#wardiebay — Public Fediverse posts

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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We need that stillness
as much as we can find it…
no matter how brief.
♾️♾️♾️
#haiku #sunset #wardiebay #grantonharbour #sunsetphotography #stillmoments #naturetherapy

We need that stillness
as much as we can find it…
no matter how brief.
♾️♾️♾️
#haiku #sunset #wardiebay #grantonharbour #sunsetphotography #stillmoments #naturetherapy

We need that stillness
as much as we can find it…
no matter how brief.
♾️♾️♾️
#haiku #sunset #wardiebay #grantonharbour #sunsetphotography #stillmoments #naturetherapy

We need that stillness
as much as we can find it…
no matter how brief.
♾️♾️♾️
#haiku #sunset #wardiebay #grantonharbour #sunsetphotography #stillmoments #naturetherapy

We need that stillness
as much as we can find it…
no matter how brief.
♾️♾️♾️
#haiku #sunset #wardiebay #grantonharbour #sunsetphotography #stillmoments #naturetherapy

Beautiful skies at Granton Harbour last night.
🌇🌇🌇
#sunset #grantonharbour #wardiebay #clouds #cloudscapes

Beautiful skies at Granton Harbour last night.
🌇🌇🌇
#sunset #grantonharbour #wardiebay #clouds #cloudscapes

Beautiful skies at Granton Harbour last night.
🌇🌇🌇
#sunset #grantonharbour #wardiebay #clouds #cloudscapes

Forgotten Fatalities: the thread about the Granton railway disaster of 1860

Recent threads about the Scotland Street Tunnel and the Granton Breakwater inevitably involved me touching on the history of the railway that ran between these two places and brought to my attention a striking image of a forlorn-looking steam engine lying on its side on the Wardie foreshore. How this locomotive came to be here isn’t “in the books“, so of course I had to find out more.

The answer to this anomaly was that it was the result of an accident which took place on the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway‘s (EP&D) short section of track on the southern side of the Firth of Forth between Trinity Station and Granton Harbour. This event on the evening of Sunday 8th August 1860 would claim the lives of four people, injure six more and cruelly impact upon one family in particular.

The EP&D ran from its start at Canal Street Station (beneath and at right angles to what we now call Edinburgh Waverley), by gravity down the steep incline of the Scotland Street tunnel to a station of that name at its foot. Here, steam engines were attached to trains to haul them the few miles to Granton, via Trinity, or North Leith, via Bonnington. At Granton passengers could continue their journey onward across the Firth of Forth to Burntisland, by connecting paddle steamer. North of the Forth the railway carried on north to Perth and to Dundee (via a further steamer from the harbour at Tayport), explaining the full name of the company.

On Sundays there were usually there were only two passenger trains a day each way to Granton. On the day of the accident the 4:30PM from Edinburgh ran the three mile trip hauled by engine No. 32. At the terminus the driver detached his engine and shunted the carriages back into the platform to where it would later form the 8:10PM return journey. This pattern only took place on the Sabbath; Monday to Saturday there were sixteen trains each way and a much quicker turnaround was required, undertaken in a rather frightening manner known as “fly shunting” whereby the carriages were “slipped” (detached) while the train was in motion and a well-timed throw of the points directed the engine one way and the freely coasting train the other into the platform. The guard at the rear in the brakevan was responsible for bringing the train to a controlled halt by which time the engine was already in the process of re-positioning itself so it could re-attach at the front of the train and haul it back the way it had come.

There was nowhere at Granton for engines to wait for any period of time and so on No. 32 now returned the way it had come to while away the next few hours in the engine shed at Scotland Street. As it departed it began to pick up speed and ascend the gradient up to the embankment along the foreshore and parallel to Lower Granton Road. It crossed the bridge over the footpath access to Wardie Bay and passed over first one and then a second set of points as it rounded a gentle bend in the route. This is where disaster struck: as it approached a second, smaller, bridge (which carried it over the Wardie Burn, marked nowadays by a break in the seawall) the left-hand leading wheel of the engine jumped the rails and the locomotive derailed.

It continued to plough along the trackbed, derailed, for some 30 yards, ripping up tracks and sleepers and partially demolished the bridge. In doing so it was eventually tipped over the side when it hit the stone parapet. It fell a height of 9 feet down the embankment and then slithered 20 yards down the foreshore, coming to rest on its right hand side (not the left, as shown in the engraving, which may have either been reversed or show it during recovery).

