes isn’t named for the hill it is on, instead it’s named for a distant promontory, Kaimes on the estate of Halmyre, near Romannobridge in Peeblesshire. This is because the land here was owned by and developed for one Charles Ferrier Gordon of Halmyre, an eccentric gun collector, and this connection takes our story on an unexpected tangent.

Gordon also gave his name to the streets in this part of Corstorphine of Gordon Loan and Cairnmuir Road (from Cairnmuir, on the Baddinsgill Estate, also at one time in his ownership). He had also inherited land in Leith via his mother, Magdaline Ferrier, from whom he also took his middle name. This gives us the streets of Halmyre, Gordon and Ferrier (the latter disappeared during cleared in the 1970s). Charles’ grandfather was William Gordon, an illegitimate son of Sir William Gordon of Gordonstoun, 6th bt. Although he could not inherit his father’s title, he inherited money from him and spent this on the Halmyre estate in Peeblesshire in 1808.

The name Halmyre is toponymic, describing a hall (house) on a myre (marshy ground). William built it up into a model Victorian farming and sporting estate, improving and expanding its 16th century mansion house in the fashionable Scottish Baronial Revival style of the day. Charles was the son of William’s sixth son Archibald Gordon, a military doctor, and was born in England. His mother died when he was only 3 weeks old and at this time his father was sent to the Crimea on service, so the baby Charles was sent to the family seat of Halmyre to be raised by an aunt and uncle (Richard Gordon of Halmyre, who had bought the estate when his father William had died). Uncle Richard died in 1865 but a condition of Charles’ inheritance was that he would not come into his majority until he was 31. But his affairs were well managed for him and he was comfortably off, so devoted himself to the life of a country laird at Halmyre, his name appearing in the Peeblesshire papers in the 1880s and 1890s in connection with agricultural shows.

But most of all he indulged in his number one passion in life – guns. Between 1875 and 1904 he is estimated to have amassed a “bewildering succession” of over 300 guns, having most of these custom-built for him by John Dickson & Son of Princes Street in Edinburgh. Each of his guns was said to have “quirks and odd features” and these is something they shared with their master.

Censuses in 1881, 1891 and 1901 record Charles as living at Halmyre with only a housekeeper and a cook (and of course his hundreds of guns). Despite his wealth, such was his appetite for guns that he had to begin feuing off his inherited land to fund his habit – this was the land in Leith and Corstorphine whose street names we have already mentioned. But all was not well with Charles; he was described in contemporary newspapers as being “long of unsound mind” and “incapable of managing his affairs“, indeed his biography is entitled “Magnificent Madness”. He had spent tens of thousands of pounds (millions in 2023) on his gun collection – most of which were never even fired – and amassed substantial debts.

In 1908, adverts in the Scotsman announced the sale of “Sporting Guns and Rifles, Shot Barrels, Powder Flaks, Game Panniers etc. A collection manufactured to the order of Charles Gordon Esq. of Halmyre.” His book collection appeared in the same Edinburgh auction house the following year and three years later, in 1912, his three half-sisters by his father’s second marriage – Alice, Magdalene and Isabella Gordon – sold the estate of Halmyre by public roup (auction) for £12,000. Isabella moved into Halmyre House itself. They were acting curator bonis – in Scots law this means “a legal representative appointed by a court to manage the finances, property, or estate of another person unable to do so because of mental or physical incapacity“.

In 1911, aged 57, he was living alone at Logan Cottage in West Linton with only a single servant for company. His half-sisters did not include the cottage of Kaimhouse, which lends its name to the street in Corstorphine, on the estate in the sale, and this is where he lived out his final days. Charles Ferrier Gordon died there in 1918 aged 64; the summary of his biography says he was “a man who bankrupted his estate ending his days alone with all his possessions sold, insane and incapable of running his affairs.” But he did not find peace in death, within months the Misses Gordon, his curator bonis, went to court to challenge his will. This document had been hand-written and signed by Charles in 1908, leaving what remained of his estate to one Eleanora Gordon-Cumming (who was no direct relation), also known as Eleanora Nakesaka. Despite him blowing most of his wealth on his gun obsession, at the time of his death he still left behind, after debts and expenses, the not insignificant amount of £5,924 11s 1d (c. £252k in 2023), which clearly Eleanora felt was worth pursuing a claim on.

The Misses Gordon contested that “he was throughout his life, of unsound mind, and on account of his mental state incapable of managing his affairs or giving proper directions to their management“. Charles had become acquainted with Eleanora prior to 1907, and for a period in 1912 had lived with her and her husband in Edinburgh. Eleanora was represented in court by her husband, a language teacher, and pleaded that the will was “genuine, clear and deliberate expression of [his] wishes“, the Misses Gordon – represented by Mr Wilson KC – maintained that Charles “was incapable of understanding the importance and effect of the will” and therefore it could not be so. It took the court and jury just a day to find against Eleanora and in favour of the Misses Gordon.

