Thread by @cocteautriplets

It's probably the *second* most instagrammable vista in Edinburgh (after *that* street), so what's this place actually called and why?

Dinnae be a dafty Andy. We all know that's the Dean Village. Ask anyone in town. No ifs. No buts. Away to bed with you.

But what about if for most of its very long recorded of history, but what if... What if it wasn't?

King David I gives the rights and profits of the mills in the "dene" or "dean" (or gorge) of the Water of Leith to Holyrood Abbey in the 12th centurty. A village grows up around the mills and that is the Dean Village. Right?

Well yes and no, because a village did grow up around those mills, but it was never, ever referred to as the Dean Village until the late 19th century, and to the locals it never was until the mid 20th century.

And what if I told you the Dean Village, or Village of Dean was actually some place else? Because, actually it was.

The earliest map that records this location is Blaeu's atlas published in 1654, based on Timonthy Pont and a bit of James Gordon's surveying decades earlier. It records the Den (Dean) Mills, with a house called Kraig (Craigleith) above (source NLS, maps.nls.uk)

That other mapmaker extraordinaire, William Roy, records the Dean Mills in his 1750s lowland map, downstream from Bells Mills, and to the north of the house of Cotts (Coates) (source NLS)

OK, enough teasing though, as Dean Mills didn't refer to the village we now call Dean Village. That was called Water of Leith. Or the Village of the Water of Leith. Adair records it as such in 1682, in amongst the collection of mills, again north of Coates and south of Craigleith

Right up to 1945, every single OS map and town plan records not the Dean Village but simply the Water of Leith. (e.g. here OS 1892 and 1945, source NLS)

Indeed many of the early town map makers didn't even refer to the river as the Water of Leith, they called that the Leith Water! e.g. Ainslie here in 1804. Notice the property of the "Bakers of Edinburgh" recorded too.

The Dean Village? That's up the hill, as shown on Kirkwood's plan of 1817, adjacent to Dean House (or House of Dean) on the road known as the Dean Path. The low rise buildings there are much more modern than the village though, Victorian at their oldest.

Where there were for hundreds of years two distinct villages, there is now one (in reality, just another little quaint suburban neighbourhood), but the name of the former migrated itself to the latter.

We shall call it the Village of Dean, so as to try and not get too confused, and it is now entirely gone in all but name, but it did leave behind some intriguing history.

Malcolm Cant's book on the Villages of Edinburgh gives a description. The village is aligned on the Dean Path (at that time long the principal "road" north out the city heading to Queensferry via Cramond). It was a few small lanes but had a population of 400 in the mid-18th c.

The village was mainly single storey thatched cottages roofs, but some extended to two, with the upper accessed in the traditional manner by an external staircase. The inhabitants were carters and quarriers of the Inverleith sandstones and farm labourers of the Barony of Dean

For facilities, there was a smithy, a cartwright, a cordiner (the Scots term for a shoemaker), a small school and a tavern run by "Mrs Burr", with a sign above the door with a picture of a horse and cart and which read "Lang May the Wheel Row"

The village was dominated by the House of Dean, a vast 17th century tower house cum mansion inhabited by the Nisbets, the Dean Baronets, wealthy merchants who counted Lord Provosts and even Poulterer to the King in the family tree.

Paul Sandby, the skilled landscape artist and surveyor, made this excellent and detailed illustration around 1750 or so. The two men on the roof of one of the Village of Dean buildings catch the eye as he on the left has a drawing board. I wonder if Sandby has drawn himself in?

In 1826, the prolific watercolour artist of Edinburgh and Leith, James Skene WS, made a similar illustration from a slightly different angle, showing not too much had changed since (source Edinburgh City Libraries)

For a full history of House of Dean you can't do better than this by @Stravaig_Aboot stravaiging.com/history/castle…. Long story short it was demolished in 1845 to make way for the Dean Cemetery, but some of its ornate painted interiors and plenty of carved stoneworked survives

By this time the Nisbet's lands of Dean were owned by another Provost, John Learmonth, and it was he who successfully proposed the Dean Bridge to cross the Dean Gorge and open up (his) lands for construction of plush new suburbs north of the New Town.

