The thread about the problems of sewage disposal in 19th century Edinburgh and Leith, and how something was done about it

Are we sitting comfortably? The first part of Edinburgh’s sewage history was the Thread About the East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadows. Let us now turn to Chapter 2 of that story;the drainage and sewage problems of Victorian Edinburgh and how to fix them.

Our story starts with a little revision of the topography of the city; without it what follows just doesn’t make sense for the simple and important reason that sewage will only run downhill. So here is a topographically coloured map of central Edinburgh. White is highest, then red, orange, yellow, green, light blue; and then dark blue is lowest. Simple physics dictates that a liquid – and therefore sewage – will flow downhill from the red areas via the other colours of the rainbow to dark blue – and cannot go the other way. It will continue to do so until it either collects somewhere on the way from where it cannot escape, or finds an outflow to the sea. The dark blue channel in the top left is the Water of Leith valley. The Castle Rock and long tail of the High Street and Canongate can be seen in the middle. Calton Hill to the top and Arthur’s Seat is the red and white promontory on the right.

And here is a 1784 town plan overlaid on that. The First New Town has only just really begun to be built; the black blocks show the completed buildings and most are just plans at this point, and there is very little built to the north of George Street, so the starting point of what is happening to Edinburgh’s sewage during this time is that little of it is draining away towards the north and the Water of Leith.

No, the vast majority from old Edinburgh (and the southern part of the First New Town) ends up draining east (orange) into what is known as the East Foul Burn. The Southside is relatively lightly populated and its waste (yellow) cannot proceed east but instead goes west into the Boroughloch (now drained as The Meadows), where it slowly winds its way west into the Water of Leith via the Lochrin Burn. The north part of the First New Town (pink) has a relatively small contribution to make towards the city’s waste and goes downhill and north to the Water of Leith by one route or another.

Up until the mid-late 18th century, it is the orange lines where most of the waste is; just look at the density (black) of housing in the Old Town, Canongate and Grassmarket and then reflect that most of it is 4 or 5 storeys tall or more! Layers and layers of people living cheek-by-jowl and not a flushing toilet or underground sewer to share amongst them. Notice also that much less of the sewage heads into the Nor’ Loch than you might expect from the popular tale of it being the city’s sewer (the Nor’ Loch is that ancient, man made loch to the north of the castle that was part of the city’s defences, and while it was foul and polluted it was not the main sewer).

At this point most of the city’s sewage is simply cast directly from pisspot and chamber pot into the simple gutters that ran down the closes, where it mixed and collected with all the animal dung, food waste and industrial detritus of life and found its way into open sewers . These were little more than ditches, covered with stone capping slabs in places to allow them to be crossed, and of which there were 3 principal routes:

The flow was then east towards the Firth of Forth.

The route to the Firth of Forth via the East Foul Burn was the remarkable piece of aquatic engineering of the Irrigated Meadows. In a time before artificial fertilisers, human as well as animal manure was vitally important for food production. These meadows, constantly replenished by controlled inundation by fertilising sewage, could grow multiple crops of fodder each year which fed the city’s horses and dairy cows. The important point being made here is that the sewage system of the city back then was much more complicated and managed than we might give it credit for – as soon as the waste left the centre of population – but it was nothing to do with public health and everything to do with the practicalities and economics of food production. And private profit for the landowners!

This system was progressively sent underground into proper sewers through the 19th century. The irrigated meadow system persisted right up to the 1920s when it was bypassed by a proper sewer, the land drained and given over to council and bungalow housing estates.

Jumping through time now to round about 1850, there has been a fairly obvious change to the old system as a large part of the growing city is no longer in the catchment of the East Foul Burn system (orange) but now the Water of Leith (yellow). And to there it did flow in great abundance!

