Andy Arthur - ThreadinburghThe Big Pipes: the thread about the water supply to old Leith
This thread was originally written and published in August 2019.
Yesterday’s library trip was surprisingly productive on the subject of the water supply of old Leith. What I already knew was limited to the facts that it was unreliable, that it was supplied from the loch at Lochend and that it went from there via pipes to a reservoir at the foot of Water Street (hence the name).
Kirkwood’s map of Edinburgh and Leith, 1817, spyglass over modern map. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandSo what new things did I learn? Let’s start with some of the problems Leith faced when it came to getting drinking water. Traditionally the obvious source of water would have been the Water of Leith, but at this time it was tidal quite and so you had to take any water quite far upstream. But the principal problem was its water was also heavily used for milling by villages upstream and would have been badly polluted by the time it arrived in Leith. The other streams passing through the burgh, the Broughton Burn and the Greenside Burn, were fundamentally natural land drains and have been entirely unsuitable as a steady source of water.
Google Earth view with traces of the Water of Leith (thicker blue line) and the narrow lines of the Greenside (right) and Broughton (left) burnsSourcing water was a serious problem for Leith industries too; distilling, soap making and sugar refining all suffered from a lack of the stuff and migrated upstream on to Bonnington where there was a well. Big houses would have kept their own wells and there were wells at Yardheads too for the brewers, but the supply was meagre and upredictable. There was a good reason brewing never figured as a big Leith industry beyond meeting the residents’ own needs and disappeared altogether once Edinburgh had excess capacity to supply it. So where else could water have been sourced from? There is a description and a number of images of water being carted in from the well at Restalrig, the “holy” well of St. Triduana and/or St. Margaret. However supplying enough water in this manner would have been exceedingly difficult given the limitations of transport, so this might have been more of a niche trade than a serious supply of potable water.
Water being carted from St. Margaret’s Well at Restalrig, an 1817 sketch by James Skene. © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn 1752, the Incorporation of Traffickers of Leith (the Leith Company of Merchants) heard that Edinburgh was petitioning parliament for the right to levy a tax on ale of 2d per pint brewed. This would cover Leith too as Edinburgh exercised the rights of taxation over it. Leith saw an opportunity here and lobbied Edinburgh to try and gain access to some of the collected revenues of this taxation to improve the water supply in their town. Surprisingly Edinburgh agreed, if Leith drew up a schedule of costs and the plans themselves. The only realistic source of the water was obvious, it was the only substantial body of standing fresh water in the whole parish of South Leith; the loch at Lochend. Conveniently this had been made available for sale by the Crown who had confiscated it after the Jacobite rising of 1745. The previous proprietor of the Barony of Restalrig, Arthur Elphinstone, 6th Lord Balmerino, had forfeited this estate and his head for his part in that rebellion.
Lochend loch and House in the early 19th century. Note at this time the water level was significantly higher than it is now. This is a picture credited as Duddingston Loch, but is very definitely Lochend, with Whinny Hill of Arthur’s Seat in the background. By Hugh William Williams, CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland.The cost of the scheme was to be £600 and the plan was to lift the water out of the loch by a pump and siphon, and draw it from there down the gradient to Leith in wooden pipes to a cistern at the junction of Carpet Lane and Rotten Row1 (which would become Water Lane). Wooden pipes sound odd to modern ears, but were actually cheaper and lighter than the alternative; lead. Whole elm trunks were used as they were resistant to rot, and they were hollowed out and joined with leather seals, you can see some contemporary originals in the Museum of Edinburgh. It was reported in 1922 that wooden water pipes from this scheme were still in the possession of a “Leith Museum”.
The cost was to be met half each by Leith and Edinburgh. A campaign for public subscription in Leith raised only £110, so the Trade Incorporations had to foot the remaining £190. The contractor was a local plumber, however had no experience of laying a public water supply. They also had no capital of their own and thus work proceeded piecemeal as the money came in and they could pay for labourers and pipes. A contemporary writer wrote critically of the whole initiative:
The Loch was too small and unhygienic. The contractor he said was “a fool“, and laid the pipes so deep (15 feet) that cost was too high, progress was too slow, and the inevitable repairs were difficult.
William Maitland, in “History of Edinburgh”The pipes were laid either under, or alongside, Lochend Road which at this time ran through open fields. Water descended by gravity, but a pump house with a simple chain pump was constructed at the loch to lift the water out initially and start the siphon action. That pump house is still there. It’s very intriguing, a small, octagonal structure. If you peek inside you will see it goes down below the current ground level and there are signs of where the pump was within. If you look around at the pump house from the outside you may notice on the south wall there are signs of where a pipe has once entered the building and investigate the ground heading off north towards the park entrance you can trace a line of stone slabs in the grass, which undoubtedly covered the wooden water pipe.
The line of cap stones running away from the pump house towards Lochend RoadThe south face of the pump house showing where an iron pipe has gone through the wallThe interior of the pump house, showing the depth below ground and some supports for the pump sylinder or pipes. That cast iron pipe comes through the wall in the top right of the photo.Lochend pump house, with the Doocot/ kiln beyond. © SelfLochend pump house details © selfIt is worth noting that the surface of the loch back then was about 5-10 feet higher than it is now (depending on the season), and therefore its surface reached much further into the grounds of the park than it does today. This also meant that the pump house was inside the loch, not distant from it. The drop in level is a combined result of the abstraction of water, building drains into it and some of the underground springs feeding it were reputedly cut through by railway construction. Water reached the pump house from far into the water by way of an inlet pipe, the remains of which can be seen on the late 19th century postcard below.
