The thread about the Seventh Day of Christmas; Sven Swans a Swanstoning

This thread was originally written and published in December 2019. It has been edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

This post in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas is preceded by a thread about the Guse Dub.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Sven Swans a Swanstoning. I refer of course to Swanston, in the far south of the modern limits of the city, beyond even the Bypass. A veritably ancient name, one which is probably as old as Edinburgh itself, and even today distinctly rural in character.

The name is first recorded in 1214 and unfortunately doesn’t actually have anything to do with swans. It is of Norse origin, from the given name Sveinn (modern, Sven). Sveinnstun meaning a farmstead belonging to a man called Sven. This puts the probable origin 1 or 2 centuries before the written record in the 10th or 11th centuries. It is recorded as part of the medieval barony of Redhall, which occupied much of the land between the northern slopes of the Pentland Hills and the back of the rising ground south of Edinburgh.

As a farm, Swanston was part of the feu of Templelands; ground granted by the Knights Templar in the 12th or 13th century to Thomas, Lord Binning, a nobleman based in East Lothian. In the 15th century the farm was sub-fued (the feu, or primary plot of land held for the Crown by the laird, was split and granted to two subordinate (or vassal) lairds. These became the separate holdings of Easter and Wester Swanston, with the Swanston Burn forming the boundary, before being reunited in the late 17th century under the Trotters of Mortonhall. And so it was for the next 4 centuries, with not a lot changing; the road beyond Swanston leads nowhere but to the hills and the city was hardly visible 4 miles away beyond the rising ground of the Braid Hills to the north, with its southern boundary a full 2½ miles away in the middle of the 19th century.

The settlement was dominated by the principal farmhouse, formerly Wester Swanston, with the collection of thatched cottages that housed most of the population being on the locus of Easter Swanston.

While Swanston for most of its existence has been fundamentally detached from the metropolis within whose boundary it sits, in the middle of the 18th century it became linked to it when the City gained an Act of Parliament that allowed it to extract drinking water from the springs in its vicinity. A cistern house and three filter beds – gravel and sand filled reservoirs to settle any sediment and silt out of the water – were built south of the village and it was connected to the city by wooden pipes.

A house was added by the City in 1761 for the use of the water engineer and officials, and in 1830 this would be modernised and expanded into the villa of Swanston Cottage. Gargoyles and tracery added to an extension at this time are reputed to have been removed from St. Giles Cathedral by the architect William Burn when he “modernised” the ancient church in a manner befitting the style of the time. The cottage garnered a reputation as being something of a “municipal pleasure house“, where City officials would come to make merry. From 1867-1880, the family of Robert Louis Stevenson rented the cottage in the summer as a holiday house. The teenage Robert spent much time here, including walking to and from the city, and refereed to the place as “a stilly hamlet that vies with any earthly paradise“. Robert’s nurse, Alison Cummingham (“Cummy”), was the sister of the resident waterman, and lived with him in his cottage from 1880 to 1893. Her initials are on the lintel above the door of that house.

On his walks from the family home in Edinburgh’s New Town or from the University to Swanston, the young Robert would pass the water house of the Comiston Springs, which also provided the city with clean drinking water, and where the four springs were named after animals. Coincidentally, one of these was a swan, the Swan Spring emerges in the water house through a pipe crowned with a cast lead swan.

The name of Swanston has been applied to housing built between the 1930s and 1970s to the north of the City Bypass in the district of Fairmilehead. By the middle of the 20th century, these ancient farmhouses of the village were verging on unfit for habitation. They still had floors of compressed earth; their roofs were still thatched with reeds from the Tay (the only such lowland houses in Scotland); running water had only arrived in 1934 and they were without electricity until 1949. The City bought the cottages in 1956 and restored them, for which they earned a Scottish Civic Trust award in 1964. They were leased them out as council housing. Most were purchased under “Right to Buy” legislation, but one survives under municipal ownership and is probably Scotland’s only thatched council house.

In 1927, a woman by the name of Margaret Carswell took a lease of land from Swanston Farm to create a 9-hole ladies’ golf course, having found it impossible to gain access to any of the city’s many other golf courses. Men were later admitted (by popular consent of the membership) and it was expanded to a full 18 holes. It is the only visitor attraction of the “village”, which boasts no public facilities, having lost its school in the 1930s.

The Edinburgh and Leith-themed Twelve Days of Christmas continues with a post about The Maiden Castle.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

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A seasonal treat for the urban poor: the thread about Scotland’s New Years steak pie tradition

With the filling for the obligatory Ne’erday steak pie doing its thing in the slow cooker, it inevitably leads to the question of how such a pie should properly be flavoured. Should it have any herbs and spices beyond salt and pepper? A bit red wine or ale perhaps? A few drops of Worcester sauce? And more intriguing for me than the finer points of the recipe, what are the origins of this seasonal pie tradition in Scotland? Let’s try and find out, shall we?

