Thread by @cocteautriplets

I am currently waiting in a bus shelter, outside a council shed, in the depths of west Edinburgh, in the snow, in my shorts and I'm rather excited... But it's all for a good reason. What is that reason? Well you'll just have to wait and see.

If anyone's looking for the Portobello Power Station coat of arms, we found it

If anyone's looking for the Pilrig Muddle cable tramway pulley wheels, we found them too

So why were @NeilBriogaisean and I hanging around behind a council depot in Murrayburn on a bitterly cold day?
Well see came to see a map. 🗺️
An old map.
Not just any old map, an absolutely gigantic map! 📏
So big, it's not practical to move it.

We came to see "A Plan of the lands belonging to The City of Edinburgh, Heriot's Hospital, and other heritors of the North of the City with the Town, Harbour and Citadel of Leith. Survey and Planned by John Fergus and Robert Robinson, 1759"
@PA_Dodds put me on to it a while back

It's a fairly unique snapshot in time, of the lands north of the old Regality of Edinburgh (city administrative boundary), before the North Bridge and New Town came along a decade or so later changed the landscape forever

Did I mention it was very old and very big? It's 264 years old, and about 10 feet square. It's been mounted on canvas, and repaired, but it's thin paper, brittle, and worn and torn in places. It's best not moved around if it can be avoided

Big. Map. Action.

We crawled around the floor, poring over it and admiring all the detail and draughtsmanship, photographing every bit as good as we could (no flashes allowed), being very careful not to tread, fall or sneeze on it 🤧

It's at once instantly familiar, but also completely alien. The topography of Edinburgh has been changed so much by town expansion since it was surveyed, there's no clear reference points in this pastoral landscape to place many things you can see on it

Anyway, I've taken a zillion photos and not really had a chance to sort them or even digest the experience, so pleas enjoy this poorly orientated "fly past" of the mid-18th century Edinburgh hinterland 🛩️

Thank you to the helpful staff at the Edinburgh City Archives for locating the map and arranging access to the store building for us to ogle it at our leisure in all its enormous glory. 🙏

The topographical feature shown by shading along the line of what is now Great Junction Street is the remnants of the 16th century "Trace Italienne" town walls and bastions erected during the Seige of Leith (1548-60)

The naughtiest feu in town

Upper and Lower Quarryholes

"The thread about Quarryholes and its dark and bloody history; battles, treachery, murder, witchcraft and execution" (cw: mild posthumous cannibalism) threadinburgh.scot/2022/09/08/the…

"CITADEL of LEITH". The legend along the shoreline gives you an idea where the northern walls of the pentagonal structure went to

"The thread about chasing the ghosts of The Citadel, armed with a little old watercolour and the first accurate Town Plan of Leith" threadinburgh.scot/2022/09/09/the…

Hard to overstate the quality and attention to detail of this map. Here we see the gibbet at the Gallowlee (of which AFAIK there are no images of). Two unfortunates hang from the cross arms. A gate and path lead to it from Leith Walk, another - wider - gate to a sandpit

Cannon Mills (Canonmills) in glorious technicolour. Notice the use of fine, thick, hatched and dotted red lines to denote buildings, structures, walls and enclosures, red hatching. Roadways are an orangey colour, water is blue, planting is green.

While almost everything else - buildings and landscape - has gone and been changed out of recognition, a part of one of these old structures in Canonmills remains, and its subterranean secrets were recently exposed threadinburgh.scot/2022/08/31/the…

Newhaven in 1759. No pier back in those days, boats were just hauled up onto the beach. The Peacock Inn is evident, as is the house known as The Whale, which may have more to do with topography than marine mammals 🐳

The area marked "St. Anthony" is the boundary, likely including ruins of, the 15th c. Augustinian Preceptory and Hospital of the monks of St. Anthony of Vienne. It was these monks who had the ruinous chapel on the slopes of Arthur's Seat, disestablished by the reformation.

The story of St. Anthony's Preceptory is one for another day; not much is known for fact and much is supposition. However it gives its name still to streets, and St. Anthony's was long an RC secondary school for Leith and northern Edinburgh

North Leith, a possession of Edinburgh quite separate from South Leith, later a distinct parish. The bridge was further upriver in those days. Confusingly, a portion sat on the south bank of the river around the bridge, a quirk dating back to landholdings of Holyrood Abbey

The bridge was reputedly built by (or under provisions of Abbot Robert Bellenden (Ballantine) of Holyrood in the late 15th c. The large tenement on the right and the North Leith chapel were also Abbey money-making schemes.

In 1630, when Newhaven was detached from the West Kirk (St. Cuthbert's) and attached to North Leith, the fisher folk of Newhaven put up quite a spirited and successful resistence to the over-reach of Kirk authority threadinburgh.scot/2022/11/09/the…