That might have been that, but Eleanora and her husband, Michel Naake Nakeski, were serial litigants and would not let their loss lie. They had been bankrupted in September 1923, and in November that year a strange case came up in the Court of Session whereby he attempted to sue the lawyer representing the estate of Charles Ferrier Gordon – J. Harold Macdonald WS – for the sum of £960 (about £48k in 2023). Michel ‘s case made 3 different claims:

1. £215 for the price of three pictures, a pair of pistols and a blunderbuss that he had sold to Gordon in 1908 and never been paid for
2. £134 for board, wine and cash advances made to Gordon between 1908 and 1912
3. £120 for secretarial work he claimed to have undertaken for Gordon in 1912

The balance of the claim was 11 years interest. The judge, Lord Morison, found that Nakeski had produced no actual evidence besides his own “vague and unsatisfactory” testimony, and “gave no intelligible account” of his alleged transactions. He threw the claim out and no expenses were found against him on the condition that he did not proceed with further such litigation. Instead, Michel found a new spurious claim to try and in December that year he sued the War Compensation Court for £1,500 (£75k in 2023) on account of a military order that stipulated he “could not reside without permission in certain areas” during the war on account of his Polish birth which had therefore limited his earning potential as an itinerant tutor of languages. Once again, the case was thrown out. The John Bull magazine describer Eleanora in 1924 as an “inveterate, cadging mendicant“. The couple never had much luck in court; Michel had been fined £15 in 1919 by the Sheriff Court for failing to provide himself an identity book “as required by the Aliens Restriction (Consolidation) Order, 1916“, for her part Eleanora was fined £2 2s. She appealed the fine, lost, and found it increased to £9 11s for her pains.

You can read an article from Shooting Sportsman about Charles Ferrier Gordon and his gun collection, 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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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.

“In all time coming for the use of the public”: the thread about Leith Links

There was a Council consultation that closed on October 21st on the topic of an Activity Park for Leith Links, so what better time to have a quick thread on Leith Links and its history as a place of leisure? When I said this is quick, it’s actually going to be quite long, so if you’d like to jump to a particular section you can use the section links below.

1. Golf
2. Cricket
3. Bowls
4. Unusual pursuits: Cock-fighting and Quoiting
5. Football
6. The Bandstand
7. Putting and Tennis
8. Playparks
9. Explore Threadinburgh by map:

So first up, what is a Links? Links (from the Old Scots Lynkis, from the Old English Hlinc) are the characteristic sandy, undulating, raised (usually) coastal beaches covered in scrubby and grassy vegetation that are commonly found on the east coast of Scotland (they are also found in other places too).

Links were often the common of the nearest town, as is the case with Leith, and it was as frequently called the Links of Leith as Leith Links. They are also inextricably associated with golfing, a game which goes back to late Medieval times in Scotland; as such, many Scottish golf courses are known as Links. Again, this is also the case with Leith.

Golf

So I’m sorry if you think golf is just a way to “ruin a good walk“, but you can’t do the history of Leith Links without also doing the history of golf… Indeed, one of the earliest good pictures we have of them is as the backdrop to a golfer! In the background of David Allan’s 1780s painting of William Inglis (click here to view it, and zoom into the detail) we see people at play on the undulating, scrubby Links above the beach of South Leith Sands. Beyond that we can see (left) South Leith Kirk and towards the centre the prominent cones of its glassworks kilns and some of its finer villas.

An earlier engraving by the landscape artist, surveyor and cartographer Paul Sandby shows a 1751 view of Leith from what is now known as Easter Road. In it, we can faintly but clearly discern characters on the Links amongst the hillocks with what appear to be raised clubs.

But golf goes back much further than the 18th century in Leith. Folk were so mad for it that in 1592 Edinburgh Town Council had to ban its playing on the Sabbath. The books of the Kirk Session1 of South Leith is full of offenders who golfed during the “tyme of preaching or tyme of sermons“. In 1608, John Henrie and Patrick Bogie were “accusit for playing of the Gowff on the Links of Leith everie Sabboth the time of the sermounes, notwithstanding of the admonition past befoir“. That means they were accused of playing golf on Leith Links every Sabbath at the time of sermons, despite being previously admonished for it. For their troubles they were fined £20 each and put under caution that any subsequent offences would get £100.

1. In the Kirk (the Church of Scotland), the Session was the body of the elders that formed an ecclesiastical court for the parish that had responsibilities for the administration – and discipline – of the congregation ↩︎

It wasn’t just the ordinary folk who golfed at Leith – the nobility, clergy and royalty loved it too. Both James VI and Charles I ordained that after church, people should not be prohibited or discouraged from their “lawful recreation“. Indeed Charles I is reputed to have been golfing on Leith Links in 1641 when he received news of the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion that would lead to the Irish Confederate Wars (part of the complex series of interlinked conflicts known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms that would ultimately see Charles lose his throne and his head).