With the bridge completed and opening to traffic in 1834, the farmland and orchards which occupied the estate now found themselves opened to development (although that proceeded at a slower pace than Learmonth envisaged and he never lived to see much of it).

And for the Village of Dean? That seems to have disappeared quite quickly between 1831 when its position is shown on the Great Reform Act maps, and 1849 when it's missing from that last OS Town Plan (sources both NLS)

A simple village for simple folk, we might never have known any more if it wasn't for the curious tale of one of its blacksmiths. Enter stage right Robert Orrock (or Orrok, an old Fife name derived from an ancient Norman landowner, Symon de Oroc).

Orrock was the village smithie in the 1790s and was deeply interested in political reform under the influence of the French revolution and also in Scotland a lingering feeling of political disenchantment following the Act of Union (sound familiar?).

In the 1790s in England, reform minded Whigs began to set up a group called the "Society of Freinds of the People", a sort of gentlemens' political debating club by invite.

In Scotland, and mainly around Edinburgh, the similarly minded and sounding "The Friends of the People Society" was an altogether different organisation, largely composed of the more skilled and higher status working class like shopkeepers, artisans and the trades

The Friends of the People also attracted writers and advocates and ministers to their ranks, and in 1792 and 1793 they held three "general conventions", which grew increasingly radical and saw the more learned and middle class members drift away.

Robert Orrock became involved in the last and most radical of these conventions, the "British Convention", where members of some of the English societies were invited to Edinburgh to attend

The Convention's goals were universal male suffrage and annual free elections. Amongst their hundred or so attendees they included the local legend that was "Balloon Tytler", James Tytler, the man of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon who made the first flight in the British Isles

While the attendees debated at Mason's Lodge on Blackfriar's Wynd in the old town, Robert Orrock was hard at work at his forge to all hours. When asked what he was working so hard on he would reply he was "making ornamentations for a gentleman's gate"

Except, he wasn't. Those long metal spikes weren't for a gate. He was making pike heads! Orrock was in a small faction of the Friends who had decided that they might need to follow the French example and undertake revolution if they wanted the change they desired.

The plan was simple. Once Orrock had made enough pike heads and they were assembled into weapons, the old excise office would be set alight to draw out the castle garrison. The conspirators would then rush the depleted castle and take control.

With the castle under control and the masses (hopefully) flocking to be equipped from its armory, the city and the reins of power of the Scottish administration would be seized by quelling the town guard, rounding up the judges and the magistrates, and seizing the banks.

The plan came to nothing however, Orrock's stash had been uncovered by the sheriff's men and he turned crown evidence to save his own skin.

The Convention itself was broken up by the authorities, terrified of revolution, and five of its leaders and principal spokesmen (2 Scots and 3 English) arrested, tried for sedition and sentenced to transportation. They are commemorated by the Martyrs Monument on Calton Hill.

What became of the revolutionary, turned blacksmith, turned turncoat, Robert Orrock, is not recorded in my book. His complicity was uncovered in 1794 as a result of his bankruptcy, so it's unlikely in that case he testified against the 5 martyrs.

Of those arrested with Orrock, Robert Watt and David Downie were tried and convicted of High Treason. Watt was executed but Downie was pardoned in 1795 on sentence of a further year in jail and self-banishment from Great Britain. Neither Orrock or any of the others were tried.

And how did the Water of Leith Village become to be known as the Dean Village? Well apparently its use was first recorded as such in 1884 in reference to Well Court, that beautiful model workers housing scheme built by John Ritchie Findlay of the Scotsman.

(n.b. apparently the clock tower and "Dutch" steeple are modelled after the original of the Tron Kirk, lost in the Great Fire of Edinburgh of 1824. Seen here in this 1740s print by John Elphinstone)

Anyway, that's straying dangerously close to the history of the Water of Leith village rather than the Dean Village. Apparently until 1962 you could still find businesses listing themselves under "Water of Leith" as their address in the Post Office directory (this example 1941)

So there you have it. The story of why the Dean Village wasn't the Dean Village for most of its history, where and what the Dean Village was before it was the Dean Village, and just what it had to do with the Edinburgh version of the storming of the Bastille that never was. 🔚

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