114 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [New Tom.
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Cockburn, the former spoke thus affectionately
.of the High School :-
? In this town it was, as was truly observed by
.our worthy chairman, that I first imbibed the noble
grinciples of a liberal Scottish education; and it is
Ifit that I should tell you, as many of you may not
have heard what I have frequently told to others,
:in other places, and in other meetings, that I have
:seen no other plan of education so efficient as that
which is established in this city. With great
experience and opportunity of observation, I
certainly have never yet seen any one system so
well adapted for training up good citizens, as well
as learned and virtuous men, as the old High School
of Edinburgh and the Scottish Universities. Great
improvements may, and no doubt will be made,
even in these seminaries. But what I have to say
of the High School of Edinburgh, and, as the
ground of the preference I give it over others,
and even over another academy, lately established
in this city, on what is said to be a more improved
principle-what I say is this : that such a school is
altogether invaluable in a free State-in a State
having higher objects in view, by the education of
its youth, than a mere knowledge of the Latin and
Greek languages, and the study of prosody. That
in a State like this, higher objects should be kept
in view, there can be no doubt ; though I confess I
have passed much of my time in these studies myself.
?Yet a school like the old High School of
Edinburgh is invaluable, and for what is it so? It
is because men of the highest and lowest rank
of society send their children to be educated
together. The oldest friend I have in the world,
your worthy vice-president (Lord Douglas Gordon
Halyburton of Pitcur, M.P.) and myself were at
the High School of Edinburgh together, and in the
same class along with others, who still possess our
friendship, and some of them in a rank in life still
higher than us. One of them was a nobleman who
is now in the House of Peers ; and some of them
were the sons of shopkeepers in the lowest part of
the Cowgate-shops of the most inferior descnption-
and one or two of them were the sons of
menial servants in the town. They wen siiliug
side by side, giving and taking places from each other,
without the slightest impression on the part of my
noble friends of any superiority on their parts to
the other boys, or any ideas of the inferiority on
the part of the other boys to them ; and this is my
reason for preferring the old High School of Edinburgh
to other and what may be termed more
patrician schools, however well regulated or conducted.?
CHAPTER XVI.
THE NEW TOWN.
?The Site before the Streets-The Lang Dykes-Wood?s Farm-Drumsheugh House-Bearford?s Parks-The Houses of Easter and Wester
Coates-Gabriel?s Road-Craig?s Plan of the New Town-John Young builds the First House Therein-Extension of the Town Westward.
LOOKING at the site of the New Town now, it
requires an effort to think that there were thatched
cottages there once, and farms, where corn was
sown and reaped, where pigs grunted in styes or
roamed in the yard; where fowls laid eggs and
clucked over them, and ducks drove their broods
into the .North Loch, where the trap caught eels
.and the otter and water-rat lurked amid the sedges,
and where cattle browsed on the upland slopes
that were crested by the line of the Lang Dykes ;
and where the gudeman and his sons left the
ploiigh in the furrow, and betook them to steel
bonnets and plate sleeves, to jack and Scottish
spear, when the bale-fire, flaming out on the Castle
towers, announced that ?our ancient enemies of
England had crossed the Tweed.?
Such, little more than one hundred years ago,
was the site of the Modern Athens.?
?
.
Along the line now occupied by Princes Street
lay a straight country road, the Lang Dykes-called
the Lang Gait in the ?Memorie of the Somervilles,?
in 1640-the way by which Claverhouse and
his troopers rode westward on that eventful day in
1689, and where in 1763, we read in theEdinburgh
Museum for January of two gentlemen on horse-.
back bei,ng stopped by a robber, armed with a
pistol, whom they struck down by the butt end of
a whip,. but failed to secure, ?? as they heard somebody
whistle several times behind the dykes,? and
were apprehensive that he might have confederates.
The district was intersected by other lonelyroads,
such as the Kirk Loan, which led north from St.
Cuthbert?s Church to the wooden, or Stokebridge,
and the ford on the Leith at the back of the
present Malta Terrace, where it joined Gabriel?s
Road, a path that came from the east, end of the
New Town.] ? . WOOD?S FARM. 11.5
Lang Dykes; by the old Queensferry Road that
I descended into the deep hollow, where Bell?s Mills
lie, and by Broughton Loan at the other end of the
northern ridge.