There were six people on the footplate when the crash happened of whom four were killed instantly; driver David Mathieson, his 9 year old son William Mackenzie Mathieson (out for an exciting Sunday trip), his brother-in-law and neighbour John Mackenzie and Andrew Morgan, a railway signalman hitching a lift back to Scotland Street. The fireman, James Bowling, had a lucky but painful escape, jumping from the tender as it left the tracks. He broke an arm and dislocated a shoulder amongst other injuries, but lived to tell the tale. A railway porter who was also cadging a lift, George Dall, found himself swimming in the waters of Wardie Bay from where he was pulled, miraculously unhurt.

Blacksmith Thomas Gillies, his wife and two children had been sitting on the sea wall below the embankment, enjoying their day of rest, when the engine came crashing down from above, passing inches away from where they sat. All were badly scalded by escaping steam but survived. A horse cab was summoned to take the injured away to the Royal Infirmary. Sheriff Gordon, Procurator Fiscal Paterson and Chief Constable List were on the spot within the hour. They appointed engineers Mr Hawkins and Mr Jardine to investigate, while the officials of the railway company appointed their own civil engineer, Mr Lorimer, to also make enquiries. The Board of Trade appointed Captain (R.E.) Henry Whatley Tyler, to write a formal report.

None of the investigating engineers found any fault in the permanent way, engine No. 32 or with the manner in which it was driven by Mathieson. Tyler noted that although there were minor defects along the way none “ would have caused a steady engine thus to leave the line“. The type of engine – built locally in Leith by R. & W. Hawthorn – had been used without problem for 15 years and the only derailment it had suffered had been caused by a fractured rail. He did however note that the engine was particularly light at 11½ tons, that it had poor weight distribution and that there was a very short wheelbase of just 6 feet. This made it liable to oscillate at higher speeds and Tyler’s educated guess was that the engine had been travelling fast enough (“but not imprudently so“) to set up such an oscillating motion. Without the weight of a following train to restrain such gymnastics it was able to jump enough to leave the rails at a position where the gauge between the tracks was slightly too wide.

Margaret Stewart Mackenzie, the driver’s wife, lost not only her husband but also her brother and eldest son that day. She was left a widow with three children to support; a 7 year old girl and boys aged 3 and 1 years. She was also four months pregnant and would give birth to a daughter, Sarah Clapperton Mathieson, that December. The members of the Mathieson and Mackenzie family – who all lived next door to each other on Duncan (now Dundonald) Street – were also interred alongside eachother at the Old Calton Burying Ground.

Given the loss of her husband and brother the Mathieson widow and children found themselves without any financial support and a public subscription was set up under the coordination of the Lothian Road United Presbyterian Church for their benefit. In September the Scotsman reported that “a woman who assumes different names and represents herself to the the wife of an elder of Lothian Road U.P. Church” was wanted by the police for fraudulently soliciting for donations to the fund. The 1881 census shows that Margaret Mathieson stayed on at 10 Duncan Street and was living there with her 80 year old mother (Margaret Mackenzie), two sons (David, 24, a clerk and John ,21, a piano tuner) and her daughter (Sarah, 20, a dressmaker). She was working as a laundress. Sarah Clapperton Mathieson married 4 years later to Robert Fotheringham and they moved nearby to Airlie Place and then Deanpark Street, with at least 6 children born. Margaret would join them next door at Airlie Place, where she died in 1911 aged 81, after 51 years a widow.

Marion Mathieson was about 64 years old when her son David died and lost her son and a grandson that day. The Caledonian Mercury reported the agonising news that this was her fourth son to die; one was knocked down in the street near the family home, another fell from Salisbury Crags and a third had drowned off Aberdeen where he was serving an apprenticeship. She was by this time a widow, living in a cottage in the village of Corstorphine where she would die in 1871.

Of the other victim, Signalman Morgan, he was buried at Warriston Cemetery. A correspondent called Fair Play wrote to the Scotsman soon after to ask for subscriptions for the case of “Mrs Morgan, a highly respectable widow“, the mother of the deceased signalman. He had been “her only hope of subsistence since he was 12 years of age” and that the “good feeling of the public” had overlooked her plight.

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 Great Storm of 1901: the thread about the tragic loss of the cutter “Active”

On the 12th November 1901 a terrible storm formed over the North Sea and battered the East Coast of Scotland. The Firth of Forth felt its full fury and by the following morning twenty men would lie dead in the cold waters of Wardie Bay, when the Royal Navy cutter Active was driven ashore and wrecked against the Granton Breakwater.

