CHAPTER IX.
THE WEST BOW AND SUBURBS.
N the centre of the ancient city there I stood, till a few years since, a
strange, crooked, steep, and altogether
singular and picturesque avenue from
the High Street to the low valley on the
south, in which the more ancient extensions
of the once circumscribed Scottish
capital are reared. Scarcely anything
can be conceived more curious and whimsically
grotesque than its array of irregular
stone gables and timber galleries,
that seemed as if jostling one another
for room along the steep and narrow
thoroughfare ; while the busy throng
were toiling up or hurrying down its
precipitous pathways, amid the ceaseless
din of braziers’ and tinsmiths’ hammers,
for which it was famed, and the rumbling
of wheels, accompanied with the vociferous
shouts of a host of noisy assistants,
as some heavy-laden wain creeked
and groaned up the steep. The modern
visitor who now sees the Bowhead, an open
area nearly on a level with the Castle
drawbridge, and then by gradual and
easy descent of long flights of stairs, and the more gentle modern slope of Victoria
Street, at length reaches The Bowfoot Well in the Grassmarket, will hardly be persuaded
that between these two widely different elevations there extended only a few years
since a thoroughfare crowded with antique tenements, quaint inscriptions, and E t i l l
more strange and interesting associations ; unmatched in its historic and traditionary
memories by any other spot of the curious old capital, whose memories we seek to
revive. Here were the Templar Lands, with their antique gables, surmounted by the
croBs that marked them as beyond the reach of civic corporation laws, and with their old-
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