The Water of Leith was far less suited to being a sewer than the East Foul Burn as its flow was highly seasonal (far more so than it is now since compensation reservoirs were built in the 19th century to maintain the water level and flow in the river for industry). During the periods of little to no flow the sewage would collect and gather and fester. Additionally, this river was tapped by numerous mill lades – large and small – and the slower water flowing through these meant that the sewage would settle out of the water, silting up the lades and collecting behind the weirs, “by the middle of the 19th century the condition of this river had seriously deteriorated“. But this was a nuisance mainly of the sight and smell of raw sewage; it was not until the Second Cholera Epidemic of 1848-1849 that it was finally proved and widely understood that water polluted by sewage had a pivotal role in spreading disease.

Not only do you have the raw sewage of the New Town and the expanding north of Edinburgh carried directly into the Water of Leith, the dense industry along the route; below Coltbridge at Roseburn there was milling, distilling, tanning, papermaking, soapmaking, chemical works, gas works and more. All of these were dumping their waste and by products straight into the river, from where they flowed directly to the town of Leith. As the 19th century wore on, these industries began to use progressively less water for power as steam took over, but instead used it for new processes such as cooling steam engines and flushing waste away – neither of which required the maintenance expense of headwater lades, many of which simply silted up with sewage from lack of use.

Something had to be don; but it was not clear specifically what. Industry was fairly happy so long as the river flowed, and it was kept flowing by a series of “compensation reservoirs” in the Pentland Hills which kept up a reliable supply of water in the upper reaches of the Water of Leith. Reformers and residents desired a change to clean up the river and their environment. This was stymied by interminable jurisdiction conflicts; there was no single authority or jurisdiction along the river and there were long standing legal rights for industries to extract water and fill their lades.

The first meaningful effort for change was made in 1853 by the Edinburgh Police Commission (the “Police” back then were mainly concerned in handling the city lighting, cleansing, sanitation, weights and measures, some taxation etc. Law enforcement was something they did on the side). The Police engaged consulting engineers to look at the state of the lower river (beyond Coltbridge / north of Roseburn), who surveyed it carefully and came to the logical conclusion that it was full of shit.

The engineers’ report made 2 simple reconsiderations;

The Police Commissioners accepted the report without hesitation and in 1854 the Edinburgh Police Amendment Act was passed. Part 1 of the scheme was implemented with much struggle from reluctant and recalcitrant mill and land owners, but Part 2 came to nothing. The success of Part 1 helped Edinburgh, as it assisted in the flow of raw sewage down the river, but it did nothing for poor old Leith. As the river slowed in the basin of the Port of Leith the sediment and suspended sewage settled out of the water and silted up the bed. By 1855 this was causing the Leith Dock Commissioners a serious problem. They complained that the Water of Leith now “flushed so well that a foot of mud and solid filth had been deposited… this created such a noxious and offensive effluvium and stench, as to be exceedingly prejudicial to the health of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood“. Leith began to lobby Edinburgh for a joint solution to the problem; namely resurrecting the plan for the unbuilt interceptor sewer, and expanding it to catch the outflow of some 180 drains, constituting the whole north and west of Edinburgh and most of Leith.

A scheme for the sewers was drawn up by the finest consulting engineers the city had to offer; Thomas and David Stevenson (of the “Lighthouse” dynasty).

The city was further assisted by another Stevenson (no relation); a son of Glasgow and analytical chemist called Stevenson Macadam, who undertook the first chemical analysis of the contents of the river. Coincidentally he was the consultant chemist to the Northern Lighthouse Board for whom the Stevenson brothers were the principal engineers. Macadam’s work proved that although there was industrial waste in the river north of Roseburn, there was no “putrefaction” as a result, but just north of Roseburn where the West Foul Burn and city’s sewers began to enter it, “the quality deteriorated drastically“. Macadam didn’t mince his words. The river was receiving the raw sewage of “100,000 people and was charged with fecal matter of the most disgusting and abominable character“. It collected in “hot-beds of decomposing filth from which abundantly offensive gases were diffused“.

It took about 2 years of legal and political wrangling between Edinburgh and Leith to agree who should be liable for paying for what (it turned out that Edinburgh wasn’t legally liable for its own shit or the problems it caused once it entered the Water of Leith). It took the intervention of the Lord Justice-General (a senior Scottish judge) to put the legal liability to one side and he adjudicated that Edinburgh should be paying for what to do with its own waste, not Leith, where it had ended up. Despite opposition from mill owners and the usual nay sayers of local politics – averse to any change that they didn’t think impacted them – the Edinburgh and Leith Sewerage Act for the construction of the interceptor sewer was passed in 1864.