Bearford?s Parks on the west, and Wood?s Farm
on the east, formed the bulk of this portion of the
site; St. George?s Church is now in the centre of
the former, and Wemyss Place of the latter. The
hamlet and manor house of Moultray?s Hill arc now
occupied by the Register House; and where the
Royal Bank stands was a cottage called ?Peace
and Plenty,? from its signboard near Gabriel?s
Road, ? where ambulative citizens regaled themselves
with curds and cream,?? and Broughton was
deemed so far afield that people went there for
the summer months under the belief that they
were some distance from ?town, just as people
used to go to Powburn and Tipperlinn fifty years
later.
Henry Mackenzie, author of ?The Man of
Feeling,? who died in 1831, remembered shooting
snipes, hares, and partridges upon Wood?s Farm.
The latter was a tract of ground extending frGm
Canon Mills on the north, to Bearford?s Parks on
the south, and was long in possession of Mr. Wood,
of Warriston, and in the house thereon, his son,
the famous ?Lang Sandy Wood,? was born in
1725. It stood on the area between where Queen
Street and Heriot Row are now, and ?many still
alive,? says Chambers, writing in 1824, ?remember
of the fields bearing as fair and rich a crop of
wheat as they may now be said to bear houses.
Game used to be plentiful upon these groundsin
particular partridges and hares . . . . . Woodcocks
and snipe were to be had in all the damp
and low-lying situations, such as the Well-house
Tower, the Hunter?s Bog, and the borders of
Canon Mills Loch. Wild ducks were frequently
shot in the meadows, where in winter they are
sometimes yet to be found. Bruntsfield Links,
and the ground towards the Braid Hills abounded
in hares.?
In the list of Fellows of the Royal College of
Surgeons, Alexander Wood and his brother Thomas
are recorded, under date 1756 and 1715 respectively,
as the sons of ?Thomas Wood, farmer on
the north side of Edinburgh, Stockbridge Road,?
now called Church Lane.
A tradition exists, that about 1730 the magistrates
offered to a residenter in Canon Mills all the
ground between Gabriel?s Road and the Gallowlee,
in perpetual fee, at the annual rent of a crown
bowl of punch; but so worthless was the land then,
producing only whim and heather, that the offer
was rejected. (L? Old Houses in Edinburgh.?)
The land referred to is now worth more than
A15,ooo per annum. .
Prior to the commencement of the new town,
the only other edifices. on the site were the Kirkbraehead
House, Drumsheugh House, near the old
Ferry Road, and the Manor House of Coates.
Drumsheugh House, of which nothing now remains
but its ancient rookery in Randolph Crescent,
was removed recently. Therein the famous
Chevaliei Johnstone, Assistant A.D.C. to Prince
Charles; was concealed for a time by Lady Jane
Douglas, after the battle of Culloden, till he escaped
to England, in the disguise of a pedlar.
Alexander Lord Colville of Culross, a distinguished
Admiral of the White, resided there s u b
sequently. He served at Carthagena in 1741, at
Quebec and Louisbourg in the days of Wolfe, and
died at Drumsheugh on the zIst of May, 1770.
His widow, Lady Elizabeth Erskine, daughter of
Alexander Earl of Kellie, resided there for some
years after, together with her brother, the Honourable
Andrew Erskine, an officer of the old 71st,
disbanded in 1763, an eccentric character, who
figures among Kay?s Portraits, and who in
1793 was drowned in the Forth, opposite Caroline
Park. Lady Colville died at Drumsheugh in
the following year, when the house and lands
thereof reverted to her brother-in-law, John Lord
Colville of Culross. And so lately as 1811 the
mansion was occupied by James Erskine, Esq.,.
of Cambus.
Southward of Drumsheugh lay Bearford?s Parks,.
mentioned as ? Terras de Barfurd ? in an Act in.
favour of Lord Newbattle in 1587, named from
Hepburn of Bearford in Haddingtonshire.
In 1767 the Earl of Morton proposed to have a
wooden bridge thrown across the North Loch
from these parks to the foot of Warriston?s Close, but
the magistrates objected, on the plea that the property
at the dose foot was worth A20,ooo. The
proposed bridge was to be on a line with ?the
highest level ground of Robertson?s and Wood?s
Farms.? In the Edinburgh Adnediser for 1783
the magistrates announced that Hallow Fair was
to be ?held in the Middle Bearford?s Park.?
Lord Fountainhall, under dates 1693 and 1695,
records a dispute between Robert Hepburn of
Bearford and the administrators of Heriot?s hospital,
concerning ?the mortified annual rents
acclaimed out of his tenement in Edinburgh, called
the Black Turnpike,? and again in 1710, of an
action he raised against the Duchess of Buccleuch,
in which Sir Robert Hepburn of Bearford,
in I 633, is referred to, all probably of the same family.
The lands and houses of Easter and Wester