Governments, wars and heads of state, came and went, but inevitably the people were drawn back to golfing on the Links. In 1682, the “first international game of golf” took place here, when a scratch pair representing Scotland beat a pair representing England. The Scottish twosome was composed of John Paterson, a cobbler in the Canongate and reputedly the best golfer in the City, and one James Stuart, Duke of York (Later James VII and II). They played a pair of English gentlemen to settle a wager over which country had a longer association with the sport.

Leith’s association with golf was very strong; an epic poem, The Goff, was written and published in 1743 by Thomas Mathieson detailing the story of a game on the Links. It was the first book published that is devoted entirely to the game, and describes the Links thusly:

North from Edina, eight furlongs or more.
Lies that famed field on Forth’s sounding shore.
Here Caledonian chiefs for health resort —
Confirms their sinews in the manly sport”

The Goff, Thomas Mathieson, 1743

In the 18th century, the golfers of Leith Links were said to be “the greatest and wisest of the land… mingling freely with the humblest mechanics in pursuit of their common and beloved amusement. All distinctions of rank were levelled by the joyous spirit of the game…“. In 1744, the “gentlemen golfers” decided to organise themselves into a club under the patronage of the Magistrates of Edinburgh – The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. They were not the first such club in the city, but they were perhaps the most prestigious. The City provided a prize to the new institution, which was to be competed for on Leith Links annually, a silver club valued at £15. This is why David Allan’s painting of William Inglis, which we saw earlier in the thread, has the Links as its backdrop. The prize club was drummed through the city, carried by a Baillie (senior official of the City), to announce the competition, and Allan includes this scene in the painting (look to the right of Inglis) and also as one of his exquisite watercolours of the occupations of the city. The winner of the trophy became Club Captain (Captain of the Goff) and President for the year and was required to fix – at their own expense – a silver golf ball to the prize club with their name on it. These are the balls on the club we see in Allan’ s paintings.

The first winner and therefore captain was a surgeon, John Rattray, whose statue stands on the Links. The Goff describes him (thank you to Jan Barker for highlighting this to me):

Rattray for skill, and Corse for strength renowned,
Stewart and Lesly beat the sandy ground

The Goff, Thomas Mathieson, 1743

In 1744 it was he who signed the first ever formal, written set of rules and regulations for the game – the “Articles and Laws“. This is used to substantiate Leith’s claim as “home of Golf” over St. Andrews and a statue of Rattray was recently place here. While rules and practices of the game were slightly different, the principles are recognisably the same. A big difference for instance at Leith Links was that there were 5 long holes of 400 yards each, which took around 6 or 7 strokes to complete. They were played 4 times for a full game, or 20 holes vs. the modern 18.

But as a course the Links was far from ideal – it was wet, windy and poorly drained. There was the ever present difficulty of encroachments by people exercising their right to the common – bleaching laundry promenading, or grazing their animals. The military too liked to use the Links, where wappenshaws (literally “weapon showings,” musterings) had long taken place. As a result, golf began to wane here in the early 19th century. Most of the Leith clubs and even the veritable Honourable Company folded for lack of interest and finance, although the latter reformed in Musselburgh in 1836 before moving to Muirfield. In 1867 the game was rejuvenated somewhat on the Links after a high profile national prize tournament of professional players was held here. The game played according to Leith Thistle rules, 4 rounds of 7 holes. Old Tom Morris, “the Grand Old Man of Golf” was there, but the £10 first prize was won by Robert (Bob) Ferguson of Musselburgh. But even though it continued to be played with some enthusiasm on the Links, golf would never again be as important or prominent a pastime as it once had been. It found itself being edged out by competing demands for the space, from newer and more fashionable sports crazes.

Putting the use of the Links to one side, let’s look at the ownership and legal status of the them. The superiority of Leith and its Links had long been owned by the City of Edinburgh, but by 1833 the latter was broke, having greatly overextended itself by borrowing for building Leith Docks and imprudent financial management. In the words of the government, the city found its affairs “for some years past been in a state of great embarrassment” and in need of a bailout. Various conditions were attached to this, including some of the land set aside for docks being ceded to the Admiralty and the rest put into the trust of the Leith Dock Commissioners. The town of Leith also got the chance to buy itself off of Edinburgh under the provisions of The City Agreement Act (1838) – “An Act to regulate and secure the Debt due by the City of Edinburgh to the Public; to confirm an Agreement between the said City and its Creditors; and to effect a settlement of the Affairs of the said City and Town of Leith“. And so it was that Edinburgh’s long standing, jealously guarded and bitterly resented municipal control of Leith came to an abrupt end.