The next part of this story shall look at cleaning up the Water of Leith and the building of the interceptor sewers.

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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Interceptor Sewers: the thread about Victorian efforts to clean up the Water of Leith

At the end of part 2 of this story, Edinburgh and Leith (separate burghs at this time) had finally agreed the terms of an “Interceptor Sewer” for the Water of Leith. What is an Interceptor Sewer? It is a sewer that “intercepts” other sewers and collects their output before it can discharge some place else; in this case into the river of the Water of Leith. This sewer could intercept all the untreated human and animal waste that was currently discharging into the river and carry it safely off somewhere else, out of sight and out of mind. The construction of the interceptor sewer began immediately after approval of the parliamentary bill in 1864, and took 3 years to complete. The engineers were David and Thomas Stevenson.

The 1864 Interceptor as we shall call it comprises some 5.2 miles (8.4km) of brick-built, egg-shaped sewer. This is the optimum shape for a sewer, ensuring good flow at low volumes, being “self scouring” and requiring a less wide excavation than a circular sewer of the same cross-sectional area.

The interceptor follows the course of the Water of Leith, from the “irrigated meadow” at Roseburn park – where the Lochrin Burn discharged the waste of the south west of the city – to the Black Rocks off of Leith. It runs along the river banks in places and along the river bed itself in others. An exception is near Bonnington in Leith where it takes a more direct route, directly under the industries which had been using the river as their sewer.

The sewer intercepted some 180 outflows into the river by the method shown below, which meant the old sewers would still overflow into the river during storm events, the internal weir directed most of the waste into the main interceptor. The interceptor got larger as it went downstream to account for the progressively increased volume of waste being added to it.

The brick-built interceptor is around 2.5 feet wide (I couldn’t find a precise measure), with some sections between 2 and 3 feet wide of cast iron pipe, and where it hits the Shore at Leith (picture above) it becomes a 3 foot 6″ pipe, set 20 feet back from the quayside. It is ideally sited to take much of the waste of Leith (which historically either flowed into the river, or was directed towards the shore). The outflow was at a depth 17 feet below the high water spring tides, with the outflow generally being carried away down the Firth of Forth east by the tide. The cost of this scheme was “about £70,000 [£8.9M in current money], entailing a special drainage-rate of 2/6d per £ on the rental within the [catchment area]“.

The pin marked “1864 vent” on the map refers to that curious, square-section “chimney” above the river weir in St. Mark’s Park. It’s not a chimney at all, but a “stink pipe” or sewer vent. Noxious gasses and air compressed by storm events can escape here.

The 1864 Interceptor did exactly what it was designed to do, and was very successful at it. It was calculated to carry 600 cubic feet per minute at the outflow, but even by the time it was completed the requirement had more than doubled to 1,340 cubic feet as the population had exploded along its route; “in some cases fivefold“. So the additional waste from the city simply overtopped the collection weirs and continued to find its way into the river.

There was also the continued problem of the waste collecting in the old mill lades at Coltbridge (Roseburn) and Stockbridge, and the same old story of reluctant owners and landlords and fragmented ownership making it very difficult to get anything done about these. In 1873, after nearly 10 years of to-and-fro, the “Edinburgh Improvement Trust” was ready to abandon trying to sort things out. Not even a “forceful petition from Stockbridge residents” having had the required effect. By 1884, a survey by the Trust found that the Coltbridge mill dam had accumulated behind it a 4 foot depth of solid, compacted human excrement and 7.5 feet depth of more liquid matter; the situation was intolerable.

In 1885, the Edinburgh Corporation stepped in and had the Coltbridge mill lades and dam certified as a public health nuisance and obtained an order requiring the owners to clean it up. In the words of the Corporation’s presiding officer:

A deposit of putrescent sewage and other decomposing organic matter [which] is continually evolving noxious gases and germs, of a nature to produce and provoke miasmatic and malarious disease, and to endanger the health of persons who reside in, or who have occasion to frequent the neighbourhood.