There’s a syndicated short story entitled How Shall I hold New-Year’s Day which was printed across Scottish newspapers on the Boxing Day 1851 which discusses new year traditions and in which a “beef steak pie” features. The story takes the form of a conversation between two working class men – Jock and Bob – on their plans for the season and it’s quite obviously the work of the Temperance movement. Jock, the man with the pie, intends not to drink any whisky and instead to spend his time with his family enjoying the fruits of his abstemiousness. Instead of his usual parritch (porrdige) he is having a feast of ham, eggs, hot rolls, cheese, currant buns and “tea along with the elders” for Hogmanay. Bob’s plans, in contrast, mainly involve whisky. Come the morning of the 1st, Bob will have argued with his family and be left with his hangover. But canny Jock has the benefit of his “rest and sobriety of the previous night” and will take his children out to the toy shop, then come home to his pie, followed by a sing-along with invited friends and the treat of fresh fruit. All very sober! An interesting point noted by Jock is that while his wife has “made” the pie, it was “covered and baked by the baker the previous night“; most people would not have had a home oven that could have baked such a pie, so they would take their filling in a dish to their baker who would cook it in the bread oven. The pie could then be reheated atop the range on the girdle (griddle).

This was the earliest mention of steak pie at New Year that I could find in Scottish newspapers. However the phrase comes up again and again (and again!) over the next 60 or so years of press in one specific context; feeding the poor at new years and (later) Christmas. In January 1863, the Glasgow Herald reported that the inmates of the Paisley Abbey Poorhouse had been treated to an “excellent beef-steak pie” and oranges by the benevolent committee of the parish poor board. In 1876, the Edinburgh Evening News similarly describes the inmates of the City Poorhouse at Craiglockhart had gotten their “usual new year’s treat” of “excellent soup, beef-steak pie and pudding“. Those in St. Cuthbert’s Poorhouse were in contrast served a mutton pie, plum pudding, currant loaf and jugs of beer.

Craiglockhart was still serving New Year steak pie in 1893, but the soup had by this time been downgraded from excellent to mere potato. In 1898, the Evening News reported that an injunction of the Local Government Board had prevented the Parish Board from financing any “special entertainments during the festive season” at the poorhouses from their own funds and these instead had to be met by private benevolence. Fortunately £70 was provided by Alexander Oliver Riddle (or Riddell) of neighbouring Craiglockhart House, a whisky magnate in the distilling firm of Usher & Co. and the inmates of the poorhouses still got their roast beef and mutton “along with a steak pie and fruit“. The men were provided with a treat of an ounce of tobacco, the women got a similar weight in snuff and the children the same but in sweets. A. Oliver Riddle continued to fund the Craiglockhart New Year steak pie dinner thereafter and in 1902 645 mouths were fed. By 1907 times had changed slightly and the women were being provided with sweets instead of snuff. Craigleith seems to have lacked such a sponsor however and the inmates instead were getting a dinner of coffee, bread and butter, soup and mince – all washed down by a visit from local councillors.

It wasn’t just the poorhouses providing New Year steak pie; The Scotsman in 1896 reported that it was the custom in Glasgow for the merchants of the Royal Exchange to fund a steak pie and potato dinner for the poor, held at the City Chambers. This dinner had by 1905 shifted to Christmas Day at which time 3,000 people got their lunch, but had in turn to suffer a lecture from Lord Provost Bilsland about knowing their place and being grateful for philanthropy. It was noted at this time that the tradition was now 36 years old. Similarly in Edinburgh, in 1904 Lord Provost Sir Robert Cranston (noted champion of Temperance) put on a New Year steak pie dinner for 1,000 of the city’s poor at the Grassmarket Corn Exchange; but it had to be held on January 2nd as a bird show had the venue booked on the 1st!

In 1910, the Home for Aged Women in Portobello served a Christmas Day dinner – provided by a Mrs Sellar – of steak pie, plum pudding and fruit, and a New Year’s Day “godly repast” of roast mutton, pudding, jellies, meringues and sweets provided by Mrs Durham and Miss Scott Moncrieff. When Edinburgh wine importer William Crambe Reid died in February 1922, £68,000 of his £184,000 fortune was left to good causes in the city. The interest on one benefaction went to providing an annual Christmas meal for 4-500 of the city’s poor; the “William Crambe Reid Dinner“. The inaugural menu had soup, haggis and mashed potatoes, steak pie, vegetables, more potatoes, plum pudding and fruit. In North Leith Parish, a bequest of property by a Mr Neill paid a £51 annual profit on rents that was still providing such a meal on New Year’s Day as late as 1938.

