The thread about the building of the Scotland Street tunnel, a challenging – and occasionally fatal – engineering endeavour

This thread was originally written and published in September 2023.

In this thread from the other day I covered why Bellevue House in the centre of Drummond Place was demolished so as to allow the Scotland Street Tunnel to run directly beneath it. There’s a lot been written about the Tunnel: some of it’s even true! Despite a service life of just over 20 years and despite being defunct as a transport route for over 150 years, it still captivates the local imagination. The 1,052 yard long tunnel climbs from its entrance beneath Scotland Street to its terminus at the long gone “Canal Street Station” (beneath the Waverley Market) at a significant gradient of 1-in-27, directly beneath the axis of the New Town streets of Scotland Street, Dublin Street and St. Andrew Street so as not to undermine any buildings. But have you ever stopped to wonder how it was built?

The tunnel was planned by the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven Railway, which soon changed its name to the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton when the terminus on the Forth shifted to the latter harbour. Within a few years, this small railway was absorbed by the larger (but as-yet unbuilt) Edinburgh & Northern Railway in and changed its name one last time to the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee in 1849 to better reflect the destinations it planned to connect.

When it came to construction, it wasn’t simply a case of starting at one end and digging towards the other, or even trying to meet in the middle from both. No, in fact they dug from both ends and also sunk 5 shafts along the route and dug out from all, at once. The process was to dig a narrow guide mine or drift , 6 x 6 feet wide and tall, linking all the shafts together and then widen that out into the 24 x 24 feet tunnel section and line it. The aerial view below shows the locations of these shafts, from the southern edge of St. Andrew Square (top right of image) to the southern edge of the Drummond Place garden (bottom left of image).

The shafts are not spaced equidistant along the route but are concentrated in the central section between Drummond Place and St. Andrew Square. This is because of the underlying geology; the hardest rocks to dig through are located here. From the northern portal and under Scotland Street to the north of Drummond Place was easy going through sand, clay and gravel but beyond this they struck multiple bands of sandstone, freestone, hard freestone, very hard freestone, whinstone, hard sandstone and blaes (mudstone and shale). Beyond St. Andrew square, going got easier again as the freestone is interspersed with multiple bands of clay. An excellent geological section map is available on Canmore, but the terms of its licensing don’t allow me to reproduce it here. So I went one better and re-drew it and re-coloured it to make it clearer for you.

The sources tell you the tunnel was constructed between 1844-47, but the newspapers confirm that the drift was actually started by the contractor James Mitchell (of Ross & Mitchell, who was father in law to James Gowans of Rockville) in February 1843 when the company was still known as the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven Railway. It was largely completed by February 1844, with the exception of the hardest section beneath Drummond Place and Abercromby Place. Much of the ground that was cut through here was water bearing and drainage was a problem before the whole drift was completed. A particular difficulty, which you can see in the above diagram, was the strata being cut through were thrusting upwards at an angle of around 20-30 degrees to the tunnel and so formed “walls” which held back the water. When the miners breached these, they could suddenly and unexpectedly release the water built up in the next layer. To counter this, the contractors bored out “jumper holes” (pilot holes) ahead of the excavations. When the jumper hole breached a geological wall and struck water, this could then be tapped off and drained away in a controlled manner before the whole drift advanced into the next strata.

This approach was quite successful, but disaster struck early on Friday 29th November 1844 when the nightshift workmen of No. 3 Shaft, digging away below the vicinity of Albany Place, bored out the jumper hole off the planned angle in error and breached a significant subterranean pocket of water which flooded the workings. This shouldn’t actually have been a surprise, the Thursday shift had noticed unusual springs of water in the workings and one of the miners had insisted to his mates that they were digging off of the intended route. Mr Mitchell, the contracting engineer, was informed, and made known his intention to go down with the morning shift at 6AM, to inspect the workings for himself. He asked the workmen to call him before they went down, however when the shift arrived they workmen called not on Mr Mitchell the engineer, but his brother Peter Mitchell, who was employed as a superintendent “but was not conversant in the business of mining“.

Instead of getting his brother, Peter Mitchell took it upon himself to do the inspection and went down with the gang. A short time later, a 14 year old boy – Jack – was being lowered into the shaft and was almost at the bottom when he heard “a loud roar of thunder” and yelled in a panic to be hauled back to the surface. Jack only just made it to the surface before a “huge wave came surging up the shaft” behind him and rose to a height of 80 feet, before “falling back again… almost as quickly as it had risen“. A second explosion of water occurred near the entrance to Broughton Markets out of No. 4 shaft, this one caused by the compression of the air in the tunnel by the flooding finding a route out and propelling the water before it. The basements in this area were flooded up to a depth of 4 feet. Once the initial torrents had subsided, the men at the surface found the drift and shafts were flooded and choked up with rocks, clay and debris from the onrush of water. The majority of the water however drained down and out of the tunnel mouth at Scotland Street “where it flooded the terminus of the completed portion of the railway to a considerable extent“: for a short period, the Canonmills Loch resurrected itself.

