Thread by @cocteautriplets

One thing that always fascinates me, as you probably know by now, is how a place name evolves over time, from century to century and map to map, and how the local pronunciation of the name either leads this or follows it. This morning my eye was caught by "Cammo". 🧵👇

Cammo was formerly a grand house and estate to the west of Edinburgh, now a local park / nature reserve finding itself being swallowed up by suburbification where the fields are replaced by car dependent new build estates with evocative names like "Cammo Meadows"

Cammo almost sounds biblical to my ear. You can imagine it sitting alongside Canaan or Jericho in the old testament. It's an old name indeed, but not quite *that* old, and is recorded on a charter in 1296 as Cambo or Cambok.

Which those of you familiar with the East Neuk of Fife will recognise also as the Snowdrop capital of Scotland.

And the place name is one and the same - Fife Cambo is also initially recorded in the 12th century as Cambok. It's a Brythonic language placename [cam(b) + – ōc] meaning a crooked place, referring to land in the bends of a river or stream.

The "Camb" part of the word finds its way into Gaelic names, also meaning "crooked" e.g. Cameron (Cam sròn) = Crooked Nose or Campbell (Cam beul) = Crooked Mouth.

It's also evolved into the Fife place name of Kemback, but that's by the by, we're looking at the Edinburgh Cambo or Cambok here

The first map to record Cammo is Timothy Pont's survey of Scotland of the 1600s, which was never published for the Lothians in its original form, but emerged decades later in Dutch imprints as "Kammock" (e.g. Janssen 1646, Blaeu 1654, both via NLS)

Pont's incomplete Survey and Atlas was completed by Robert Gordon of Straloch in the 1640s, but Gordon omits it from his map of the Lothians - it should be there next to Lany/Lenny.

But it is back in its place next to Lenie in John Adair's map of 1682 (which is both charming in its style and cartographically excellent). We can see he renders Lenny with an extra tower and trees, suggesting it is the larger and more important house and set in a park.

When William Roy comes along to do the lowland section of his "Great Map" in the 1750s, he goes for "Cummock", which you can imagine is how the place "Kambock" was being pronounced. Again, Lenny is the more important looking of the two at this time.

However if Roy or his surveyors had knocked on the door at the time, they would have found its (then) new owners, the Watsons of Saughton, had renamed the place New Saughton in 1741! James Dorret makes the same "error" in his 1750 map

Howevert by 1807 the maps have caught up and Aaron Arrowsmith (determined to be first in every phone book and school register!) marks it down as New Saughton. Note it is now set in its parkland and Lenny has ceased to be important enough to map it is reduced to a farm.

John Thomson in his 1832 atlas of Scottish shire maps shows "Saughton" as a grand house set in ample landscaped gardens and parklands.

And a grand house it was, 3 storeys set on a raised plinth. This 1887 picture is © Edinburgh City Libraries and shows Cammo when owned by Archibald Campbell (Crooked Mouth of Crooked Place!), of Archibald Campbell, Hope & King brewers, who had bought it with his beer fortune

Archibald Campbell, Hope & King, or Campbell & Co. marketed themselves as Brewers to Her (His) Majesty by Special Appointment and brewed from the Argyle Brewery on what is now Chambers St. (if you like your Scottish History, *all* the Argyles seem to be called Archibald Campbell)

Anyway, back to Cammo as a place name. Something odd happens to it in 19th century OS maps - it goes from New Saughton or Cammock to "Camino". This mistake seems to be confined to the 1890s 1 inch survey

Looking back at Dorret's map of 1750 you can see how easy it would be for a clerk to mistakenly transcribe a cursive Cammo to Camino

Given the change from New Saughton back to Cammo occured during Campbell's tenure, I wonder if that was deliberate on his part. Fun Fact - Campbell's town house in Edinburgh was 6 Charlotte Square, now Bute House, official residence of the First Minister @NicolaSturgeon

The OS did not repeat the mistake though, and the placename is set in print in the 20th century back to Cammo. (1905 1:25 inch, 1921 1 inch, 1937 1:25000, 1944 1:1250, all via NLS)

The history of Cammo House and estate then went a bit weird. In 1898 it was bought by a wealthy heiress Margaret Maitland-Tennent and her husband David Clark. Be clear it was Margaret who bought the house, and they had a "pre-nup" that Clark was not entitled to the money.

The marriage was reputedly tempestuous and Clark left in 1909 when it became clear he was not going to get control of his wife's fortune. They divorced, a scandalous thing at the time. Margaret and her sons Percival and Robert stayed on at Cammo, Clark disappearing to England.

In 1915 Margaret and the boys went travelling to the East and Clark died. Something then went badly askew, as Robert refused to return home and took himself off to the USA. His mother returned to Cammo with Percival and disinherited him.

Margaret rented much of the estate out to the Cramond Brig Golf Club, dismissed much of her staff and she and Percival apparently moved into a caravan together and locked up the house, complete with all its lavish furnishings, paintings, their clothes and possessions.

From then on they were only seen in public together, and rarely. She dressed all in black and was known locally as the "Black Widow". They would go shopping together at Jenners, where they were given a private room and had items brought to them to peruse.

The house slowly rotted away, but not for want of money as Margaret was still a wealthy woman. Indeed she was briefly jailed for failing to declare how much she had in oversees bank accounts! She died in 1955 and Percival got everything.

Margaret was buried in the grounds of the house, and apparently this was the last private internment in Scotland. Percival retired to his two loves in life; cars and his dogs.

Percival would thrash his cars into the ground around the estate, until they would no longer run, and then abandon them behind the house and get another. He kept some 30 dogs and they got the run of the house which apparently ended up covered in a thick layer of dogshit.

Hence the saying "gone to the dogs". There are pictures of the dilapidated inside of the house in its later days here; dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-…

Percival lived in the gate house with a lodging family and he and the estate were tormented by looters and fire raisers. On his death in 1975 the ruinous property passed to the National Trust for Scotland but they didn't know where or how to begin.

The arsonists stepped in however, and Cammo house was badly burnt down in 1977 and partially demolished for safety reasons as a result in 1979. The NTS passed it on to Edinburgh District Council for £1 in 1980 who turned it into a country walking park for the public.

The council pulled down the house to its lower courses which were stabilised as a sort of ruinous folly feature. The stables are much more intact (pics © Mike Pennington & Calum McRoberts via Geograph)

There is a coloured engraving here of the house in happier days in 1794 👇

Last Cammo fact of the day. It was owned for a while by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 2nd Baronet, who had the gardens landscaped in a fashionable style between 1711-1719 in what may be the first example of a formal landscaped country garden in Scotland.

For the full story of Cammo's weird and wacky history, there's a great book by Simon Baillie (@TPWOCAMMO) bookshop.org/books/the-priv…