An old postcard of Lochend Loch, of interest are the row of supports sticking out of the water and mud, these would have carried the water inlet pipe to the pump house.The end result of this endeavour was that Leith now had it’s own piped water supply! But immediately, there were problems; the pipes were too narrow; the cistern was too small. There just wasn’t anything like enough water! So at the expense of Leith it was all dug up again within months and relaid with larger bore pipes. A larger cistern was constructed further south and this area appropriately became known locally as “The Big Pipes“. A bar of this name stood until cleared away with most of the rest of old central Leith in the mid 1960s.
“The Big Pipes” bar, opposite the water cistern, where the Kirkgate met Tolbooth Wynd, [Queen] Charlotte Street and Water Street. © Edinburgh City Libraries.Six wellheads were provided within the town for public use, the locations of five being;
- on the Kirkgate at Brickwork Close
- in the yard of The Vaults
- on the Coalhill at the bridge
- on the Shore at the New Quay
- and at Bernard’s Neuk on Bernard Street.
The well at the Shore was to be used for watering ships, but the task of filling casks lead to long queues of locals (mainly women and girls) with stoups (narrow leather buckets suspended from a yoke) and so ships were forbidden to water between 5am and 8pm. Notice that North Leith (the part of the town to the north and west of the Water of Leith) is excluded from all this as it was a separate parish from South Leith at this time and to many intents and purposes administratively part of Edinburgh. In 1771 a Police Act for Edinburgh included South Leith parish. The concept of Police at this time covered powers of sanitation, lighting, cleansing and the prevention of infectious diseases, rather than law enforcement. The Act made provisions for the paving, watering, cleansing and lighting of areas of South Leith including St. Anthony’s, the Kirkgate and Yardheads. One of the provisions was a new water cistern reserved exclusively for shipping at the Ferryboat Steps on the Shore. It would cost £850 and ships could get water for 1 shilling per ton. Clearly a lot of water would need to be provided to cover the costs.
But the basic problem persisted for Leith that Lochend was not a satisfactory reservoir and even the Big Pipes were insufficient. The inlet pipe was sunk deeper into the loch but silted up and had to regularly be cleared. As a result of this deeper and increased abstraction, the Loch would start to dry up in summer. Various schemes were mooted to resolve this, including constructing a dam across the Back Drum – the area of high ground to the west of the Loch on which Easter Road Stadium stands. This would have used a steam-driven pump to lift clean, silt-free water from the loch up the hill and from where it could run by gravity to the wells and cisterns in Leith. Instead and after much lobbying a two inch lead pipe was provided from Edinburgh’s own precious water supply to supplement that of Leith. Leith of course had to pay for this privilege and £1,000 was billed to the Leith Police Commissioners. Not long after this connection was completed a drought in 1793 resulted in Edinburgh cutting off the pipe. Chalk up another example in the long history of Edinburgh messing with Leith!
The water situation in Leith remained dire. Money was really the problem, the Commissioners had the powers but not the funds as Edinburgh kept a tight and uncooperative hand on the purse strings. All that changed in 1799 when John’s Place, a fashionable new development of merchant class villas, was constructed in Leith along the western edge of the Links as the town slowly and tentatively began to expand from the confines of its medieval boundaries.
John’s Place, LeithThe proprietors of this development wanted to match the New Town and that meant having piped water. So they proposed to the Commissioners that they would lend them the money for water improvements at 5% interest, if they would also lay supplies to them at John’s Place. The Commissioners jumped at the chance as the residents would also pay annual dues to them for this supply. On hearing this, “every heritor on the line of the pipe from Lochend” also got on board and wanted water. Each would pay 1 guinea per annum, and the required money was therefore lent to the Commissioners. Work to improve the supply and provide the private supplies took 2 years, but finally it was complete. On the grand day, the private stop cocks were opened and the public cistern promptly ran dry! That’s the problem with tapping off your water supply upstream before it reaches its destination! And so the private supplies were all shut off and could only be opened as and when the town cistern was filled.
And so the supply remained poor and the water quality was doubtful. Finally, in 1869, the Corporations of Edinburgh, Leith and Portobello made the sensible decision to combine their water interests and took over the Edinburgh Water Company to run it for themselves. Thus the Edinburgh District Water Trust came into being (look for EDWT street furniture at your feet) and Leith finally got a proper water supply.
I have used some educated guesswork to determine the likely route of the Big Pipes into Leith from Lochend and followed that on the 1849 Ordnance Survey town plan. Lo! and Behold, you can find a line of public water pumps and troughs along it near John’s Place!
Water pump marked on Leith Links. OS 1849 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland Water pump and trough marked at south end of John’s Place. OS 1849 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland Water pump and trough marked at north end of John’s Place. OS 1849 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBy this time Leith was finally a municipal burgh in its own right and retained the rights over the Loch as a water source even after it was abandoned for the drinking supply in 1869. It was still useful to some industries as it was softer water than the drinking supply so better for use in boilers. The Roperie was allegedly the last user of the Lochend supply, as late as 1922, as a source of cooling water. Leith exercised its rights in Parliament in 1906 when Edinburgh put forward a Parliamentary Bill which would have allowed it abstract water from the Loch for the condensers in its electrical power station at McDonald Road and return it to source warmed up. This was a threat to The Roperie and so although the Loch was partly within the municipal territory of both Edinburgh and Leith, the rights of the latter, junior burgh were successfully defended.
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