Edinburgh’s preferred solution was to fill the mill lades and demolish the weirs below the Coltbridge to cause the river to flow better and scour itself, but leave the lower weir at Leith Mills as a sewage trap. Leith was of course less than pleased by this and the two councils went back to wrangling. The Edinburgh Improvement Act of 1887 gave the Corporation the powers of compulsory purchase along the Stockbridge “Great Lade” (marked brown on the map below). This power they exercised, causing the lade to be progressively bought up and filled in from 1891-1893.

A more coordinated approach was required however; in addition to the burghs of Edinburgh and Leith, the Parishes of Colinton and Currie, the County of Midlothian, the Sewerage Commission, the Dock Commission, and the Edinburgh and District Water Trust all had an interest. It was Leith though, that really drove action, after all they were at the bottom of the river so subject to any sewage in the river from their upstream neighbours. They were ill-served by the over-capacity 1864 Interceptor and they were most directly dependent on the water for livelihood and prosperity. Leith Town Council commissioned a series of public health and sewerage reports in 1885 and 1886 to set out the problem and had the whole course of the river surveyed from the uppermost mill to the sea, to detail the causes.

Edinburgh finally got on board with Leith, and together they commissioned a joint report in 1887 that proposed the construction of a duplicate interceptor sewer for the Water of Leith, along a longer course and with a much greater capacity. This sewer would remedy the shortcomings of the 1864 scheme and would serve to once and for all satisfy the requirements of both Edinburgh and Leith regards sewage disposal, and it was to be adequate for the next fifty years of expected growth in demand. Long-term thinking at last!

And so it was that the Water of Leith Purification and Sewerage Act, 1889 (you can read the full provisions online, here, all 70 pages of them) went before parliament; opposed by 16 groups of petitioners, mainly mill owners and industries determined to protect their rights to abstract water from the river and discharge effluent into it.

The act passed, and work proceeded on an altogether grander scheme for the whole river, some 22.5 miles long, with a diameter increasing from 4 feet upstream to 9’3″ x 7’2″ downstream. The scheme also included a branch for The Stank, the burn cum drain cum sewer that drained the village of Corstorphine, and the marshy land and farms of the Gyle area into the Water of Leith at Roseburn.

The 1889 Interceptor largely follows that of 1864 between Coltbridge and Stockbridge and the two are interconnected in places. At sections it takes a more direct shortcut, allowing the 1864 to continue to intercept the sewers at the river, while channelling the upstream waste by a more direct route to the sea. After Stockbridge the 1889 route heads away from the river to take a more direct route to the sea, running directly under Pilrig Park and Leith Links (where construction was easier), serving the expanding district between Edinburgh and Leith along Leith Walk.

The vent for the 1889 sewer is behind St. Mary’s School on the Links, on the site of the old Roperie, It is another apparently isolated “chimney” and has always proved very hard to get a decent photo of! now that the 15 years and more of being hidden in a stalled building development it is much easier to access. I wonder if the residents of those fancy new townhouses realise what the public “feature” in front of their windows really is!

The two sewers now served a catchment area that was where the city was expanding fastest, shown by the pale orange area in the map below (they also served much of South Leith)

Long story short, the 1889 scheme was so successful that in 1896 the Edinburgh Corporation found itself needing to secure powers to pass by-laws to protect fishing rights in the river that only a few years before had been nothing but a stinking sewer! The river Purification Act had done exactly that. That said it was only the river which had been purified; the sewage was still entirely untreated and discharged directly into the Firth of Forth off the Black Rocks, where it joined by the effluent from the Old Town and the Southside of the city that flowed through the Irrigated Meadows system to enter the Firth of Forth at Fillyside. But that will be a further thread to cover the final part of this story.

The last part of this story is the thread about the great untold engineering feat of Edinburgh’s 1970s Interceptor Sewers and the grand scheme to clean up the Firth of Forth.

