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.
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.
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.
The engine was therefore running with no weather protection for the crew, into a blizzard, with a blockage on the line ahead. And to make things worse, the driver had whiled away the delay in Arbroath by warming himself in the station bar.
So although the driver, Gourlay, had been told to proceed with caution and to stop at Elliot Junction station, he couldn't really see what he was doing, the blockage was *at* the station and by taking a drink had tarnished his reputation in the subsequent inquiry.
Gourlay proceeded too fast in the circumstances and passed semaphore signals which with the weight of snow on them had dropped from the danger to the clear position - but which he should still have treated as being at danger and passed with all caution.
Elliot Junction Station was on the mainline between Dundee and Aberdeen, just south of Arbroath, where a short local branch to Carmyllie diverged to the north.
The Station was an "island" between the tracks, with goods sidings on the up and down lines, as well as the junction for the line to Carmyllie, so was relatively complex for an otherwise insignificant place which at the time was little more than a few farms, cottages and a mill.
🧵Apropos recent events, let's take a few minutes to spare a thought for Lepers in 16th century Edinburgh who lived an incredibly strict life of lockdown. 👇
There was a leper hospital in Edinburgh from medieval times, but there's no hard record as to where it may have been. The "Liberton" = "Leper town" thing is a myth as the place name predates the arrival of the word Leper into Scots language by centuries.
No, Edinburgh's 16th century leper hospital was in Greenside, outside the city boundary at the time (and actually in the barony of Restalrig). The approximate location was between the London Road roundabout and Greenside Church.
£2.8 million for a 2 bed flat? Quite possibly Scotland's most expensive bit of residential real estate per square foot?
It isn't even *that* big.
When I were a lad* this were all damp and draughty shared bedrooms. I forget which particular demographic of the student body made this place its home back in the day.
* (ok, a young adult).
Is there a relatively easy way for a layperson like myself to get something like Open TopoMap, but with the buildings and roads layers turned off? If it's more complex than finding another website to do this then it's probably beyond me.
Tl;dr how do I just get a contour map of the topology without labels and layers?
If the answer is something like "yeah, just fire X up in GIS software Y and do Z" then it's probably beyond me.
🧵Today's Leith local history thread is brought to you by chance of a couple of typos in a book, which meant I couldn't find what I was looking for but instead found an altogether more interesting tale of late 18th century shipbuilding in Leith and naval affairs 👇
The typo referred to the building of the first "ship of the line" in Scotland in Leith in 1750, a ship named Fury. However none of this stacked up, as the first HMS Fury wasn't built until much later, and wasn't a ship of the line.
In the Royal Navy, a ship of the line meant a specific sort of ship - a 1st, 2nd or 3rd rate to be precise - and something much, much larger than I thought would have been getting built in Leith quite so early. Here is the 3rd rate HMS Melville in the early 19th c.