But what of the actual pies themselves? What were people being actually eating ? We can get an early recipe for a Scottish steak pie from the book “Cookery and Pastry as taught and practised by Mrs Maciver, Teacher of those Arts in Edinburgh“. Susanna Maciver was one of Scotland’s first cookery teachers and published a cookery manual in Edinburgh around 1777. Her steak pie is very different to what we might have today; it was made from alternating strips of lean and fatty beef that had been cut into thin slices and then beaten thinner, much like a schnitzel before it was “seasoned with salt and spices” (she doesn’t say what spices, sadly.) These strips were rolled up into “ollops” (or collops, i.e. like beef olives), packed into a dish with some water, covered in puff pastry and baked.

The Cook and Housewife’s Manual etc. by Margaret Dods (actually a pseudonymous collaboration between Isobel Christian Johnston and Walter Scott) of 1826 gives fundamentally the same collop-style pie but adds gravy instead of water and the optional taste of some onions. What is much more interesting is that the book also suggests you can add a catsup (a preserved mushroom sauce), cut pickles, “other seasonings“, oysters and/or forcemeat balls (balls of minced offal and breadcrumbs). In February 1882, a Lady Correspondent submitted a recipe to the Dundee Evening Telegraph for a steak pie. It was made with 1lb of fillet steak which was cut thin, layered with oysters and flavoured with mace, walnut ketchup, port, lemon peel, gravy, salt and pepper. The same paper provided a different recipe in 1884, which was made with shoulder steak and included two kidneys “to enrich the sauce“. No mention was made of spices or other flavourings. The most unusual aspect of this pier was that it was served along with a side dish of macaroni cheese (which was actually made with spaghetti!). In 1892, the Aberdeen People’s Journal gives a recipe by a correspondent called Wiganer made from 2lb steak, 1/4lb kidney, salt and pepper with the meat diced up into chunks (rather than strips or collops) as would be recognisable now. The filling was cooked in the dish then covered in a lard shortcrust pastry and returned to the oven.

Economy steak pie recipes were published in the papers in WW1; the Dundee People’s Journal has one made from much cheaper meat – 1½lb of beef hough (shin) – which had to be boiled for 90 minutes before mixing with an instant gravy and boiled again with salt and pepper before it could be topped with pastry. And in 1917, as a reflection of how bad the food supply situation was getting, the Arbroath Herald has a recipe where sliced potatoes are used to bulk out the meat (which was itself a 2:1 ratio of beef and kidneys) and which was topped with a pastry that was ¾ mashed potatoes. This recipe used margarine or butter in the pastry – but things were so dire in January 1918 that the Food Control Committee published a recipe in newspapers for “potato butter“. This awful-sounding ersatz butter was fundamentally real butter that was stretched out by mixing it with boiled and sieved potatoes, dying it with butter colouring, preserving it with butter preservatives and setting it again in pats.

There are an infinite number of genuine and authentic and traditional Scottish steak pie recipes that you can find in cookery books and blogs. In the book “A Scottish feast : an anthology of food and eating” published in 1996, the food writer Catherine Brown gives a recipe for such a pie that attempts to meet the steak pie yardstick of Mr Glasgow (writer, broadcaster, bon viveur and foot critic Jack House) – which was the steak pie served in the Boulevard Hotel in Clydebank! This is an intersting hybrid of older pie recipe techniques, with the meat again beaten thin, but wrapped around pieces of kidney and sausage. It was thoroughly modernised however with the addition of ground clove, chopped parsley and marjoram and mushrooms. The addition of mushrooms was not just for flavouring purposes, but to form a barrier to hold the pastry off of the filling and prevent a “soggy bottom” forming on the pastry lid (which is personally my favourite part of the pie!). In reality, there is no one, authentic Scottish New Years steak pie recipe, beyond the one that you choose to enjoy on that day.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

The Palace at the Foot of the Walk: the thread about the many lives of an early cinema

The Foot of the Walk pub in Leith has been in the news recently as its owner has put it on the market for sale, to much local indignation. These premises first opened on 1st January 1913 as The Palace cinema (in reference to the term “Picture Palace“, which was in use at the time to differentiate the upper end of the cinema market from the lower), showing a programme of illustrated nursery rhymes, a film about a gang of horse thieves and other “pictures of a humorous kind, which were greatly appreciated“. The cinema, as built, had a proscenium 32 feet wide by 22 feet high which gave it the largest screen in all of Edinburgh or Leith. It had a capacity for 2,000; 900 in the pit, 650 in the pit stalls and 450 in the upper gallery and a feature was that both the roof and balcony were cantilevered, with no supporting pillars to get in the way of the view of the screen. Great attention was paid to fire safety; the Brackliss Motiograph projector was installed behind the auditorium, within fireproof walls, there were 8 emergency exits from the auditorium and lighting was electric, rather than gas.