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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It isn’t where you think it is: the thread about the”Dean Village” and an 18th-century revolutionary plot

This thread was originally written and published in November 2021. It has been lightly edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

It is probably the second most instagrammable vista in Edinburgh (after that lane), but what is this place actually called – and why?

“Dinnae be a dafty, Andy” I hear you say. “We all know that’s the Dean Village. Ask anyone in town. No ifs. No buts. Away to bed with you. ” Refreshing our local history, the story goes King David I gives the rights and profits of the mills in the “dene” or “dean” (gorge) of the Water of Leith to Holyrood Abbey in the 12th century, a village grows up around the mills and that becomes the Dean Village. Right? But what if, for most of its very long recorded history, what if… What if it wasn’t?

That a village did grow up around the mills of the Dean is indisputable, but it was never, ever referred to as the Dean Village until the late 19th century, and to the locals it never was until well into the 20th century. And what if I told you that the Dean Village, (or Village of Dean to give it its proper name) was actually some place else? Because, actually it was.

The earliest map that records this location is the anonymous map of the Siege of Leith of 1560 – likely produced by Richard Lees, an English military officer and surveyor. The captions are almost illegible in the publicly available copy, but the yellow one is “Com’on Mylles” and the blue one is “The De’nne“. So far so good; we have mills on the Water of Leith and a village nearby. But note that the village is actually up the hill and removed from the Mills.

The next earliest map showing this area is Blaeu’s atlas published in 1654, based on the surveys of Timonthy Pont and a bit of James Gordon’s, made decades earlier. It records the Den (Dean) Mills, with a house called Kraig (Craigleith) on the high ground to the north. That other mapmaker extraordinaire, William Roy, records the Dean Mills in his 1750s lowland map, downstream from Bells Mills, and to the north of the house of Cotts (Coates) (source NLS)

OK, that’s enough teasing with maps; it should begin to be clear that Dean Mills refers to the water mills in the river gorge (the “Dean” itself) and that there was a distinct place called Dean House or The Dean on the high ground to the north. The name of the village that grew up around the mills in the gorge wasn’t the Dean Village at all, it was simply Water of Leith, or the Village of the Water of Leith. Adair records it as such in 1682, in amongst the collection of mills, again north of Coates and south of Canonmills.

You can check if you don’t believe me, but right up to 1945, every single OS map and town plan records not the “Dean Village” but simply the “Water of Leith”.

Indeed many of the early town map makers didn’t even refer to the river as the Water of Leith, they called that the Leith Water! e.g. Ainslie here in 1804. Notice the property of the “Bakers of Edinburgh” (Incorporation of Baxters) recorded too.

What was called the Village of Dean or Dean Village was up the hill to the north, as shown on Kirkwood’s plan of 1817, adjacent to Dean House (or House of Dean) on the road known as the Dean Path. For hundreds of years these were two distinct villages, which are now little more than quaint little urban neighbourhoods, but the name of the former migrated itself down the hill to become attached to the other.

I shall call the higher level settlement the Village of Dean, so as to try and not get too confused, and it is now entirely gone in all but name, but it did leave behind some intriguing history. Malcolm Cant’s book on the Villages of Edinburgh gives a description. The village is aligned on the Dean Path (at that time long the principal “road” north out the city heading to Queensferry via Cramond, crossing the river at a ford and later a bridge in Water of Leith village). It was a few small lanes but had a population of 400 in the mid-18th century. The village was mainly single storey, thatched-roof cottages, but some extended to two, with the upper accessed in the traditional manner by an external staircase. The inhabitants were carters and quarriers of the Inverleith sandstones and farm labourers of the Barony of Dean.

For facilities, there was a smithy, a cartwright, a cordiner (the Scots term for a shoemaker), a small school and a tavern run by “Mrs Burr”, with a sign above the door with a picture of a horse and cart and which read “Lang May the Wheel Row“. The village was dominated by the House of Dean, a vast 17th century tower-house-cum-mansion inhabited by the Nisbets (Dean Baronets), wealthy merchants who counted Lord Provosts and even Poulterer to the King in their family tree.