The men on the surface soon followed the receding water down the shaft to look for their mates. A ganger – Erskine – and a miner, Blair from Liberton – were soon found, “as might be expected, quite dead“. The body of another miner – Philips – would not be recovered until later. Tragically, he and Blair should not have even been there, their relief had overslept and were still putting their working clothes on on the surface when the disaster happened. Philips wife “resorted to the scene in the course of the forenoon and her wild shrieks and cries exhibited a spectacle to touch the coldest heart“. His body was found at around 3PM that day and that of Peter Mitchell, who should never have gone down the mine, was found at 4PM. Their bodies had been washed down the tunnel and were stopped beneath Drummond Place by a barrier of rock that had been left across the drift to help control the flow of water down the hill.

A public subscription was raised for the “families of all these poor men” who (with the exception of Mitchell the superintendent) would be “left destitute” by the loss of the breadwinner. The Edinburgh Evening Courant implored the directors of the railway to contribute generously.

The tunnel was finally completed and ready in mid-April 1847, when the company was known as the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway. Captain Coddington, RE of the Railway Board inspected it and gave it the all clear on 10th April. It opened on Monday 17th May after “the most formidable difficulties“, on the same day as the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway opened their extension from Haymarket to a (for now temporary) terminus underneath the new Waverley Bridge.

A watercolour painting by Joseph Ebsworth was completed a couple of months later, and from its vantage point of the Scott Monument we can clearly see a train emerging from the Scotland Street tunnel into Canal Street Station below Princes Street. There is a further thread here about that station, if you fancy reading some more on the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway. The tunnel was too steep for the railway engines of the day when it was built, so trains were hauled up it on a rope by a static winding engine and ran downhill by gravity from Canal Street to Scotland Street, were a locomotive was attached for the onward journey to Granton or Leith.

Despite the effort of its construction, the tunnel ended up having a very short life and was closed to traffic only 21 years after it opened. You can read more about the various crimes and illicit goings on that the tunnel attracted during this time in this thread. In this time it also gained a reputation for accidents and the newspapers record many – it proved particularly dangerous for the men employed to work it:

• In December 1853, Thomas Cleghorn, a railway guard, was killed instantly in the tunnel when he struck his head on the wall after leaning out of the luggage van in which he was riding.
• In August 1855, a carriage left unattended at the top of the tunnel and without its brakes applied, ran down the incline and collided with a passenger train, causing multiple injuries, some severe. The shunter, Thomas Wells, pleaded guilty to “culpable neglect of duty” and was imprisoned for 9 months.
• In September 1857, a goods train emerging from the foot of the tunnel at Scotland Street did not stop and ran into the back of a slow-moving coal train. The driver of the latter train jumped from his engine but forgot to shut off the steam and apply the brakes in his panic. His engine ran off towards Granton at a speed of 30mph and crashed into a train of carriages which was fortunately almost empty, demolishing the lot. The few passengers on board had already jumped clear when the runaway train was seen to be approaching. The Glasgow Sentinel newspaper recorded that at Scotland Street station the damage was limited to 2 barrels of whisky, which broke and their “mountain dew scattered on the ground“
• In October 1859, John Adam, a railway labourer, was fatally injured after being struck by a train coming out of the tunnel. He had gone to fetch a lamp to work with and found himself caught between the train and the tunnel wall.
• In October 1859 also, the haulage cable snapped at 930AM in the morning, preventing use of the tunnel for the whole day.
• In June 1863, James Samuel, a carriage driver employed to move coaches around Canal Street Station by horse traction, caught his foot in the mechanism of a turntable and was run over by a train coming out of the tunnel on the haulage rope. His injuries proved fatal.
• In July 1865, a train of 13 carriages, 2 trucks and 3 brake wagons was moving downhill when it separated into two portions. The forward portion moved ahead, but was then hit by the rear portion when it began to slow as the brakemen, in the pitch dark, could not even see that the train had separated. There were no serious injuries.
• In September 1867, a train ran away down the hill from Canal Street Station and overshot the station at Scotland Street at the foot of the tunnel, the brakemen – one on every third carriage – had to resort to applying the emergency “drags”, stout pieces of timber that were shoved into the spokes of the wheels to bring them to an immediate (and violent) stop. There were no serious injuries.
• In November 1867, William Reid, a brakeman, was killed when he jumped from his train at the foot of the tunnel and fell, being run over by his own vehicle.

Ultimately, the tunnel was never a practical transport solution. Beyond its lack of engine traction, the platforms at Canal Street station were far too short to allow longer trains, and were at 90 degrees to the larger Edinburgh & Glasgow and North British Railway station, making connections clumsy and impractical. In 1863 the line’s then owners, the North British Railway, gained powers to construct a new line diverting around the tunnel via Abbeyhill. Construction began in 1865 and it opened (and the tunnel closed) on May 22nd, 1868. It has been abandoned as a transport corridor ever since, but has seen use variously as a car garage, industrial mushroom farm, air raid shelter and emergency railway control room for at least some the intervening years. Every so often a plan is mooted to re-open either as a tram or metro route, or as a cycleway.

Footnote. In February 2023, the Broughton Spurtle local newspaper broke the story that Dublin Street was subsiding – a “sinkhole” hole had appeared in the middle of the road. Coincidentally, this was right on top of No. 4 shaft, the one that flooded Broughton Markets in the 1844 disaster.