It cost the Leith Public Hall & Property Co. around £20,000 to build (around £1.8 million in 2023) and was part of a syndicate of cinemas controlled by theatre impresario Robert Colburn (“RC”) Buchanan; a man described by Scottish Cinema journal at that time as being gifted to the trade “by the gods“. Buchanan was for a time the managing director of the Gaiety theatre in Leith, which stood on th opposite side of Constitution Street from The Palace. The latter site had long been the premises of Bell, Rannie & Co., one of Leith’s longest established wine merchants, where brothers Robert and John Cockburn served their apprenticeships.

A fire at Bell, Rannie & Co.’s George Street shop in 1910 led to the sale of their Constitution Street warehouse and offices. It was briefly thereafter occupied by the Rev. John Findlater and the Leith Methodist Church, which had recently become homeless after its church across the road was demolished to allow the construction of Leith Central Station. Shortly after this, it too was cleared, to make way for the cinema which was built on top of Bell & Rannie’s old vaults.

The cinema was surrounded at ground floor level with shop units on both Constitution and Duke Streets and at this time the opportunity was taken for the former street to be widened and a corresponding portion of the latter narrowed, to improve the road layout at the Foot of the Walk. Upstairs, on the Duke Street side, there was a hall that was long occupied by the Leith Central Snooker Club.

One thing that wasn’t included in the demolition and rebuilding was an adjoining bonded warehouse, the property of Cockburn & Campbell, wine merchants at 15 Duke Street. This sad looking, long-abandoned old building is actually one of the oldest in this part of Leith – dating from at least 1804!

The Palace was designed around showing two programmes every night, at 7PM and 9PM, and so was laid out internally such that one audience could enter through the foyer while previous one exited through separate doors onto Duke and Constitution street, without any mutual disruption. The advert below shows the opening week’s programme, which described the venue as “a Lordly Picture House. The Largest. The Latest. The Best.“

The opening feature – “A Race For An Inheritance” (A Drama rushing from sensation to sensation) – was a Gaumont film that had only recently been released.

This wasn’t the only “Palace” cinema in the neighbourhood, there was Pringle’s Picture Palace at the other end of The Walk on Elm Row and they were joined by the Empire Picture Palace on Henderson Street in 1917. Further afield there was the St. Bernard’s Picture Palace in Stockbridge, which opened in 1911, The Palace on Princes Street, which opened on Christmas Eve 1913 and the New Palace on the High Street that opened for talkies in 1929. The Leith Palace was wired for sound in September 1930 to allow it to join that latest cinema craze. In 1931 the Cimarron with Richard Dix and Irene Dunne was one of the first such pictures being shown. Alterations were made at this time by renowned cinema (and roadhouse!) architect Thomas Bowhill Gibson, whose work includes the Dominion in Morningside and former George / County in Portobello. These may have included removal of the tower over the entrance that is seen in the first picture on this page.

The Palace quietly prospered in the 1930s and 1940s, although eclipsed by newer and larger and more modern houses (such as The Capitol on Manderston Street and The State on Great Junction Street, it remained popular. However by the 1960s, like many smaller houses it was beginning to struggle to compete with television and closed without ceremony on December 31st 1966, 53 years to the day since it opened, showing The Trouble With Angels starring Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills.

The cinema went on the market and was purchased by new owners, Norwich Enterprises Ltd, trading as Palace Promotions. It was shortly thereafter converted to serve the new craze of bingo, still under the Palace name. A fire in 1968 destroyed most of the auditorium roof of the building on March 24th 1968, fortunately some hours after the 1,000 patrons who had been playing had gone home. It was repaired thereafter and soon back in business.

In 1978 the Bingo hall closed and was replaced by Cuemasters Snooker and Social Club and in turn the long established Leith Central Snooker Club upstairs closed in 1983. In 1992 a small church called “The Potters House” moved in to the latter space.

The old cinema was refurbished and reopened as the Wetherspoon pub The Foot of the Walk on 27th June 2001. Few of the original features are visible inside, but if you use your imagination you can get a rough idea of the original layout. The upper balcony still exists, hidden away, with its seats, carpets and wall coverings as they were when the last film was shown in 1966. You can view pictures of it here on the excellent Scottish Cinemas website. After over 20 years of security in the guise of a cheap, cheerful and popular watering hole, its future is once again uncertain. In its life it has spent 53 years as a cinema, 12 years as a bingo hall, 23 years as a snooker hall and a further 23 as a public house; like many former cinemas it has now spent longer not being a cinema than the time it spent serving its intended purpose.

As for the name “Foot of the Walk“? It’s a name for this locality that’s as old as postal directories are in Edinburgh and Leith, appearing in Peter Williamson’s first directories in the 1770s. And we can push it back 40 years more in the newspapers, an advert for one of the first houses built here appearing in the Caledonian Mercury on January 4th 1737.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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