312 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH.
“he tenement directly opposite to the site of St Mary’s Chapel, and forming the south
side of the alley leading into Boyd’s Close, is curious, as having been the residence of
James Norrie, painter, the celebrated decorator during the earlier part of last century,
to whom we have already frequently referred. His workshops lay immediately behind, and
adjoining to the coach-house of Lord Milton, as appears from the titles of the property.
Both of them were afterwards converted into stabling for Boyd‘s celebrated White Horse
Inn. This street then formed the approach to the town by one of the great roads from
the south of Scotland ; and here, accordingly, were several of the principal inns. At the
foot of the wynd was Mr Peter Ramsay’s famed establishment, from which he retired with
an ample fortune, and withdrew to his estate of Barnton, in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh,
still possessed by his descendants. A large and handsome edifice, with considerable pretensions
to architectural ornament, near the foot of the Pleasance, was the Black Bull Inn,
another of these commodious and fashionable establishments, which the erection of the
North and South Bridges ruined, by diverting the current of visitors to the capital into a
new channel.
Nicoll reports, in 1650, that “ the toun demolished the hail1 houssis in St Marie Wynd,
that the enymie sould haif no schelter thair, bot that thai mycht haif frie pas to thair cannoun,
quhilk thai haid montit upone the Neddir Bow.”’ The earliest date now observable
is that of 1680, cut over the doorway of a house about the middle of the wynd, on the
east side, but one or two other tenements present features of an earlier character. At
the foot of the wpd was situated the Cowgate Port, one of the city gates, constructed
with the extended wall in 1513; and, at a later period, another was erected across the
wynd at its junction with the Pleasance, which was known as St Mary’s or the
Pleasance Port. This was the frequent scene of exposure of the dismembered limbs
of political offenders, as in the case of Garnock and other Covenanters, whose heads
were ordered “to be struck off, and set up upon pricks upon the Pleasance Port of
Edinburgh.”a The old ,Port was demolished on the approach of the rebels in
1715, from the daculty of maintaining it in case of assault; but part of the wall
remained, surmounted by one of the iron spikes, until it was demolished in 1837 to
make way for the new Heriot’s School. This ancient thoroughfare is commended in
Ferguson’s address to Add Reekie, as the unfailing resort of threadbare poets and
the like patrons of the Edinburgh rag-fair. It still continues to be the mart for such
miscellaneous merchandise, flaunting in the motley colours of cast-off finery, and
presided over by
“ St Mary, broker’s guardian ~aunt.”~
Beyond St Mary’s Port, lay the Nunnery dedicated to Sancta Maria de Placentia. It
stood about sixty yards from the south-east angle of the city wall, not far from the foot
of Roxburgh Street ; but of this ancient religious foundation little more is known than the
Chapel, Niddry’s Wynd ; the Virgin Mary’s Chapel, Portsburgh ; the Hospital of Our Lady, Leith Wynd ; the Chapel
and Convent of St Mary de Placentia in the Pleasance; the great Church at Leith, of old styled St Nary’s Chapel; and
the Collegiate Church of Restalrig, the seal of which-now of very rare occurrence-bears the figure of the Virgin and
Child, under a Gothic canopy.
Nicoll’s Diary, p. 24. Keith‘s Hist. Spottiswoode Soc., voL ii. p. 619.
The east side of this narrow wynd has now been entirely removed, and a spacious street substituted, named St
* Fountainhall’s Decisions, vol. i p. 159.
Mary’s Street.