Paul Sandby, the skilled landscape artist and surveyor, made this excellent and detailed illustration around 1750 or so. The two men on the roof of one of the Village of Dean buildings catch the eye as he on the left has a drawing board. I wonder if Sandby has drawn himself in?

In 1826, the prolific watercolour artist of Edinburgh and Leith, James Skene WS, made a similar illustration from a slightly different angle, showing not too much had changed since. The sky is typically dramatic like most Skene images, and he’s always prolific with smoke from chimneys too.

For a full history of House of Dean you can’t do better than this by Stravaiging About Scotland. Long story short, it was demolished in 1845 to make way for the Dean Cemetery, but some of its ornate painted interiors and plenty of carved stonework survives. By this time the Nisbet’s lands of Dean were owned by another Provost, John Learmonth, and it was he who successfully proposed the Dean Bridge to cross the Dean Gorge and open up (his) lands for construction of plush new suburbs north of the New Town.

With the bridge completed and opening to traffic in 1834, the farmland and orchards which occupied the Dean Estate now found themselves opened to development – although that proceeded at a slower pace than Learmonth envisaged and he never lived to see much of it.

And as for the Village of Dean? That seems to have disappeared quite quickly between 1831 when its position is shown on the Great Reform Act maps, and 1849 when it’s missing from that last OS Town Plan above. A simple village for simple folk, we might never have known any more if it wasn’t for the curious tale of one of its blacksmiths. Enter stage right Robert Orrock (or Orrok, an old Fife name derived from an ancient Norman landowner, Symon de Oroc).

Orrock was the village smithie in the 1790s and was deeply interested in political reform under the influence of the French revolution and also in Scotland a lingering feeling of political disenchantment following the Act of Union (sound familiar?). In the 1790s in England, reform-minded Whigs began to set up a group called the “Society of Friends of the People“, a sort of gentlemens’ political debating club by invite.

In Scotland, and mainly around Edinburgh, the similarly minded and sounding “The Friends of the People Society” was an altogether different organisation, largely composed of the more skilled and higher status working classes like shopkeepers, artisans and the trades. The Friends of the People also attracted writers (solicitors) and advocates (barristers) and church ministers to their ranks, and in 1792 and 1793 they held three “general conventions”, which grew increasingly radical and saw the more learned and middle class members drift away.

Robert Orrock became involved in the last and most radical of these conventions, the “British Convention“, where members of some of the English societies were invited to Edinburgh to attend. The Convention’s goals were universal male suffrage and annual free elections. Amongst their hundred or so attendees they included the local legend that was “Balloon Tytler“, James Tytler, the man of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon who made the first flight in the British Isles.

While the attendees debated at Mason’s Lodge on Blackfriar’s Wynd in the old town, Robert Orrock was hard at work at his forge to all hours. When asked what he was working so hard on he would reply he was “making ornamentations for a gentleman’s gate“. Except, he wasn’t. Those long metal spikes weren’t for a gate. He was making pike heads! To be precise, he was making four thousand pike heads! Orrock was in a small faction of the Friends who had decided that they might need to follow the French example and undertake revolution if they wanted the change they desired.

The plan was simple. Once Orrock had made enough pike heads and they were assembled into weapons, the old excise office would be set alight to draw out the castle garrison. Once they had exited the castle, another fire would be lit behind them to block their retreat and the conspirators would then rush the depleted castle and take control. With the castle under control and the masses (hopefully) flocking to be equipped for revolution from its armory, the city and the reins of power of the Scottish administration would be seized by quelling the town guard, rounding up the judges and the magistrates, and requisitioning the banks. All “country gentlemen” within 3 miles of Edinburgh were to be ordered to “keep within their houses” on pain of death.

While this might seem fanciful to us, the 18th Century “Edinburgh Mob” was notorious and more than capable of taking the law into its own hands and overpowering the City Guard when required. This included lynching its Captain in 1736 when they feared he would evade justice for ordering his men to fire into a crowd.