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.
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Bellevue: the thread about the finest and least wanted house in the New Town

I got a nice message today (September 12th) from WordPress (the foundations upon which the walls and roof of this website sits) to tell me that it had just passed 100,000 views. If I had known this particular milestone was approaching, I might have tried to be more organised and have a thread ready that was somehow relevant. But I didn’t, and so I don’t. Sorry. You’ll just have to settle for one on Bellevue House, which I happened to be looking at today.

“Bellevue House? Where’s that?” I hear you ask. Well, it isn’t anywhere, not any more – it was demolished 180-odd years ago. But when it was somewhere, it sat in the centre of Drummond Place in the so-called Second New Town; a fine building, but one that sat awkwardly, offset and facing the “wrong” way to be a monumental centrepiece to the square.

The square itself was named for George Drummond – the Lord Provost of Edinburgh – who held that post a record 6 times between 1725 and 1764, and one of the driving forces behind the First New Town of Edinburgh and other great civic improvements such as the North Bridge and Royal Exchange.

Drummond’s own house and estate – Drummond Lodge – occupied this part of the park and farmlands north of the City – bounded by Broughton village to the east, the Canonmills Haugh to the north and Gabriel’s Road to the east.

Drummond died in 1766, his house and estate eventually being sold to Major General John Scott of Balcomie and Scotstarvit (in Fife), also known as Pawky Scott (“Sly Scott”) – a soldier, politician and gambler. The latter occupation was something he was rather good at and he allegedly won Dundas House (36 St. Andrew Square, now the Royal Bank of Scotland) off of Sir Lawrence Dundas in a wager. Dundas was unwilling to part with his brand new town house, so instead agreed to build a bigger and better one for Scott on the site of Drummond Lodge.

The new neoclassical mansion was built to designs by Robert Adam and had an extra bay on either side compared to Dundas House. The rear (north-facing) elevation had a projecting, rounded bay that contained a huge oval drawing room – a form unusual for Adam’s work.

Scott named his new house Bellevue , after the palatial chateau of that name built by Louis XV for Madam Pompadour in 1750 – but he died in 1775 shortly before it was completed. The builder was George Brown, who also built George Square in the Southside. His widow and 3 daughters lived there, with the title passing to his eldest, Henrietta. She married William Henry Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 4th Duke of Portland – the Marquess of Tichfield – in 1795, who sold it and the grounds to the City for £11,375 4s 0d in 1800. There was a £1,050 annual feu duty. They had the option to buy the superiority within 7 years for a further £20,200.

The city didn’t really want the house, it wanted its vast parkland. “The whole place waved with wood and was diversified by undulations of the surface and adorned by seats and bowers and summer-houses, nothing in the town could be more delightful“. And it wanted to rip that up and develop it – by October that year they were soliciting plans to develop it into a new New Town. This was for the planned northern expansion of the New Town – the so-called 2nd New Town – and once again, this pre-existing boundary determines some of those street features that still exist today, 220 years later

The elegant curve of Royal Crescent? It wasn’t intentionally like that, they just made good use of the working with the existing boundary between Bellevue and the Canonmills Haugh. The Haugh was owned by the trustees of Heriot’s Hospital, and they weren’t interested in the New Town scheme here. There was also a significant height difference between the two holdings here, so it was a natural boundary.

Bellevue Crescent? Well now you know where it gets its name from, you also know where it gets its shape from! The boundary here was between Bellevue and more land owned by Heriot’s Hospital. The old road to Canonmills that divided the two had a bit of a wiggle in it here, and it was expanded upon with the slender garden crescent with a monumental church at its centre.

Heriot’s also stood in the way of the development at “Old Broughton”, as did the other landowner, Mr Murray. And so here there’s an awkward and jarring series of roads and walls and lanes – the boundaries of the medieval village – that not even later attempts at regular, grid-aligned streets could make order out of.

And even the grand showpiece crescent of Abercrombie Place works it’s way around a pre-existing boundary – the garden was not part of the development land at this time, and it’s not quite symetrical at its eastern end, the old boundary roadway of Gabriel’s Road (marked in white) messes things up a bit. The original street plan had Nelson Street come straight through from Dummond Place, emerging awkwardly about 2/3 of the way along Abercrombie Place, but it was soon centred into the crescent to give a more balanced prospect.

So you have to admit, William Sibbald and Robert Reid – who laid out this phase of the New Town – did a pretty impressive job of working around some wonky boundaries while keeping things ordered and regular and elegant. Their three crescents, to the north, the east and the south, were practical ways to use the land, but were the first such curved streets in Edinburgh and became very fashionable addresses. They also managed to centre the whole eastern section of the plan on Bellevue House within the new Drummond Place. The City didn’t have a use for the house itself and had been unable to lease it for residential use and so instead it was leased to the Board of Customs in 1802. The City wanted them out of the Royal Exchange (the City Chambers) to make more room for itself. The Caledonian Mercury called this arrangement “very honourable to the Government and beneficial to the City“, the “style of exterior grandeur” corresponded appropriately to the importance of the public establishment within. It would be 1805 before the Customs moved in, by which time the planned streets around it were only just beginning to emerge from the ground, so at this time the house continued to stand prominently in open land.

