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…
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"Drawn at The Execution of John Young in the Grass Market, Edinbr., 1751" The description says "a crowd... in the foreground, beyond them the gallows officers with the condemned man on a platform". Except that's not *quite* what's going on here... Let's find out more! 🧵👇
The image is by the hand of Paul Sandby, the young English draughtsman who came to Edinburgh in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion to turn the triangulations of William Roy's survey of Scotland into the incredible illustrated map. Sandby proved to be quite the artist
With his gang of esteemed friends, in his free time he would sketch the street scenes of the city. But this isn't a thread about Paul Sandby, it's a thread about the scene he drew, and how not is quite what meets the eye.
The registers of Canongate Kirk record on 17th Feb 1819 a 22 year old man was interred, having died 3 days earlier from fever. What they do not say is that he was far from the land of his birth and that he was a truly remarkable man. He was John Sakeouse and this is his story🧵👇
John was well known in Edinburgh and Leith, infact it was fair to say he was something of a celebrity, for he was a unique character in the port and in the city; he was a Kalaaleq , an Inuk from West Greenland, and was the first of his people to travel to Scotland.
He was born around 1797 in Disko Bay, west Greenland at a latitude of 69° N. We do not know his name in his native language, Danish missionaries had Christined him with the biblical names Johannes Zakaeus; John Sackhouse, or Saccheuse, but he signed himself Sakeouse)
Last week I threaded about John Gibson and John Gibson Gibson - Leith's father and son pioneers aviators. But they weren't the only locals trying to reach for the skies in 1910, in fact they were only one of 4 competing aviation projects across Edinburgh. 🧵👇
Aviation fever swept across the English Channel to Britain in July when Louis Blériot crossed La Manche in his little "Blériot XI" monoplane. In Scotland, the Barnwell brothers - Harold and Frank - make the first powered flight the same month at Causewayhead in Stirling
To cap off a thrilling year, in November John Moore-Brabazon, the first Briton to make a flight in Britain, made pigs fly when he strapped one into a basket and attached it to the wing of his aeroplane (also the first ever flight by a live animal cargo).
Another day. Another bunch of inconspicuous looking municipal houses in Edinburgh. Another question of "well, what makes these so special then?" that I will endeavour to answer. 🧵👇
This is just one little corner of the large Lochend housing scheme, developed in the mid-1920s as a big showpiece by Edinburgh Corporation. The Corporation purchased the 170 acre Lochend estate from Morton Gray Stuart, 17th Earl of Moray, in 1923 for £37,500 (£2.9M today)
Central government subsidies in place at the time encouraged the use of "non traditional construction" techniques, to try and deal with post-war shortages of both general and skilled trades labour. Edinburgh Corporation was quick to embrace both the money and the new techniques
Another sleepy little suburban Edinburgh street of neat little inter-war bungalows and well trimmed hedges. I've cycled down it hundreds of times, probably even a thousand, and never paid it any attention. If I had, I might have found out that this is no ordinary street 🧵👇
You may recall the other week I wrote about the "Sighthill Demonstration Site", the post-war living laboratory for municipal housing experiments in Scotland. Well, nobody was more surprised than me to find out that Riversdale Road in Roseburn was its inter-war equivalent!
Edinburgh Corporation had acquire the Saughton Hall Estate in 1900. Much of the land was set aside for suburban housing. Riversdale Road was so named in 1913, to some consternation with Judge Macfarlane who felt it sounded too English.
The thread about the Edinburgh Hostels for Women Students and their brief wartime role as an Internment Camp for German “Enemy Aliens” threadinburgh.scot/2023/01/06/the…
Here's that write-up @Newbattleatwar@adbrora@GaryinScotland@S_M_R_G@davidmcnay . Knew nothing about the place until this afternoon - it had quite an exciting few months before being shut. Also found a very sad story of a German who lived 44 years in Scotland and died there
A chance sight of a photo in a tweet opened up quite a rabbit hole for me this afternoon and I couldn't help but go down it to write it up. I honestly had no idea there had been a German internment camp in Edinburgh at start of WW2.