The Active was a 135 ton sailing yawl, built in Kent in 1867. For 20 years she had been stationed in the Forth as tender to the navy’s guardship at South Queensferry, the old battleship HMS Anson. She had recently returned south from secondment to the Revenue Service as a fisheries cutter off of the Shetland Islands. Her captain was Lt. Charles Culley RN, a pious and temperate man who was a “good husband, a good father and a real Christian” in the words of his widow. Culley had started out life as a pit boy in Somerset but had turned to Methodism and joined the Navy. He was therefore somewhat unusual in being a Bluejacket, having come up through the ranks and had recently learned that he was being advanced in the service and would be receiving command of a steam gunboat.

During the day on November 12th the temperature plunged and the wind got increasingly strong. Soon it brought heavy squalls of rain and sleet. The waves ran high along the Forth and were “breaking with great violence against the piers and embankments, doing considerable damage“. At the end of the eastern breakwater at Granton the green marker lighthouse and a gangway were carried away. On the quayside, part of the roof of the North British Railway station was blown off. At Trinity Crescent the sea wall was breached and the road was left impassable. On account of the intensity of the storm in the North Sea the east coast fishing fleet returned home early, boats from as far as Dundee and Aberdeen running for the safety of Granton. The Burntisland ferry was stopped, with the William Muir being kept tied up alongside at Granton. At North Queensferry the Norwegian steamer Dronning Gyda of Kristiansund was driven ashore and the Swedish schooner Tura was wrecked on the island of Inchgarvie, her crew of 7 managing to scramble ashore and seek shelter. Many vessels came into Leith Roads to seek shelter; those that could sought refuge in the harbours; those left out in the Forth were seen to be straining at their anchors. Similar stories were repeated all along the east coast of Scotland and England.

The gale swept across the city early in the afternoon and many a chimney pot came crashing down. A cartload of hay was blown over and several shop windows were blown in. Trees were brought down in the Botanics, at St. Bernard’s Crescent and on Moray Place. At the Usher’s bonded warehouse at St. Leonards the lamplighter, Donald Cormack, lost his life when an external wooden staircase he was climbing collapsed in the wind. At 74 Causewayside, twelve year old Annie Hanlan was killed as she lay in bed when the chimney breast of the tenement collapsed through the roof. A heroic effort on the part of the Sciennes firemen under the command of Lt. Grinton saw her 14 year old sister Mary, who had been sharing the same bed, rescued and taken to the Infirmary suffering from serious injuries. Two others were injured and the tenement was condemned, rendering 12 families homeless.

The maximum average wind speed during the storm would be recorded at 67mph. Beyond the city boundaries nearly all telegraph and telephone cables came down. There was no communication north, only three wires to Glasgow left intact and a single each to Newcastle and Leeds for all southwards communications. A huge backlog of messages piled up in the telegraph offices, unsent. Within the city, the telephone network was “very much out of order“, hampering the emergency response. Out in the Forth, Lt. Culley and the Active had been sent from their mooring at South Queenferry to seek shelter in Leith Roads in the time honoured way, in the lee of the island of Inchkeith. Culley had three anchors put down to secure his charge and during the day it was seen by observers on the shore to be riding out the storm as comfortably as could be expected.

Around 3 O’clock in the morning the Active was seen to be dragging her anchors. Her tiller was smashed, and orders were given to bring the spare up from below decks. Her foresail was raised to try and sail out of trouble, but it jammed and had to be hauled back down. Attempts by a Granton-based tug to reach her were futile and what few onlookers were present watched helplessly as she was soon being driven uncontrollably towards the shore. Culley let off his distress rockets to try and summon assistance and mustered the remaining men from their sleep on deck. However, before any attempt to save lives could be made, the little ship was dashed against the breakwater and “smashed to match-wood“. Observers saw her two blue marker lights disappear from view at about 4:15AM. In the last moments before disaster, Culley had ordered his men to climb the rigging in the hope of safety but of the twenty-five souls on board, only three were spared. Such had been the haste of her demise that only three men had managed to put on their cork life jackets and Ordinary Seamen W. Travis, G. Dady (or Peady) and G. Pearce would be the only men who made it off. Two of them were washed completely over the breakwater and into the harbour, being picked up by the steamer Bele who had heard their cries.

The third, dressed only in his string vest and life jacket, managed to cling to the breakwater and “through dogged persistence” crawled along it to safety. The other two survivors of the ship’s complement were Quartermaster Walsenham (or Wakenham) and the Second Mate, Boatswain John Donovan, both of whom had been allowed shore leave in Leith the day before and had been unable to rejoin ship on account of the weather.