Section 33 of the aforementioned Act “requires the Town Council of Edinburgh to convey the Links to the former [Leith] for an annual payment of £25” and empowered it to buy the Links completely for £625, which it would do in 1856 after letting them for 18 years. It also stipulated “said Links… shall be preserved and remain as an open area in all time coming for the use of the public, as now existing and enjoyed“. For the first time, the Links was legally designated as – and protected as – a place of municipal leisure. A prominent citizen of Leith, Andrew Gibson of Middlefield, writing to the Leith Herald in 1890 made it very clear that in the opinion of the townsfolk, “the Links of Leith belong to Leith and to Leith only. The Town Council of Edinburgh have nothing to do with the proprietorship… The Town Council of Leith” he said “are the exclusive owners of Leith Links; but, by law they are bound to keep the Links up in a certain manner for the use of the public generally“.

After the purchase was made and the Town Clerk of Leith had the titles safely in his office, the Town Council set about transforming the Links by making provision for two of the up and coming, mass-participation sports of their day (1857).

Cricket

The first of these was cricket, a sport that had been played on the Links since at least 1806, when the first game is recorded as being 3 innings between “the Gentlemen who play on the Calton Hill” and the “Edinburgh University Club“. The latter won by 11 wickets and 32 runs and both sides agreed to meet again. A Leith cricket club was established on the Links in 1828, “it numbers about thirty members, including many of the most respectable and spirited young gentlemen in Leith” and played thrice weekly at 6AM. The Leith Franklin club was formally constituted in 1852 by workers from Fullarton & Co.’s printers on Leith Walk and was named for the inventor and printer Benjamin Franklin. The club is now Leith Franklin Academicals, having merged with Leith Academicals in 1988, and is still going to this day – there’s a good chance that it is Leith’s longest established sports club.

The new pitches were inaugurated by a match between Leith Caledonian and the Royal Artillery from Leith Fort. The Artillery won my 52-41 runs in a single innings game. Cricket, a sport not often associated with Scotland, was hugely popular at the time – there were 14 clubs on the go in Leith alone.

Bowls

The other up and coming game at the time was lawn bowls. This had long been popular with the nobility in centuries gone by. Leith had greens in the 16th century, from where West Bowling Green Street takes its name, and the Honourable Edinburgh Golf Club had one too adjoining their clubhouse on the Links. But now it was a game of the urban working class. Leith had purchased an extra strip of land to the north of the Links from Edinburgh and in 1857 opened the first public greens there. The annual opening of these greens was a civic event. They were, in the words of the Provost, “inferior, perhaps, to none in Scotland“.

Bowls went from strength to strength and at its peak in 1910, there were 7 greens on the Links. The original two on the north, 4 more at the western end which had been opened to accommodate demand in the early 20th century and the private club of Seafield at the east end (where my Nana used to bowl). The game was the mass participation sport of the urban working class and many big works had their own clubs. Many of these have outlasted their employers and names such as Ferranti, London Road Foundry and Fountain Brewery live on in them. Its popularity only really began to wane in the 1980s as an aging user base dwindled, and many of the public greens have shut including those on the Links, where only Seafield Club is now active.

Unusual pursuits: Cock-fighting and Quoiting

There were other more unusual leisure pursuits that have had popular followings on the Links. One of the first recorded cock-fights in Scotland took place on Leith Links in 1702. The Leith Cock-pit charged 10d for front row seats, 7d for second, 4d for third. The Caledonian Mercury, Edinburgh’s principal newspaper in much of the middle part of the 18th century, is full of adverts for cock-fights in Leith, with silver cups offered as trophies. The proprietor of the cock-put was a Charles Liddell, and tickets could be had “at Mr John Mellegan’s, next Door to the Laight Coffee House… and at said Charles Liddell’s, at One Shilling each“.

Another popular game, particularly amongst dockers, was quoiting. It had been played on the Links since the 18th c. and was revived in 1839. A new quoiting ground was opened at the east of the Links in 1895 and it was one of the last holdouts of a once popular game in the 1930s. This was one of a number of traditional games which went under names such as quilts, skittles, kyles and 9-pin. Indeed, the 1980s housing development at the western end of Great Junction Street in Leith takes the name The Quilts after these games, as there had been a green for playing them here in the 16th century. A related game was Rowly Powly which was long a favourite on the Links (particularly betting on it) during the annual Leith Races. Walter Geikie was there to capture this scene for us:

With all this leisure use of the Links they were increasingly managed for the purpose and needed maintenance. The rough and hummocky ground was gradually levelled and tidied up and its pastures mowed to become a flat public park with formal paths set out that we are familiar with today. Grazing had finally been banned in 1862 after a woman was attacked by a cow and had to be rescued by two golfers who broke their clubs fending it off. Horses had been banned in 1839 on account of the boys who would torment them and make them stampede off.