The plan came to nothing however, Orrock’s stash of weapons had been uncovered by the sheriff’s men when only 40 were complete and he turned crown evidence to save his own skin. The Convention itself was broken up by the authorities, terrified of revolution, and five of its leaders and principal spokesmen (2 Scots and 3 English) arrested, tried for sedition and sentenced to transportation. They are commemorated by the Martyrs Monument on Calton Hill.

Of those arrested with Orrock, Robert Watt and David Downie were tried and convicted of High Treason and ordered to be hung, drawn and quartered. Watt was executed but Downie was pardoned in 1795 on sentence of a further year in jail and self-banishment from Great Britain. Neither Orrock or any of the others were tried. As if to labour my point, one of his conspirators who also appeared for the Crown as a witness was one Arthur Macewan, a weaver from “Water of Leith”. What became of the revolutionary, turned blacksmith, turned turncoat, Robert Orrock, is not recorded in my book. He was ordered to be released in December 1794, and a Robert Orrock died in Edinburgh in 1806, age unknown, which could be him.

And how did the Water of Leith Village become to be known as the Dean Village? Well apparently its use was first recorded as such in 1884 in reference to Well Court, that beautiful model workers housing scheme built by John Ritchie Findlay of the Scotsman.

n.b. apparently the clock tower and “Dutch” steeple are modelled after the original of the Tron Kirk, lost in the Great Fire of Edinburgh of 1824.

Anyway, that’s straying dangerously close to the history of the Water of Leith village rather than the Dean Village. Apparently until 1962 you could still find businesses listing themselves under “Water of Leith” as their address in the Post Office directory (this example 1941)

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.

Walked the Water of Leith path on New Years Day, from Leith to Balerno, about 21km. A bit samey (A river! behind some trees!) but a really lovely long, non-strenuous walk, through some of the best of Edinburgh. Very much enjoyed this!

https://www.waterofleith.org.uk/walkway/

also.. does anyone know if they extract water from the river? It really feels like a much bigger river once you're upstream of Gorgie

#Edinburgh #Hiking #Leith #WaterOfLeith

Peter Puddock and the Puddocky: the thread about Municipal Frogs and Flood-prone Pitches

An unexpected – and irresistible – eBay find in recent days was this charming (or, depending on your feelings towards anthropomorphic frogs, terrifying) button badge featuring Peter Puddock, the one-time mascot of Edinburgh’s Royal Commonwealth Pool. Peter was created as a marketing campaign by the District Council in 1987 and his name was chosen by a children’s competition which attracted some three hundred entries.

The lucky winner was ten year old Marjorie Drysdale from Prestonfield. In addition to securing the naming rights she was awarded a photo-shoot with Peter, who presented her with two golden passes for a year’s free swimming at The Commie. In addition, from the chairman of the council’s Recreation Committee, she received one of these badges and a matching t-shirt.

Following this, Peter’s first official public outing was at McDonald Road Library on March 21st, the occasion being the sale of 20,000 ex-circulation books. After that, what became of him is not recorded in the pages of the Evening News or any other newspaper. However, in August 2018 the Dartmouth Chronicle reported that a Peter Puddock had accused Kingswear Parish Council of financial mismanagement and running up a £17,000 financial shortfall. Coincidence? Who is to say…

So what’s in a name? As recorded in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, Puddock is the word for a frog in that leid (or a toad, the two species are often confused). It can also be spelled puddick, poddock or paddock, but does not share an etymology with the English word paddock (from parrock or park), instead having its roots in the Old Norse padda for toad. It may be used as an adjective – puddockie or puddocky – to describe the sort of wet, boggy ground which abounds in amphibians. It has various reduced forms including paddy but it’s pure coincidence that the same word is used in English for a flooded field where rice is grown; in this case that’s a loan from the Malay word pādī.

Sections of the Water of Leith were once commonly known as the Puddock Burn although by the mid-19th century it was remarked upon that this was a nostalgic notion on account of the river pollution having rendered it almost entirely devoid of such wildlife. This association is also used more specifically for the section of the river between Canonmills Bridge and Powderhall, long known as The Puddocky.