With the telephone and telegraph systems being out of order, news had to be carried on foot to the police office at Gayfield Square from where 10 constables and two doctors were dispatched under the command of Superintendent Lamb , Inspector Cruickshanks and Sergeant Ford. By 11AM, only three bodies had been recovered, the vessel having been driven ashore on an ebb tide, which meant that most of the victims’ bodies were carried away from the shore and out into the Forth. The local fishermen, intimately in tune with the currents and habits of the Firth, pronounced that bodies would be carried to the vicinity of Elie.

All morning on the 13th, dense crowds lined the Wardie foreshore to gaze on at the macabre spectacle of wreckage and flotsam being tossed around in the bay and of policemen combing the shore with boathooks looking for survivors (or, more realistically, bodies). Rifles, cutlasses and uniforms were brought up on the slipway at Granton and large quantities of Rum had to be secured by the Customs men before they found their way into jacket pockets. Sergeant Bain of the Police was able to pull ashore the ship’s colours from the breakwater at considerable risk to his life.

On Thursday 14th, the newspapers reported that the foreshore along the coast was being searched for bodies and that divers had arrived to scour the seabed around the wreckage. The gunboats HMS Redwing and Cockchafer arrived to trawl up and down the Forth. In the aftermath, observers with the benefit of hindsight said that the Active had been anchored too close to the shore and not far enough north to be safely sheltered in the lee of Inchkeith. Some were of the opinion that she should have been brought into the safety of the harbour, however it was noted in the papers that this would have been against Culley’s instructions. Others still wrote to the Scotsman bemoaning the lack of a coastguard watch or lifeboat at Granton, Leith or Newhaven.

The first funerals took place on Saturday 16th, with a cortège leaving the City Mortuary on Infirmary Street with full naval honours on its way to the Admiralty’s plot at Seafield cemetery. The procession was led by the officers and men of HMS Anson and the band of the shore base HMS Caledonia. Thousands turned out to line the streets and pay their respects to seamen John (or Herbert) Walker, R. Pearson and E. Farrow, Carpenter’s Mate H. Williams and Ship’s Boy J. Mulvaney. The same day, a requiem mass was held for James Donovan at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea R.C. Church in Leith. All six were interred side-by-side at Seafield, the men from the Anson firing a salute over the graves. That same day, a remarkable event occurred; a glass bottle was recovered on the shore at Granton, containing a message: “H.M.C. Active, Sinking Fast. From Captain Culley. Good-bye.” Mrs Culley identified the handwriting as that of her late husband.

On Tuesday 26th of November, a further body was recovered from the mud in Granton harbour, Ordinary Seaman James Lyall could only be identified from his names stitched inside his clothing. On the 29th, tugs brought the remains of the Active to a position in Wardie Bay where they could be hauled ashore and broken up. The following day, a benevolent fund was opened for the families of the deceased by Captain William Fisher CB of the Anson and his officers, with the Lifeboat Institution making an opening contribution of £2,000. Lieutenant Culley alone left behind 6 children, the eldest being 17.

Bodies were slowly recovered in November and by the 20th, seventeen had been recovered. On 27th November, Ordinary Seaman James Lyall was buried at Seafield. A court martial into the disaster was held in distant Chatham on 3rd December. Four of the five survivors (George Pearce was still in hospital recovering) appeared, but were not charged or asked to plead. Captain Fisher of the Anson gave witness, confirming that he had ordered Culley not to risk his ship on any account, and to anchor her in Leith Roads. He did however say that Culley had not done so in the exact position he had been shown on the chart. The survivors stated that the loss of the tiller and jamming of the sails had prevented them for seeking safety, and that the Granton tugs had not approached close enough to offer assistance. The court exonerated the survivors from all blame, but noted – with the benefit of hindsight – that Culley should have “shown better judgement had he either weighed or slipped anchors and run for safety” but that when the disaster was inevitable “he appeared to have maintained discipline and done all possible to save life.” Culley’s body was not recovered until late in January 1902, and he was buried with full naval honours near his men in Seafield Cemetery.

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.

“As unthinkable as to bulldoze Arthur’s Seat”: the thread about the 1980s scheme to infill Wardie Bay

I like to be asked questions about some matter of local history or knowledge, because they usually create a “happy accident” whereby I go down a particular rabbit hole and end up finding a tangent to follow about something I never knew about. Today was one such case, I found something I could hardly believe: a 1987 scheme by Forth Ports to fill in Wardie Bay! In case you didn’t know, Wardie Bay is that pleasant little haven of sand, sea, seals and (sometimes) sun, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years as a sport for swimming and other water sports. I wrote about the origins of the bay and its name on this thread.