The Leith Improvement Scheme of 1880 saw further wholescale changes, with the surface levelled again, ashes from the gas works used to surface the paths and trees planted. Leith Burghs MP Munro Ferguson provided 100 saplings from his own nursery and the Town Council enclosed the park with railings.

Football

The next popular pastime to take to the Links was that other “national game” – football. The first recorded matches go as far back as 1851, when the students of Edinburgh University played the gentlemen of the Veterinary College (thank you to Andy Mitchell for this information). The University won the first 2 games (which lasted 40 minutes and two hours respectively) and a third was abandoned. In 1866, 200 striking dockers congregated and “several well-contested games were played in the presence of a great many people.”

Regular league games did not start on the Links until 1880. In an newspaper report of one of these first matches, Edinburgh Caledonian beat Leith Trafalgar 5-0 and 1st Midlothian beat Leith Harp 3-0. But the game, particularly its popularity, was soon causing problems. The main complaint aimed at it was that it ruined the surface of the park, exposing the sandy soil below which blew away on the wind. But when the Town Council attempted to regulate its play, it found that it had no powers to do so. So in 1886, under the General Police Act 1862, they applied for and received a provisional order from the Scotch Secretary (as the office was then titled) allowing them to make bye-laws on the Links. In 1887 an attempt was made to ban football entirely, the petitioner’s hyperbolic claim stating it was “a very unnecessary and injurious game, and the town had suffered very much during the past years from it. The game did not command the respect of anyone outside those engaged in it and it had caused the death of many persons” (I have not found a record of any, never mind many, persons being killed in games of football on the Links). Another complaint levied against the footballers was “the language used [by them] was disgraceful, and besides they stripped themselves almost naked in front of the windows.”

Hyperbole aside, the issue of the game turning the Links into a “sandy desert” was felt to be real, and so football was confined to a designated western corner and was banned entirely in the summer (and on Sundays, of course). Parkies were charged with keeping footballs and footballers away, with the newspapers frequently reporting on boys being hauled infront of the magistrates for playing it. In 1922 a mother on Balfour Street complained to the Evening News that a parkie had taken her son’s new football off him and where were the children meant to play the game? By 1925, football was at crisis point, not just on the Links but in Leith as a whole. It was noted that the town had 86,000 residents and not a single official public football field, even though the terms of the 1920 amalgamation had obliged Edinburgh to provide one within 5 years. Leith Athletic, the “local” team, were obliged to move around, and played variously at Logie Green, Powderhall, Marine Gardens and Meadowbank.

In 1932 Baillie Young dismissed 6 youths accused of playing football in the streets of Leith and urged them to petition the Town Council for pitches. It was not until 1938 that the Council finally relented and allowed football to be played on the Links. Wartime games were a popular attraction but by 1944 the military had taken over the ground and they had stopped – Leith Victoria FC had to play in distant Gilmerton.

The Bandstand

Proposals in 1847 for skating and curling ponds came to nothing, as did an 1895 proposal for a model boating pond. A bandstand was proposed in 1887 but was not erected until one was gifted to the Town in 1898 by an anonymous local donor to mark the coming of municipal mains electricity.

The bandstand brought controversy in 1904 when an open air Sunday concert was organised of the band of the Life Guards by the Edinburgh Sunday Society – a secular organisation to “promote the rational observance of Sunday” – they were Sabbath breakers! It incurred the wrath of the sabbatarians as a result, who wrote to the newspapers that this was “a new departure, which will, it need not occasion surprise, awaken genuine grief and pain to all who have contended for the maintenance and sacred character of our Christian Sabbath… [it] appeals to men who are asking for bread, but only offers them stone. It is the thin end of the wedge.” The Town Council enacted a hasty resolution “forbidding the playing of music on the bandstand during recognised church service hours“. The concert went ahead nevertheless, later in the afternoon, and 10,000 people gathered to hear the “pleasant, healthful and harmless Sunday recreation“. The City voted to spend £100 in 1966 to dismantle the neglected bandstand.

Putting and Tennis

By the turn of the 20th century, the Links were so busy that Golf had “become a public nuisance” and was banned in the summer months and during the middle hours of the day. In 1904 it was prohibited entirely and had to wait until 1908 for the new municipal course to open at Craigentinny on the former irrigated meadows. It made a partial return in 1925 when the Council opened an 18-hole putting green. Lord Provost Sleigh, Councillor White, convenor of the Parks Committee and Judge Keddie of Leith North Ward had the inaugural game. The Lord Provost won by 3 strokes.