Coincidentally, Lawrence Dundas – who had “lost” his house to Scott in that bet that would result in him paying to have Bellevue built – had died in 1781 and his house had been sold to the government who installed the Board of Excise there. The Boards of Customs and of Excise were separate institutions at this time, but Bellevue House occasionally gets labelled as the “Excise House“, when it was the “Custom House“; the former was on St. Andrew Square. The Customs couldn’t quite fit into the building initially, and so had an extra storey added by the Town Council before taking up occupation. They also required that the surrounding 1 acre of land be fenced of, which formed the nucleus of the later Drummond Place Garden. The Excise found at this time that many of the taxes they collected were being abolished and were downsizing as a result. They vacated Dundas House in 1825, (which was sold to the Royal Bank) and moved in with the Customs at Bellevue. But not even the joint establishments of the Customs and the Excise could keep the building filled – many of their functions finding themselves sent south to London, and the building soon began to empty. By the late 1830s, 17 of its rooms lay vacant.

The Town Council had hoped to buy Dundas House for itself, as a mansion for the Lord Provost but had been outbid by the Bank. They now found the government willing to sell their lease on Bellevue House back to them for £5,000, so they were keen not to lose out again. It was 1844 and the Lord Provost Adam Black had also heard rumblings that the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, planning to commence tunnelling its way under the New Town from Scotland Street to Canal Street station, might move to buy the house and the square of Drummond Place for itself and erect workshops or a station. He “considered it a matter dangerous to the city that this property should come into the hands of any railway company” who might cause “considerable danger of nuisance… in that part of the town, which it was of importance should be kept in as beautiful a state as possible“. Lord Provost Black had a particular concern in his matter; he resided in a house on Drummond Place!

On this subject, the Lord Provost was right – partially. The Railway did want to buy Bellevue House, but for no other reason than to demolish it. It was directly on top of the line of their tunnel and they did not wish the expense and difficulty of going around it, or trying to reinforce the foundations. And so in December 1845, the City struck a bargain with the Railway and the Board of Customs. The City bought the house for £5,000, with the Customs moving to smaller premises on Picardy Place. They in turn, after negotiations on the terms had completed, sold the house to the Railway for £3,200, who would then pay to demolish it. It was estimated that £1,200 of its materials would be of use in constructing its stations and buildings. Everybody won: the Railway saved much more in simplifying the construction of the tunnel than it had spent on the house. The City prevented the Railway building on the land, and the proprietors of Drummond Place got rid of an awkward building that spoiled the symmetry of their square and were able to buy the site and incorporate it into their private pleasure garden for the sum of £1,200.

By February 1846, the Edinburgh Evening Post reported “in a few days it will be levelled with the ground” and that its removal would be “a great improvement to Drummond Place, besides opening up the vistas from Duke (Dublin) Street northward and London street eastward“. And just like that, one of the biggest, but least wanted, houses in the New Town was gone and Drummond Place got its private garden in the centre and they all lived happily after. (Until, that is, someone dared to paint their door pink. And then green. And then off-pink.)

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.
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Mr McHattie and Mr Ritchie’s Mechanical Triumph: the thread about the Princes Street Gardens Floral Clock

The Princes Street Gardens floral clock is a fine Edinburgh institution. At the time of writing (June 2023) it was being replanted to celebrate the centenary of the Flying Scotsman steam locomotive (not “the train” of the same name as the tweet below would suggest). But this year is also an anniversary for the clock itself and it will be 120 years old, having first been revealed to the public on this very day (June 11th) in 1903. It was the first floral clock not just in Scotland but also in the UK, and possibly the 3rd in the world (there being earlier examples in Paris and Detroit). The Edinburgh clock was the work of the City Superintendent of Parks & Gardens, John W. McHattie, who enlisted the help of James Ritchie & Son., the famous Edinburgh clockmaker on Leith Street who built and wound the city’s public clocks. It so happened that Ritchies had in their workshop at this time the mechanism from one of the turret clocks from Elie Parish Church in Fife, which was surplus to requirements. This was installed in the base of the Allan Ramsay Monument next to the clock, and a drive shaft was run from the clock mechanism to the time hand in a small passageway under the flowerbeds.

This first clock had a single time hand – an hour hand – which was a large metal planting tray 4 feet 2 inches (127cm) long and was “delicately balanced” on account of the slope but kept time perfectly. It was described as a “beautiful study in carpet bedding, in which American aloes, echevarias, sedums and other plants” were “set out with great taste in a bold geometric pattern.” The clock face was was 12 feet in diameter, the hours delineated by two concentric circles planted of sedums and the numbers picked out in “fresh green pyrethrum“. The centre of the face was split into quarters, each denoting and planted to represent one of the seasons of the year.

The Dundee Evening Telegraph hailed it as “a mechanical triumph“. The Devon Valley Tribune called it “the great wonder of the Gardens“, the Dundee Courier was a bit less generous and went with “the quaintest of horticultural freaks“. The Town Council was so pleased with Mchattie that they voted him a raise of £100 per year (almost £10,000 in 2023 terms. His picture below can be found on the website of the Friends of Saughton Gardens as he was also the man we have to thank for the first planting of that public park, which opened in 1910. The Friends have a good write-up of McHattie and his work at Saughton on their website, here. He died in 1923 when he was still the city’s Head Gardener, after 22 years service.