Forth Ports, the harbour authority for Leith and Granton, created a subsidiary company – Edinburgh Maritime Ltd. – with Glasgow developers GA Group, to front this outrageous, £400m scheme. The overall architects were Hind Woodhouse, with individual large buildings by RMJM and Cochrane McGregor. It was all backed by the Scottish Development Agency.

Their plan would include the infill of most of Granton Harbour, the Victoria Dock and much of Western Harbour at Leith, and everything inbetween – i.e. Wardie Bay. This was to “reclaim” 500 acres of land from the Firth of Forth, and would have obliterated the coastline from Seafield to Granton. 8,000 jobs were promised (from where, it was not said), with 1,895 houses, offices, a cinema, an industrial zone, new supermarkets and cultural attractions such as a Granton marina village planned. It was said without a certain amount of chutzpah that the site would rival San Francisco’s or Sydney’s waterfront and be 5x the size of the Glasgow Garden Festival.

The scheme was met with much scepticism, and local outrage. The Wardie Bay Action Group, chaired by John Horsburgh QC, was set up to resist the scheme.

Wardie Bay is a recreational asset equivalent in value to Holyrood Park. In both cases their accessibility is th emajor factor in their value to the citizens. To infill Wardie Bay is as unthinkable as to bulldoze Arthur’s Seat.

The above quotation comes from a £3,000 counter-report they produced in 1988, for which the below artists impression was also commissioned. This shows an 80 acre “loch” between the sea wall and the new development, and which would have retained the harbour of Newhaven, accessible to the loch. It is not clear if the loch was connected to the sea or not.

In August 1988, Edinburgh Maritime tried to sweeten the deal with plans for an Opera House, but it farcically collapsed when the Trust for an International Opera Theatre for Scotland made their public announcement too early, resulting in back-pedalling counterstatements being issued by Edinburgh Maritime Ltd.

By 1989 however, Lothian Regional Council had made it be known that they would refuse the plans on the basis of the strong local opposition, so they were hastily redrawn to exclude Wardie Bay. But they still included Granton Harbour and parts of Western Harbour. It was this scheme that was approved in May 1990 and that led to the Ocean Terminal development (which for years has sat half empty, and is about to be partially demolished), to the Scottish Office at Victoria Quay and to the infilling of the western portion of Granton Harbour, of Leith’s Western Harbour. The planned boom in housing on these latter two sites has only materialised in fits and starts, and their painfully slow housing projects are still incomplete 30 years later. Multiple “marina village” ideas have come and gone for Granton, and there has never been a flourishing of industry on the western side.

We have a lot to thank the Wardie Bay Action Group for in their successful counter-campaign. Planned in a fit of late-1980s capitalist optimism, multiple economic downturns since the 1990s would probably have created nothing more than a vast foreshore wasteland had it gone ahead, with none of the projected “benefits” being realised.

It was, however, never quite clear just where the money was going to come from to develop the scheme as originally planned. Environmental destruction aside, it was a project for which there was no real need. There were vast swathes of brownfield land around Granton and Leith that wouldn’t require expensive reclamation, and more pressing investment needed in the existing housing schemes in this area. The privatisation of Forth Ports in 1992 saw the authority turn its attention to instead acquiring the competition and focussing on land-banking its existing reclamation.

This was not the first such proposed act of mass environmental vandalism proposed for the Forth. Some 60 years previously, a scheme was put forward to construct a vast tidal barrier across the estuary just upstream of North and South Queensferry. Fortunately this came to nothing, but you can read about it over on its own thread.

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

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Windy, but lovely.
The sunset and warmish sea
revives tired heads.
🌅🌅🌅
#sunset #sunsethaiku #naturehaiku #wardiebay #naturephotography #sunsetbeach #sunsetphotography

Windy, but lovely.
The sunset and warmish sea
revives tired heads.
🌅🌅🌅
#sunset #sunsethaiku #naturehaiku #wardiebay #naturephotography #sunsetbeach #sunsetphotography

Windy, but lovely.
The sunset and warmish sea
revives tired heads.
🌅🌅🌅
#sunset #sunsethaiku #naturehaiku #wardiebay #naturephotography #sunsetbeach #sunsetphotography