On that same day, the Lord Provost also opened the Links’ tennis courts. These were first proposed in 1913 but war intervened. Tennis had become incredibly popular, by this time there were 74 public courts in Edinburgh with 150,000 players bringing an annual profit of £2,000. The courts were grass surfaced and for summer use only but in 1955 they were converted to an all weather blaes surface (crushed shale waste). It was not until 1964 that Sunday tennis or putting was allowed. The old tennis courts are now home to the Earth in Common Community Croft and the tennis courts are on some of the former bolwling greens.

Playparks

In 1935 the park Superintendent, John G. Jeffrey, reported that on the Links there were 2 cricket pitches, 4 bowling greens, 6 tennis courts, a putting green, childrens playground and a sand pit. However the latter was felt to be unhygenic and was to be removed. In its place the council opened a paddling pool; six inches deep at its edges with a deep end of nince inches. It was an instant success, in 1936 the Evening News wrote “delighted boys and girls… ‘from early morn till dewy eve’, disport themselves at the Links pool for hours on end“.

The year 1938-9 was probably a peak of the most sustained public investment in the Links – with a tramway shelter and public toilets financed, £880 set aside for painting the railings and tarmaccing paths and a shrubbery and rockery planted around the bandstand. The park has seen investment here and there, but its public facilities have been in long term decline. There are no public toilets, the bowling greens have been abandoned almost a decade and the pavilion locked.

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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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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#317 A Mini-Guide to Cornish: Place-Names, Dictionary, Phrases. Tor Mark Press, Truro, 1970, 1st edition. #Cornwall #Kernow #Kernewek #Cornish #Languages #PlaceNames #Toponymy #TorMarkPress #BookOfTheDay

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.
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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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

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

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jamaica Streets: the thread about how Edinburgh and Leith street names evidence the time of colonialism and slavery

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

There are an unusual number of Jamaica Streets in Scotland: there are (or were) streets of this name in Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, Glasgow, Greenock, Peterhead and Edinburgh. Street names can tell us many things from the people, events and places that they commemorate. Set in stone or metal signs, they can give us insights into the past. In the case of Jamaica Street, this is a direct link to colonialism in the West Indies and, by extension, slavery. In fact Edinburgh has not just had one Jamaica Street, it has had at least five.

The best known Jamaica Street in Edinburgh is that which was in the Northern New Town, built from around 1805 onwards, marked by the red dot in the map above. It was not amongst the New Town’s most splendid streets or highest quality residences and by the 1950s had been classed as a slum, with demolition following after an order of 1964. The surrounding mews lanes of Jamaica Street North Lane and –South Lane were retained, and in 1981 a new development of courtyard flats called Jamaica Mews was completed in the vacant plot for Link Housing Association. Stubs of the original street remain at the east and west sides as access to the lanes.

But this was not the first Jamaica Street in Edinburgh, that honour goes to a relatively short-lived route through the Southside of the Old Town (yellow dot on the map at the top of this page. This existed prior to the opening of the South Bridge and is shown on maps in the 1780s. Running along the axis of Infirmary Street and North College Street (now Chambers Street), this name never appears to have caught on and by a 1784 town plan was not in use.

A third Jamaica street also existed in the first quarter of the 19th century, forming the foot of what is now known as Morrison Street (orange dot on the map at the top of this page). This land was owned by a William Morrison esq., who lived in the house of Rosemount shown on the below map just below the “J” of “Jamaica”. The streets here were a speculative development on his part. Development of this street was extremely slow, with only a handful of houses completed by the time of the 1849 Ordnance Survey town plan, by which time the name Morrison Street is in use.

A further example could be found in Edinburgh’s port town of Leith. In 1809, a new street was planned along the Ferry Road in North Leith, part of which took the name Jamaica Street (the green dot on the map at the top of this page).

This name was suppressed after the 1850s, however if you are eagle eyed, and look (the best vantage position is the top deck of a bus) on the oldest block of this street – above 142A Ferry Road – you can still spot the original name inscribed in the masonry.

But during the late 18th and early 19th century Leith was formed of two distinct and independent parishes of which North Leith was only one. In the other, South Leith, a further Jamaica Street existed for a period. This one does not show up on maps, and as far as I can tell has been overlooked by the two principal references on Edinburgh Street names (Stuart Harris and Charles Boog-Watson) but is referred to in a number of adverts for the rouping (sale by auction) of land. This street was probably not developed before it was renamed to the present day Duke Street around 1818 (darker blue dot on the map at the top of this page).

There are further connections to Caribbean islands in the street names of Georgian Edinburgh. After around 1790, an upper section of Morrison Street adjacent to the then Jamaica Street was known as Tobago Street, and just off it was a property known as Tobago Place (pink dot on the map at the top of this page). The landowner here at this time was one “Mr Nathaniel Davidson of the Isle of Tobago”.

