340 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH,
as an industrious burgher. He was imported from Holland, it is believed, near the beginning
of last century, and first did duty with Rpade in hand at a seedsman’s door in the
Canongate ; from thence he passed to a grocer in the High Street, and soon after he made
his appearance in the Bow, where his antiquated costume consorted well with the oldfashioned
neighbourhood. Since the destruction of this, his last retreat, he has found a fit
refuge in the lobby of the Antiquarian Museum. On the opposite side of the street, the
last tenement on the east side of the first turning, and situated, as its titles express, “without
the place where the old Bow stood,” was popularly known as the Clockmaker’s Land.
It had been occupied in the reign of Charles 11. by Paul Romieu,’ an ingenious knockmaker,
who is believed to have been one of the French refugees, compelled to forsake his
native land on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1675, as appears from the
records of the Corporation of Hammermen, a watch was, for the fist time, added to the
knockmaker’s essay, previous to which date it is probable that watches were entirely imported.
There remained on the front of this ancient tenement, till its demolition, some
portions of a curious piece of mechanism which had formed the sign of its ingenious tenant.
This was a gilt ball representing the moon, originally made to revolve by clockwork, and
which enjoyed to the last a share of the admiration bestowed on the wonders of the Bow.
Other and more curious erections than those we have described had occupied the ground along
this steep descent at a still earlier period, when the secular clergy shared with the Templars
the dwellings in the Bow. In the “ Inventar of Pious Donations,” to which we have
already frequently referred, a charter is recorded, bearing date February 15, 1541, whereby
6‘ Sir Thomas Ewing mortifies to a chaplain in St Giles Kirk, an annual rent of twentysix
shillings out of Henry Spittal’s Land, at the Upper Bow, on the east side of ye transse
y’of, betwixt Bartil Kairn’s Land on the south, St James Altar Land on the north, and
the King’s Street on the west.” Below the Clockmaker’s Land, the tortuous thoroughfare
turned suddenly at an acute angle, and presented along its devious steep a strange assemblage
of fantastic timber and stone gables; several of them being among those strange
relics ’of a forgotten order of things, the Temple Lands, and one of them, with its timber
ceilings curiously adorned with paintings2 in the style already described in the Guise
Palace, bearing the quaint legend over its antique lintel, in ornamental characters of a very
early date :-
HE YT a THOLIS * OVERCVMMIS.
Behind these lay several steep, narrow, and gloomy closes, containing the most singular
groups of huge, irregular, and diversxed tenements that could well be conceived. Here
a crazy stunted little timber dwelling, black with age, and beyond it a pile of masonry rising
story above story from some murky profound beyond, that left its chimneys scarcely rivalling
those of its dwarfish neighbour after climbing thus far from their foundation. in the
depths below. One of these, which we have engraved under the name of ‘‘ The Haunted
CZose,” is the same in which the worthy gentlewoman, the neighbour of Major Weir, beheld
the spectral giantess vanish in a blaze of fire, as she returned down the West Bow at
the witching hour of night. The close, for all its wretched degradation, which had won
Minor Antiquitiea Information derived fifty years ago (1833) from a man who WM then eighty years of age.
a Some curious fragments of this ceiling are now in the collection of C. K. Sharpe, Esq.
