LEITH, AND THE NEW TOWN. 371
hospital for lepers in early times, from an entry in the Council Records of 30th September
1584, where Michael Chisholm and others are commissioned to inquire into ((the estait
and ordour of the awld fundatioun of the Lipper-houa besyde Dyngwall.” A rural mansion
occupied in former days the north-eastern slope of Moutrie’s Hill,-a curious waif
which long survived the radical changes that had transformed the silent fields in which it
stood into long avenues of populous streets and squares. From its elevated position-on
the hill where the Queen’s men hung up their adversaries as a point visible alike to Edinburgh
and Leith-it must have commanded a magnificent prospect of the Lothians and
Fifeshire, with the Forth, the German Ocean, and the Highland Hills. Now it is buried
under lofty tenements, in one of the most populous districts of the New Town, and with
miles of streets and houses on every side interposing between it and the distant country.
This nucleus of the New Town was not, however, the oldest building it contained. A
small fragment of an ancieut thoroughfare on the west side of the Register Office till
lately bore the name of Gabriel’s Road, although it had been closed for many years, and
reduced to a mere passage leading to one or two private dwellings ; a New Town close,
in fact, somewhat worse than many of its defamed precursors of the Old Town. This
mean-looking alley was the remains of a country road, along which some venerable citizens
still remember to have wended their way between green hedges that skirted the pleasant
meadows and corn fields of Wood’s farm, and which was in days of yore a favourite
trysting-place for lovers, where they breathed out their tender tale of passion beneath the
fragrant hawthorn. It led in an oblique direction towards the ancient village of Silvermills,
and its course is still indicated by the irregular slant of the garden walls that
separate the little plots behind Duke Street from the East Queen Street garden.
When James Craig, the architect, a nephew of the poet Thomson, published his
engraved plan of the new city, which had been selected as the best from a host of
competing designs, he appended to it the following lines from his uncle’s poem :-
August, around, what Public Works I Bee !
Lo, stately streets ! 10, squares that court the breeze !
See long canals and deepened rivers join
Each part with each, and with the circling main,
The whole enliveo’d Isle.
The regular array of formal parallelograms thus sketched out for the future city, was
received by the denizens of the Old Town with raptures of applause. Pent up in narrow
and crooked wynds, its broad, straight avenues, seemed the Jeau ideal of perfection, and
the more sanguine of them panted to see the magnificent design realised. Some echo of
their enthusiastic admiration still lingers among us, but it waxes feeble and indistinct.
The most hearty contemners of the dingy, smoky Old Town, now admit that neither the
formal plan nor the architectural designs of the New Town, evince much intellect or inventive
genius in their contriver ; and, perhaps, even a professed antiquary may venture
to hint at the wisdom of our ancestors, who carried their road obliquely down the steep
northern slope, from Moutrie’s Hill to Silvermills, instead of devising the abrupt precipitous
descent from where the statue of George IV. now stands to the foot of Pitt
Street ; a steep which strikes a stranger with awe, not unmingled with fear, on his first
372 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH.
‘approach to our cc Modern Athens” from the neighbouring coast. When, some two or
three centuries hence, the New Town shall have ripened into fruit for some twenty-second
century Improvements Commission, their first scheme will probably lead to the restoration
of Gabriel’s Road, and its counterpart from Charlotte Square to Pitt Street, marking the
saltier of Scotland’s patron saint on the antiquated parallelograms of James Craig I
The village of Silvermills, the remains of which lie concealed behind St Stephen’s
Church and the modern streets that surround it, may not improbably owe its origin to
some of the alchemical projects of James IT. or V., both of whom were greatly addicted
to the royal sport of hunting for the precious metals, with which the soil of Scotland was
then believed to abound. Sir Archibald Napier, the father of the philosopher, was
appointed Master of the Mint and superintendent of the mines and minerals within the
kingdom; and we are assured, on the authority of an ancient manuscript in the Cotton
Library, that The Laird of Merchiston got gold in Pentland Hills.”‘ The village of
Silvermills consists almost entirely of a colony of tanners, but one or two of its houses
present the crow-stepped gables of the aeventeenth century; and though now enclosed
within the extended town, we. can remember many a Saturday’s ramble through green
fields that ended at this rural Aamlet.
Another and more important village, which has experienced the same fate as that of
Silvermills, is the ancient baronial burgh of Broughton. Its name occurs in the charter
of foundation of Holyrood Abbey, granted by David I. in 1128, and implies, according to
Marnitlandt,h e Castle town. If it ever possessed B fortalice or keep, from whence its name
was derived, all vestiges of it had disappeared centuries before its fields were invaded by
the extending capital. The Tolbooth, however, wherein the baron’s courts were held, and
offenders secured to abide his judgment,
or to endure its penalties,
stood within these few years near
the centre of the old village, bearing
over its north door the date 1582.
Its broad flight of steps was appropriately
flanked with a venerable
pair of stocks; a symbol of justice
of rare occurrence in Scotland,
where the joug3 were the usual and
more national mode of pillory. The
annexed vignette will srdice to
convey some idea of this antique
structure, which stood nearly in the
centre of the New Town, on the ground now occupied by the east end of Barony Street,
from whence it was only removed with all its paraphernalia of obsolete minners and
laws in the year 1829. The curious rambler may still stumble on one or two of the
humble tenements of the old village, lying concealed among the back lanes of the modern
town. A few years since, its rows of tiled and thatched cottages, with their rude fore-
Niaoellane Scotioa, Napier of Herohiaton, p, 228.
VIOXETTE--The Tolbooth, Broughton.