Stuart Harris – the late authority on Edinburgh and district place names – said that the the theory what is now Bridge Street Lane in Portobello was once another Tobago Street was one where “evidence is lacking“, how there is more than one mention of a street of this name in Portobello in the 1850s.

And around 1804, one of the many “places” along Leith Walk was named Antigua Street (the light blue dot on the map at the top of this page), a name it keeps to this day (although there was a concerted plan by the Corporation to rename it as part of Leith Walk or Leith Street in 1935).

Of course these are just streets named directly after colonies and by attachment, slavery in the Caribbean (you can read some of these links for Edinburgh on this blog). There are of course myriad other connections in street names, where they are named after individuals who owned slaves, colonial land or plantations; after their investors; after colonial administrators; and other parts of the British Empire, such as India Street and the now demolished India Place in the Northern New Town (white dots on the map at the top of this page). There is much more work to be done than this simple scratch of the surface by flicking through a few books on place names in order to identify deeper and less obvious links to the past.

Footnote. There is one set of “colonial” names though that do not actually have any colonial links, these are the Colonies houses, of Stockbridge, Abbeyhill, Restalrig Road, North Leith etc. The name may either refer to them being communities outwith the then city boundary (so thought of as a distinct colony of workers) or due to their builder – the Edinburgh Cooperative Building Company – using the beehive – a symbol of worker cooperation – as an identity.

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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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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Servitude: the thread about why James Craig’s New Town isn’t as regular as he would have liked

Have you ever wondered why at the far western end of Queen Street, where it meets North Charlotte Street, the regular, right-angled Georgian grid of the First New Town does something odd and has a bevelled corner? You have? Great! Lets find out why that is.

No, the Georgians weren’t future-proofing the street corner here for a 20th century traffic engineer’s filter lane. This has to do with something much more predictable than that – land ownership disputes!

You see, when Town Council first had a plan of land ownership drawn up for the planning of the New Town, they didn’t actually yet own all the land on which they intended to build. In fact, they only owned about three quarters of it. Standing in the way to the west was “Allan’s Park“, owned by Dean of Guild Allan (Thomas Allan), and “Barjarg’s Feu” – owned by James Erskine, Lord Barjarg of Drumsheugh House.

Allan’s Park was relatively easy to acquire, and was done so by the time the above plan was released to James Craig and other prospective architects for the design competition in April 1766, but Barjarg’s Feu still formed a salient into it. But planning proceeded on the basis that the Council hoped to acquire the land anyway and James Craig’s winning entry therefore drew the western town blocks over it.

Building commenced at the eastern end within short order and by the late 1760s or early 1770s, the New Town was creeping westwards. By the time it reached the boundary of Barjarg’s Feu in 1785, in the vicinity of Castle Street, the the owner – by now styled Lord Alva having inherited that estate – agreed to sell to the council and the plan could continue uninterrupted (although it took until 1820 to conclude, and was not on entirely favourable terms for the Cityand subsequent proprietors). But if we look closer at the western edge of Craig’s plan, and compare it with what is on the ground, we notice that Queen Street should meet North Charlotte Street on a regular grid (it doesn’t) and both Queen Street and the city grid should extend for another block west from where it does (it doesn’t!). Something else stood in the way. (P.S. Charlotte Square was originally to be St. George’s Square)

So what went wrong? Well, it wasn’t just Lord Alva’s land in the way. In 1782, the Trustees of Heriot’s Hospital (who had sold much of the land for the northern portion of the New Town to the city) had sold a portion of land to Francis Stuart, 9th Earl of Moray and on this he had built for himself a mansion, Moray House, and laid out extensive gardens. And Moray wasn’t for selling, so the New Town plans had to be hurriedly altered to build around his land.

This explains why the north western corner could not be completed as planned, and why Queen Street stopped short at North Charlotte Street, but not why they build that awkward and incongruous bevel on the corner? Well that’s because of a little legal thing called “servitude”. What does servitude mean? “A right that an owner of heritable property has over property owned by another. A servitude runs with the land and not the owner“. The Earl of Moray and Lord Alva had servitude over each other that neither could built within 90 feet of their boundary. When Edinburgh bought the land from Alva, Moray maintained his servitude over it. And can you guess what the distance from the bevelled façade on the corner of Queen Street and North Charlotte Street is from the boundary with the Earl of Moray’s land? Yes, that’s right, it’s *exactly* 90 feet.

This old boundary cut through what is now Glenfinlas Street and explains why the pavement suddenly changes width about 1/3 of the way down – it was built at two different times.

It wasn’t until the intransigent Earl of Moray’s son began to be feu the ground in 1822 that the owners of the properties on the north side of Charlotte Square got the change to buy the rest of “their” gardens. The maps below show 1817 compared with 1849 (slide to compare). You can see at this time, a garden wall still existed on the old boundary at the very west of these gardens, and that the formal portions (marked out by the perimeter paths) also conform to the boundary.