The clock has, appropriately, changed with the times. By the time the below picture was taken in 1914 it had acquired a minute hand, which was 10 feet long, and accompanied a new 6 foot long hour hand.

The mechanism was modernised in 1936 but still required daily winding, something which took place until its platinum anniversary, when it was electrified in 1973. It was during the 1936 modernisation that a “cuckoo” sound was added to it, the sound being generated by two tuned organ pipes in the base of the Ramsay monument.

In 1943, the clock’s 40th year, it was given a wartime makeover by the Superintendent of Parks John T. Jeffrey. This featured a large Royal Navy warship decorated with anchors and other naval insignia and a profile picture of Winston Churchill smoking a cigar and surrounded by the legend The Hour, The Man. The planting incorporated beetroots and carrots so as to make an edible contribution to the Dig for Victory campaign.

In 1947, for the first Edinburgh International Festival, the names of famous composers were added in to the planting, which was repeated in 1948.

In 1949 it was planted to mark the Scottish Industries Exhibition in Glasgow that year. For 1953, the clock’s 50th birthday, the Parks Superintendent, Mr A. T. Harrison, hit upon the idea of adding a “real” cuckoo to the clock. Thus a wooden bird house was added to accommodate the bird, which popped out when it chimed. The organ pipes were replaced at this time by an electric system of tuning valves connected to a loudspeaker.

Ritchies would go on to provide the mechanisms for many floral clocks throughout the world (“practically all” of them, claimed the Evening News in 1956), including ones in Salisbury, South Rhodesia (modern day Harare, Zimbabwe) and Sydney Zoo.

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 thread about the “Dick Vet” and why its name is nothing to be giggled about

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

A Freudian slip where a taxi was mistakenly ordered for the “Small Dick Animal Hospital” instead of the “Royal Dick Small Animal Hospital” is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, occasion where Edinburgh’s Dick Vet institution has found its name to be the source of some amusement.

This name goes back to William Dick, founder of the city’s first veterinary college, which he ran with his sister Mary Dick. Dick, a form of Dickson from the diminutive for Richard, is an old Scottish and northeast English family name going back to medieval times. Dick Place (no sniggering at the back) in the Grange is named for the landowning Lauder Dick baronets. Dick’s Close (I said stop it!) in the Cowgate was for the Dick family of brewers.

William and Mary Dick’s family came from Aberdeenshire, but they were born in the Canongate in White Horse Close at the tail end of the 18th century. Their father was a blacksmith and farrier, so they grew up around horses.

When William Dick was 22, the family moved from the Canongate to the New Town, at 15 Clyde Street.

William was studying anatomy at this time under John Barclay, having done well in his boyhood education. Barclay, satirised below in a John Kay caricature as trying to enter the University atop an elephant’s skeleton as its new anatomy professor, was the son of a farmer and specialised in comparative anatomy (i.e. the study of differences and similarities of anatomy between species). He was also a director of the Highland Society of Edinburgh (now the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland) and he influenced and supported William to pursue his boyhood interest in horses (from his father’s occupation) and head to London to study veterinary medicine.

That was 1817, and it took William only 3 months to complete his certificate in London. He returned to Edinburgh in 1818 and in 1819 set up a small vet school of his own in the family premises on Clyde Street. The Highland Society both sponsored the qualification and provided financial support and his sister ran the administrative side.

By 1823, regular classes were being run, financed both by student fees and the Highland Society. The institution flourished and in 1830 it took on the name Edinburgh Veterinary College. Soon, larger, dedicated premises were needed and in 1833 it moved across the road on Clyde Street, to a purpose-built Vet School, largely financed by William himself. The grand pediment was crowned by a large statue of a horse. This building (and Clyde Street itself) was long ago demolished to make way for Edinburgh’s bus station.

In 1838, Dick became Veterinarian by Appointment to the Queen and the word “Royal” was added to the name of the college, with the royal coat of arms installed within the inner courtyard at Clyde Street. In 1840, Dick’s students wrote to the Highland Society requesting that he be made professor, and the readily agreed to this demand. William Dick died in 1866, with the college being run afterwards by his protégés. When one of the latter set up a rival institution, the “Royal” status of his college was questioned and his sister lobbied for it to be instead called the Dick Veterinary College.

It was around this time that the institution locally began to be known as just the Dick Vet or The Dick. The trustees had the name altered to Dick’s Royal Veterinary College in 1876, and the following year it was rearranged to the Royal (Dick’s) Veterinary College. The apostrophe was lost 10 years later. In 1911, the awarding of degrees in Veterinary Medicine began under the umbrella of the University of Edinburgh. By now the school was out-growing its 80 year old premises at Clyde Street and the construction of new buildings on the site of the Summerhall commenced. The completion of these was delayed by the onset of WW1 and they were not entered into until 1916.

The Dick Vet as an independent college ceased to be in 1951, when the University of Edinburgh (Royal (Dick) Veterinary College) Order Confirmation Act was passed, formally incorporating the college as a school within the university, now known as the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, a name it maintains to this day. A further move, out to the Easter Bush campus in Midlothian, took place in 2011. A stained glass window commemorating William Dick was removed from to the new location at this time. The former student bar at the Summerhall, now an arts venue of that name, is still called the Royal Dick.