While it’s true that generations of children have fished here for frogs with bits of string and jeelie jars, the name instead derives from an older placename of Paddockhaw or Puddockhall, a farm of that name in this location being recorded in 1724. There was no actual hall here however, the word being referred to is the Scots Haugh; a level plain alongside a river, seasonally wet land prized by farmers and frogs alike.As a place it disappeared after 1763 when the river was significantly straightened in an attempt to deal with flooding, but the name has persisted in to modern times.

The persistence of the name in collective memory has perhaps been helped by its surprisingly prominent literary profile. In an 1898 biography of Robert Louis Stevenson – educated nearby at the Canonmills school of the Free Kirk – Evelyn Blantyre Simpson relates that on learning the 23rd psalm (“The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want; he makes me down to lie in pastures green; he leadeth me the quiet waters by“) the boy’s over-active imagination pictured this as being his riverside playground of the Puddocky where he spent many an hour splashing around, attended by his ever-present nursemaid Cummy.

The young RLS was not the only Edinburgh author to have formative memories of the place, Muriel Spark recalls in her autobiography Curriculum Vitae that “at weekends we roamed in the botanical gardens or went for walks at Puddocky“. She would use it as a location in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie where the character Teenie allegedly took a romantic “walk” with her boyfriend which resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. Norman Macaig refers to it in “his most sustained meditation on Edinburgh“, the 1973 poem Inward Bound:

Journeys, Mine were
as wide as the world is
from Puddocky to Stockbridge
minnows splinter in a jar
and a ten-inch yacht
in the roaring forties of Inverleith Pond
crumples like a handkerchief

The Puddocky name also has a number of long-standing associations with sport in the district. Part of Warriston Park was taken on as playing fields by the Edinburgh Institution (later to become Melville College) in the 1860s, with cricket played in the summer and rugby in the winter. This ground was part of the Water of Leith’s flood plain and had once been the site of the ornamental pond of Wester Warriston House. Unsurprisingly as a sports pitch it was perpetually damp, usually waterlogged in winter and more suited to webbed feet. It gained the derisory nickname of The Puddocky. It was taken over later by the Edinburgh School Board in 1910 and remains as playing fields for school use to this day.

On the opposite bank from here was the triangle of land possessed by The Governors of Heriot’s Hospital that had been marooned on that side when the river was straightened out. From 1883 this was used as a football ground by the itinerant St Bernards F.C. but after 1887 it was transferred back to Heriot’s as school playing fields. Again this site was frequently damp and again it found itself nicknamed The Puddocky. The school lasted here for little more than a decade before removing to altogether more commodious and drier facilities further north at Bangholm. Renamed Old Logie Green, it became the ground of Leith Athletic F.C. who played here until 1915. The displaced St Bernards didn’t have too far to go however and moved just next door to the New Logie Green ground.

Once again the nickname Puddocky was applied for the usual reasons and this site holds a unique claim to fame in that it is the only football ground outside of Glasgow where the Scottish Cup has been held. Owing to a timetabling clash at the usual Hampden Park venue in 1896 the game was played instead at the ground of the holders – St Bernards. The match was an Edinburgh derby, Heart of Midlothian prevailing over their city rivals Hibernian by three goals to one. St Bernards departed here in 1899 when their lease expired and the ground was removed, Logie Green Road driven through its heart.

To keep you on your toes if you are trying to research either of these two football teams or either of the two Logie Green grounds, Leith played very briefly at New Logie Green in the 1899 season and St. Bernards returned to Old Logie Green between 1921-24. From then until final closure in 1926 Old Logie Green was home to, you’ve guess it, Leith Athletic. In the century since then it has been the football boots of generations of Edinburgh school children playing soggy winter fixtures at Warriston that have trod on the last remaining Puddocky pitches.

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I regularly see herons in or beside the Water of Leith - but never on the path before!

This was in Leith, just upstream from the Great Junction St bridge. The river was very full with all the recent rain, and running fast. Maybe there was too much water for the heron!

#Edinburgh #WaterOfLeith #heron #bird