You can find the result of this boundary dispute in other places too. It is the reason for instance that Randolph Lane takes an odd, irregular form if you follow it northwards.

Amazingly, the last of the legal niceties over this portion of land weren’t resolved along this boundary for almost 170 years! Those nicely cleaned and restored “Georgian” townhouses at 1-3 Glenfinlas Street? They were only built in 1990 to finally finish this corner of the New Town (almost) as planned.

There’s actually a few more of these incongruous and awkwardly non-right angles scattered through the New Town – it’s always about old boundaries. This thread details the Gabriel’s Road boundary and the line it still cleaves across the New Town. If you want to understand why any New Town street in Edinburgh isn’t on a right angle – overlay an old land boundary plan on it (in this case, the eastern end of John Laurie’s 1766 plan) and it will probably reveal the answer. Broughton Street and York Lane? Cathedral Lane and the foot of Leith Street? St. James Square and Gabriel’s Road? Truncated southern side of Abercrombie Place? Property boundaries are your answer.

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.

#203 P.A.S. Pool - The Place-Names of West Penwith. Author, Penzance, 1985, 2nd edition. #PASPool #PeterPool #Toponymy #PlaceNames #Penwith #Cornwall #Kernewek #BookOfTheDay

The thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about Smokey Brae; how a showpiece public housing scheme became “unfit for human occupation”

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South. And it hadn’t always suffered from such an issue, indeed it wasn’t until the Corporation built its show-piece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks and the relatively low and well-separated buildings on a wide open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two actually were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings. As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style.

Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.” So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margaret’s was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, 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.

#ISO appears to have changed SHORT name of the #Netherlands in its widely-used #countrycodes list from "Netherlands (the)" to "Netherlands (Kingdom of the)", making it same as the official long version name. This would usually follow a change at the UN. Anyone know what's going on?

https://iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:NL

#ISO3166 #geography #toponymy @geography @geopolitics @politicalscience

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.

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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 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.

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The Pipes of Pipe Street: the thread about the Eleventh Day of Christmas

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 Lord Russell Place and the man for whom it was named.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Pipe Street. I could have gone with the Big Pipes of Leith, but they are covered in another post, and this gives me a chance to include something of Old Portobello; “the town that bricks built”.

Pipe Street dates back to the very beginnings of Portobello in the 1770s, when the lands to the east of the Figget (Figate) Burn were feud to an Edinburgh mason by the name of William Jamieson by the landowner, the Dukes of Abercorn. Jamieson was looking to build a villa but instead when he dug down he found a clay bed on the river bank. He built his house – Rosefield – but being an industrious and entrerprising man, he also opened a brick and tile works. He had clay and coal was plentiful in the district. Below is a sketch of John Ainslie’s plan of Portobello, or “Village of Figget”, of 1783.

Jamieson built housing here – from his own brick and tile and known as Brickfield – for his workers and laid a pipe (or pipes) from the Figgate Burn near his house at Rosefield, well enough above the industry of Portobello, to bring fresh water to his employees. The pipes discharged into a communal trough or cistern near where Pipe Street meets Bridge Street, and gave its name to the former.

Despite Jamieson’s early attempts to bring fresh water into the district, in 1832 and 1836 there were outbreaks of cholera amongst the workers “with a heavy mortality, and again in Pipe Street and neighbourhood many deaths occurred.” Cholera returned in 1853 and 1854, despite there now being piped fresh water from Edinburgh and most houses having water closets. Pipe Street was again badly afflicted, this being on account of the sewage drainage from the area running down to the old, abandoned pier on the beach where it lingered in pools. The Town Council gained powers in a Parliamentary Act in 1856 to deal with this nuisance – however it obviously was not completely solved as in 1893, when Portobello was amalgamated with Edinburgh, “improvement of the sanitary condition of Pipe Street and lanes adjacent” was one of the conditions.

In 1857 the Burgh drew up plans for sewers that would send the untreated effluent of the burgh far enough out into the Firth of Forth that the sea would carry it away. Two outlets, one at the east and the west of the beach of Portobello were built, and the pipes of the interceptor sewer that fed these ran along the sea front and was built over, providing the town with the seaside promenade for which it is known.

Somewhat fittingly, Pipe Street was later the site of a public gasometer to provide the town of Portobello with town gas from Edinburgh for lighting, and the gas main supplying this ran down Pipe Street. And when the potteries and old houses off of Pipe Street and its lanes were cleared away in the 1970s, new houses were built in 1979 with street names including Brickfield, William Jameson Place and The Pottery.

The Edinburgh and Leith-themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread concludes with a post about The Drum and Drum House

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 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.
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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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about 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.
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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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about 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.
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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 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.

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about 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.

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about 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.

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.