The equestrian statue that once topped the 1833 vet school was relocated to the Summerhall site in 1916, and moved again in 2011. It is still in existence, having been placed outside the equine buildings at Easter Bush, and was renovated in 2019.

The site of the 1833 school is commemorated by a plaque at the bus station.

It was converted to a cinema – the St. Andrew Square Picture House – in 1923 and burned down in 1952. The fire gutted the building within 20 mins, not before the projectionists saved the precious lenses.

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.
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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.

Gabriel’s Road: the thread about how James Craig’s elegant and regular New Town grid is rudely interrupted

A tweet for #WorldTownPlanningDay from the The National Library of Scotland Map Library earlier (Nov. 8th 2019) threw up a reminder of one of my favourite, less weel kent features of Edinburgh’s first New Town. Namely, that James Craig’s otherwise regular Georgian grid of the First New town (red lines, principal streets of Princes / George / Queen Streets) of 1768 meets James Craig’s otherwise regular Georgian grid of St. James Square (green lines) of 1773 at a jarring, irregular and unsatisfactory angle. What’s this that about?

Clue 1 is in those dates. The two districts were planned 5 years apart. On Craig’s 1768 plan, the St. James area is still largely occupied by a portion of land known as Clelland’s Feu. (In Scottish land law, a Feu is a portion of land tenure.). This is a house with ample gardens and nursery land, all on a regular plan but offset at about 47 degrees from the New Town.

A map of land ownership drawn up for the city in 1766 by John Laurie shows that Clelland’s Feu was only one of a number of pre-existing portions on this particular grid alignment and gives us Clue 2: looking at the dotted line below (which I’ve highlighted in red for you), the City did not own all of these parcels of land.

Mapping of the area of the New Town before Craig’s Plan is pretty scant, as it usually centres on the Old Town (indeed the land that became to be the New Town, the Barefoot’s Park, wasn’t yet even incorporated into the City and Royal Burgh), however a magnificent 1759 survey by Robert Robinson and John Fergus of the land north of the Old Town all the way to the Forth does exist. This captures Clelland’s Feu (spelled Clealand’s Few) and others, unfortunately this portion of is badly degraded and poorly conserved.

But from this we can at least see that a decade before the winning design for the New Town was approved there were already buildings and streets in the area respecting older boundaries and alignments – offset at that awkward 47 degrees to Craig’s grid. Five years after the latter was laid that out for the City, a private citizen – the writer (solicitor) Walter Ferguson – commissioned him to design a new square on the Clelland’s Feu. Also involved were two other lawyers with a financial interest in the Feu, Gray and Steuart.

It should be noted that the Trustees of Heriot’s Hospital, as feudal superior (i.e. they held the land, on behalf of the Crown, and had sub-feud it to Ferguson, Gray and Steuart as vassals), tried to block this development in the courts but failed (they were trying to sue lawyers, after all!) Construction of St. James’ Square commenced at its southern edge in 1775, allegedly on or near the 17th of June and the British victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill, for which reason this corner became known as Bunker’s Hill. But that story might all be hooey! Stuart Harris – the historian of Edinburgh, who wrote the book on the street and placenames of the city – certainly thought so. He also notes that Ferguson, Gray and Steuart were all ardent Jacobites, and would meet annually in Steuart’s house to toast the birthday of Charles Edward “Bonnie Prince Charlie” Stuart. Harris goes on to suggest therefore that the St. James of St. James’ Square and the King of (Little) King Street is actually the Jacobite Old Pretender – James Francis Edward Stuart. This was something very risqué not 30 years after Culloden.

But that’s another story. Back on topic, in those early maps there’s something else tantalisingly hidden in plain sight. Clue 3: a loan (lane) that respects – but predates – the alignment of St. James Square. It runs in a straight line between the feus of Mr. Hogg and Mr Sim, and is walled in between them, before heading off northwest. I have highlighted it yellow below on Fergus and Robinson’s map.

This is very tantalising as despite all the efforts of the Georgian developers, the Victorian rebuilders, the 20th century destroyers and the 21st century re-destroyers, this lane (and the western remnant of St. James’ Square) are still there!

I am talking of course about the enigmatic Gabriel’s Road, a 126 foot (38.4m) long stretch of pavement that follows the ancient alignment of the lane which predates the Georgian city centre.

Rather than build over this section of the old lane, they built around, it and this block of West Register Street aligned its façades with it (Guildford Arms and Café Royal patrons will be more than familiar with this). Land ownership trumped town planning – as it frequently does to this day. Where the planners and builders hit an existing, irregular, land boundary which couldn’t be resolved, they simply went with it, and Gabriel’s Road became the boundary between the grid of the New Town and the grid of St. James’ square, aligned with the latter. This approach avoided the legal complexity (and cost) of trying to regularise it for the sake of a grid pattern.

Gabriel’s Road is an ancient right of way, which is why there is a gate and public access from Register Place through the Square outside the Royal Bank of Scotland head branch at 36 St. Andrew Square. So that is our case closed. Or is it? What have we here? Another Gabriel’s Road? Almost a mile away in Stockbridge? What’s that doing there? Surely just a coincidence?

No, it’s not a coincidence at all, because it’s the same road (or lane). While the middle part has long since been built over and disappeared from view, either end escaped and survives. If we look at the 1804 town plan, before Saxe Coburg Place was laid out, we can see Gabriel’s Road clearly marked as “Foot Road“.

