THE CANONGA TE AND ABBEY SANCTUAR Y. 309
seriously that Mary is reported to have used a bath of white wine to exalt her charms, a
. custom, he adds, strange, but not without precedent.’ Other no less efficacious means
have been assigned as the expedients resorted to by Queen Mary for shielding her beauty
against the assaults of time, but the existence of a very fine spring of water immediately
underneath the earthen floor might reasonably suggest her use of the pure and limpid
element.
Beyond this lies the district of Abbey Hill, an old-fashioned suburb that has risen
up around the outskirts of the Palace, and includes one or two ancient fabrics that have
probably formed the residence of the courtiers of Holyrood in days of yore. Here is a
narrow lane leading into St Anne’s Park, which bears the curious Gaelic title of Croftan-
rzgh, or the King’s Field; a name that furnishes very intelligible evidence of its
former enclosure within the royal demesnes. One ancient tenement near the Palace has
the angles of its southern gable flanked with large round turrets, in the castellated style
of James VI.’s reign, while the north front is ornameuted with dormer windows. This
antique fabric answers generally to the description of the mansion purchased by William
Graham, Earl of Airth, from the Earl of Linlithgow, at the instigation of his woefull wyse
d e . It is described by him as the house at the back of the Abbey of Holyrood House,
which sometime belonged to the Lord Elphinstone ; and though, he adds, ‘‘ within two
years after, or thereby, that house took fyre accedintallie, and wes totallie burned, as it
Btandeth now, like everie thing that t.he unhappie womau, my wyfe, lade hir hand to,” ’
many of our old Scottish houses have survived such conflagrations, and still remain in
good condition.
Pennant’s Tour, vol. i. p. 71. Minor Antiquities, p. 271.
