Andy Arthur - ThreadinburghThe Royal Mile: the thread about a street with no addresses
This thread was originally written and published in September 2022.
Apropos current events (at the time of writing), I thought it might be interesting, relevant or a bit of both to delve a little into the name of a certain street and dispel a few myths or misapprehensions about it.
You can find any number of pictures of “The Royal Mile” signs on stock photo sites.The Royal Mile of course is well known as that ancient main street of Edinburgh’s Old Town, named for the mile long route between Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. This is a route steeped in history and long trodden by monarchs of Scotland, yes? The history books (or some of them) actually will tell you this, so it must be true, yes? Well, not really, no.
OK, the bit about it being a mile long between the castle and the palace is correct, it almost exactly is – give or take a foot, yard or metre. But that’s a statute mile not the Scots mile which some sources claim (which is ~200m longer) so that should raise a slight suspicion as to how ancient a term it really is. Feel free to measure it if you don’t believe me! You also won’t find any property with a street address of Royal Mile and you won’t find it in any old Post Office directory listing.
No. The Royal Mile is a collective term for four distinct streets, which in days of yore were in two completely separate burghs. From the top of the hill at the castle to the bottom, which is from west to east, we have the Castle Hill, Lawnmarket and High Street of Edinburgh and the Canongate which was in the Burgh of Canongate. These are shown below with their separate names on Kincaid’s street map of 1784.
Castle Hill, Kincaid’s map of 1784, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandLawn Market, Kincaid’s map of 1784, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandHigh Street, Kincaid’s map of 1784, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandCanongate, Kincaid’s map of 1784, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandStuart Harris, who wrote the book on Edinburgh street names, takes particular exception to the Royal Mile name: “to use this label for the combined length of the separate historic market streets [Edinburgh and the Canongate] it is at cost of blurring the distinction between the two“. He continues “it is not only meaningless historically, but unhappily gives an impression that this was a route created to link castle and palace, whereas the truth is that it came into being hundreds of years before the kings of Scots had anything to go with the fortress or the palace“. Harris notes that in medieval references it is given as “via Regia“, the King’s Way, but then that was given to any public highway, with the adjoining streets and closes all being in private ownership in their respective burghs. Using the “nickname” of Royal Mile, he bemoaned, was causing the erosion of the historic and distinct individual street names, “with a regrettable loss of civic dignity“.
The route is undoubtedly ancient, a track will have existed along the spine of the Castle Rock since as long as people scratched out a living on its summit as a defensible place to survive. But how old are the street names and how old is the objectionable term Royal Mile? The earliest medieval references to the High Street describe a vicus foralis or market street, because that’s what it was and why it was much wider than it is now. By the 16th century it’s the magnus vicus or great street and by the start of the 17th it’s the High Street (or Hie Gate in Scots). The below sketch reconstructs the 15th century birds’ eye view of the city on its ridge below the castle, with the prominent one-mile route from castle to Holyrood.
Edinburgh Birds Eye View Looking North, c. 1450. F. C. Mears, 1910The name Castle Hill, now partly buried beneath the 18th and 19th c. Esplanade, dates to at least 1484. It refers to the hill you climb to reach the castle, the castle itself sits on the Castle Rock. There’s evidence to suggest that the Castle Hill predates the High Street as the main centre of populace of Edinburgh.
The Lawnmarket is nothing to do with lawns or selling fodder. Lawn is a corruption of the Scots Laund or Laun; in English – Land; it was the Landmercatt, where people from the lands outwith the burgh could trade. The main city markets were restricted to only being for the traders of the burgh. In the 1765 town plan by Edgar (below) it’s even spelled as Land Market.
Edgar’s Town Plan of Edinburgh, 1765, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAnd the Canongate, the principle thoroughfare of the burgh of that name dates to not long after the foundation of the Holyrood Abbey in 1128, first being recorded in 1363 as the vicus canonicorum or “Canoungait“, the way of the Canons (of the Abbey). The Burgh of Canongate, whose superiority was held by the Abbey until the Scottish Reformation, post-dated the street name and was established at some time in the 15th century.
And so what of The Royal Mile? Well, it’s a term that first appears in newspapers in the late 19th century. There are a couple of references to it in articles in The Scotsman in the 1880 and 1890s, written in a manner that implies it was clearly a term already understood locally. But crucially, it’s not given as a proper noun, it’s in quotation marks as the “royal mile“, it’s being used as a descriptive nickname. It first appears in book print that I can find in 1901, in “Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century” by W. M. Gilbert. Again, with the quote marks and no capital on mile, again it’s clearly a nickname.
W. M. Gilbert’s book.From here on, use of the term grows. A burgh councillor, C. J. Mcarthy, gave a talk illustrated by magic lantern slides of the title to the Edinburgh Architectural Association in 1905. By 1920, it’s the title of a historical guidebook published locally, by Robert T. Skinner
Robert T. Skinner’s book.And by the 1930s, the name and its mythical genesis is firmly embedded in the popular history books.
Newnes Pictorial Knowledge, vol. 3, 1934So there you have it. Yes, the Royal Mile or royal mile is a well accepted and established local name for the area between the Castle and the Palace, but as is sometimes the case the accepted history is a relatively modern invention to fit the facts and is divorced from the historical reality.
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