This section of the path was long ago known locally as the Dummie Steps. The steps part is obviously because the steep path was stepped and the first because because over the wall was the Deaf and Dumb Institution (the Dummiehoose) of the city, built here in 1823. Dummie is the Scots for dumb. The building of the Stockbridge Dummiehoose is now part of Edinburgh Academy.

Dummie is where the Edinburgh district of Dumbiedykes (once Dummiedikes) got its name, from the institute for the dumb (the Dummiehoose) set up by James Braidwood there in 1763, and the walls (dykes) that enclosed the land in that neighbourhood. Walter Scott had borrowed the name for a comical character in Heart of Midlothian, but changed it by inserting the b-, to give us Dumbiedykes. The change stuck and the street names and neighbourhood took up the extra letter, even though it should be silent.

Anyway, back to the lane. What is it and why is it there? Looking back at – and zooming out a bit – on that amazing 1759 map by Fergus & Robinson, we can see it clearly cutting northwest across what was then farmland, where the Second or Northern New Town and the eastern expansion of Stockbridge would later be built. The lane forms as straight a line as possible (around old land boundaries) between Inverleith House and what at one time would have been the northern access to the city of Edinburgh down Leith Wynd.

At its very northern end, our map does not show what happens when Gabriel’s Road meets the Water of Leith, but this was long a ford, with stepping stones, across the river and is approximately where the Colonies houses of Collin’s Place are now.

Old & New Edinburgh records the “beautiful and sequestered footpath bordered by hawthorn hedges, known by the name of Gabriel’s Road, is said to have been constructed for the convenience of the ancient lairds of Inverleith to enable them to attend worship in St. Giles [kirk]“. The definite meaning of the Gabriel part of the name is lost to time. It may be a reference to it being used for attending church. A theory about it relating to an infamous murder is apparently spurious and an old tavern of that name in Broughton is said to have been named for the road and not the other way around.

If you keep on looking for odd angles in the modern property and street lines you can see for yourself a few other intermediate fragments of Gabriel’s Road. For instance along East Silvermills Lane:

And if you follow along to the eastern end of Abercrombie Place, where there is a short block of houses on the south side of the street (the only ones along its length), you will notice that there’s a section of garden boundary wall at an odd angle… That’s right, it’s perfectly aligned on Gabriels’ Road, another instance where the portions of land on either side were in different hands when it came to planning and building.

And back where we started off, with the boundary of Clelland’s Feu, this long and invisibly demarcated parish boundaries. St. James’ Square was a detached exclave of St. Cuthbert’s parish (the large parish that surrounded the old city of Edinburgh), where as Craig’s New Town was split between two new parishes of St. Andrew’s and St. Stephen’s.

Anyway, there you go. Hidden amongst the regular, monotonous Georgian grid of the New Town there are some little clues and reminders of Edinburgh in a much older time. You can read about another one at the other end of Craig’s New Town here.

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.

Horseless Carriages: the thread about the first motor car in Edinburgh and Scotland (and why motoring began with deliberate law breaking)

I’ve been waiting for July 19th to write this. On this exact day – 127 years ago – something momentous happened. Something that would change Edinburgh, and Scotland, forever: The first ever motor car entered the city, on the first ever (legal) cross-county drive in Scotland. Thomas R. Barnwell Elliot of Cliftonpark, Kelso, had been causing a stir in the south of Scotland ever since he imported his 3.5hp Panhard et Levassor Phaeton “horseless carriage” from France in December 1895. It was the first motor car imported into Scotland, the 7th in the UK.

At this time, the Locomotives Acts, meant any “locomotives” (which included motor cars) on the road were limited to 4mph (country) and 2mph (city), and a man had to walk 20 yards in front. (The red flag requirement of popular lore was actually abolished by the Locomotive Act 1878.) Barnewall Elliot was the son of the Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Roxburghshire, and had been given exemption by the county constabulary from the restrictions of this act within their borders, unless any specific complaints were raised against him.

The July 17th trip took him from Kelso, via Edinburgh and Stirling, to the Highland Show at South Inch in Perth. The Provost of Perth had invited him to demonstrate his contraption there and had gained an exemption for this journey from the 14 police jurisdictions he had to pass through.

The car had been imported via the Daimler Syndicate (hence sometimes referred to as such). It had a 2hp engine, weighted 1 ton, had iron tyres, tiller steering, no radiator, ran on petrol (at the rate of 1pint / hour), had a range of 100 miles and could do 12mph on the flat. It could seat 4 persons, but on any sort of a gradient 3 of them would have to get out and walk. Barnewall Elliot took his first drive in it on December 27th 1895 and made local news headlines (and turned many a Roxburghshire head) when he drove the 50 miles from Kelso to Ladykirk in it on 31st January 1896. On February 2nd, he went to Jedburgh, where Inspector Dickson of the Constabulary stopped him. However, after a brief check of the facts and that all was in order, he went on his way again and proceeded along the Jed water.

On 19th March though he did something he shouldn’t have: he drove it over both county and country borders and into Northumberland. When he was stopped by the Police in Berwick, he agreed with them that he was “probably breaking the law” and he was charged. This was deliberate on Barnewall Elliot’s part, he was trying to force a test case, and was successful. He admitted to the magistrates that he drove at “up to 14mph“, defending himself with the contention that his motor car was not a locomotive as defined in those acts. The magistrates were sympathetic, but stuck to the letter of the law. Describing Barnewall Elliot as a “most obliging defendant” they found him guilty, buy only with failing to have a man walk 20 yards in front of him and fined him a total of… 6 pence! (plus 19s 7d costs)

These events made Barnewall Elliot something of a household name in Scotland. At this time, the organisers of the Highland Show were keen to have an exhibition of motor cars as it was felt they would be of great transport use to country farmers, and so Barnewall Elliot – a gentleman farmer – was the perfect man for the job. He accepted their invitation and “those who witnessed [his demonstration] were struck by its easiness and steady progress“.

He had bought his car for £250 (c. £27k in 2023). After driving a few thousand miles in it he sold it in October 1896 for £112 in order to buy another. He suffered 55% depreciation on account of the crummy build quality of these early vehicles.

But although his was the first motor car imported into Scotland, and although he made the first legal road journeys in it, it was not actually the first horseless carriage in Scotland. That honour goes to Glaswegian locomotive engineer George Johnston. ohnston had been engaged by the Glasgow Corporation to build a tramcar that did not require electricity or horses. He came up with an oil-fuelled steam tram. Unfortunately it burned down before it could really prove its worth. Johnston went back to the drawing board.

He gave up on the idea of the steam tram and having seen a motor car in operation, decided he could build one of those too, but better. He imported a Panhard chassis and Daimler engine via Leith and combined them with a “dog cart” carriage body in late 1895. Very early in the morning of November 12th that year, Johnston took his machine for a test run through the streets of Glasgow. He knew full well he was breaking the law and even invited a journalist for the Scotsman along for the ride.

Not long after midnight, they set out from Springburn, taking Buchanan Street, to cross the city. They went along the Broomielaw to Shawlands “and back by a more circuitous way“. They deliberately tested a range of road surfaces, noting that macadam roads gave the best ride. The 3 occupants noted “the feeling of greatest exhilaration” on the Parliamentary Road when Johnston took them up to the giddy speed 12mph. The Glasgow Polismen on their early morning beats were dumbfounded and didn’t know what to do. The law caught up with Johnston on January 24th 1896, when he was convicted by Judge Mitchell in the Glasgow Police Court and given a token fine of 2s 6d. He would go on to become one of Scotland’s most successful early motor engineers under the Arrol-Johnston name.

While Glasgow and Kelso took an early lead in motoring, the Edinburgh Evening News noted “Edinburgh people… Did not readily take to innovations and preferred to wait until they gained experience from others.” We can be confident that Barnewall Elliot indeed brought the first car to Edinburgh because when the Locomotive Acts were repealed on 14th November 1896, the Evening News reported there were no cars in the city at that point and his had been the only one to pass through up until then. Despite the repeal of the Acts, it was not until 11th December that another car came to Edinburgh, when Glaswegian firm Colosseum Warehouse Co. brought a Daimler with a taxi cab body to the city and gave rides in it. It took until February 1897 for a citizen of Edinburgh to troubled themselves to get a car, when Mr John Drew of Belford Road exhibited an “almost noiseless” electric car of the Neale type that he had built.

It was not long thereafter that the Rossleigh Cycle Company (named for partners Thomas Ross and the Sleigh brothers) went into the chauffeuring business with a number of Daimler Dogcarts acquired for the purpose. Driver Thomas Morrison is seen here in Holyrood Park in 1897.

On 22nd September 1899, Sarah Renicks, a domestic servant from Broxburn, was the first reported person to be knocked down by a car, when a vehicle of the Edinburgh Autocar Co. hit her as she stepped off a tram on Princes Street. She sued for £150. In January 1900, the Edinburgh Autocar Co. was again in court, having knocked down Thomas Woolard in Newington. Sheriff Maconochie however found that the car was not being driven in a “furious and reckless manner” and that the pedestrian was at fault for not looking. In April 1900, James Collins of Duncan Street, Newington, was fined £5 (or 20 days imprisonment) for having driven his car in a “reckless and careless manner” on Lothian Road and crashed into a horse and carriage.

On June 16th 1902, the first pedestrian fatality as the result of being knocked down by a motor car took place on Princes Street. Christina Currie, 56, of Cumberland Street was hit by a vehicle being driven by Thomas Morrison as she crossed the street at the foot of the Mound. A policeman on tram points duty witnessed the event, and estimated the accused had driven at 15mph. He said he had tried to stop the vehicle but it had not. Other witnesses put the speed between 12 – 17mph. The defendant stated the victim had stepped out from behind a tramcar. A jury took only half an hour to find Morrison not guilty, however the foreman expressed “their strong disapproval of the too common practice of driving motor cars in crowded thoroughfares at too high speeds and without due regard to the safety of the public“.

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.

Wordless Wednesday – 4/15/2026

Kirk Wynd in East Kilbride to the southeast of Glasgow, lined with late 18th century and early 19th century dwelling houses, and with a 19th century church tower in the distance. The church itself was built in 1776, but the tower wasn't added until 1818.

Cont./

#glasgow #eastkilbridge #glasgowhistory #newtown