The Grange.! GRANGE HOUSE. 49
?The chapel of St. Roque,? says Wilson, ?? has
not escaped the notice of the Lord Lyon King?s
eulogist, among the varied features of the landscape
that fill up the magnificent picture as Marmion
rides under the escort of Sir David Lindesay
to the top of Blackford Hill, in his approach to
the Scottish camp, and looks down on the martial
array of the kingdom, covering the wooded Links
of the Burghmuir. James IV. is there represented
as occasionally wending his way to attend mass at
the neighbouring chapels of St. Katharine or St.
Roque j nor is it unlikely that the latter may have
been the scene of the monarch?s latest acts of devotion,
ere he led forth that gallant array to perish
around him on the field of Flodden.?
In the ?Burgh Records,? 15th December, 1530,
we find that James Barbour, master and governor
of ?the foul folk on the mure? (i.e., the peststricken),
had made away with the goods and
clothes of many that were lying in the chapel of
St. Roqui; and that all who had any claims to
make should bring them forward on a given day;
but if the clothes proved of small value, they were
to be burned or given to the poor.
In 1532 the provost and bailies, ?moved by
devotion, have, for the honour of God and his
Blissit Mother, Virgen Mane, and the holy confessour
Sanct Rok,? for prayers to be said for the
souls of those that lie in the said kirk and kirkyard,
granted to Sir John Young, the chaplain
thereof, three acres of the Burghmuir, with another
acre to build houses upon; for which he and
his successors were bound to keep the chapel
in repair, and its slates and ? glaswyndois ? watertight.
These acres are described in the ? Records ? as
lying between the land of James Makgill on the
west, and of William Henderson on the east,
Braid?s Burn on the south, and the common
passage of the Muir (ie., the Grange Loan) on the
north.
Early in the present century, by a new proprietor,
? the whole of this interesting and venerable
ruin was swept away as an unsightly encumbrance
to the estate of a retired trades.
man.?
Close by, a tombstone from its burying-ground
long remained at the corner of a thatched cottage
in the Loan. It bore the date 1600. Others
were to be found in the adjacent boundary
walls.
Now villas are springing up fast between the
Loan and Blackford Hill, which in altitude is 698
feet above the level of the sea, and of which Scott
says, in ?? Marmion?.:-
?Blackford ! on whose uncultured breast,
A truant boy, I sought the nest,
Or listed as I lay at rest ;
While rose on breezes thin
The murmur of the city crowd :
And, from his steeple, jingling loud,
Among the broom, and thorn, and whin,
St. Giles?s mingling din.?
The tiends and tithes of the Burghmuir belonged
of old to the abbey of Holyrood, but this
did not prevent the acquisition of its fertile acres
by private proprietors, or their transference to different
ecclesiastical foundations.
The great parish church of the city had at the
earliest period of its existence as chief clergyman
an official styled the Vicar of St. Giles?s, who possessed
an interest in a farmhouse called St. Giles?s
Grange, which has given the name of The Grange
to all the pleasant suburb around where once it
stood.
In 1679, William Dick of Grange succeeded
Janet McMath, his mother, relict of William Dick
of Grange, in the lands of St. Giles?s Grange, and
eighteen arable acres of the Sciennes.
Before the Grange House was enlarged by the
late Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, it presented, in the
early part of the present century, as shown by
Storer, the appearance of a plain little castellated
house, with only three chimneys and one circular
turret.
Of old it was the patrimony of the Dicks, from
whom it went to the Lauders; and in the Register
of Entails for 1757, we find Mrs. Isabel Dick of
Grange, and Sir Andrew Lauder of Fountainhall,
her husband, entailing the lands and estate
of Grange. They were cousins. He was the fifth
baronet of the old and honourable line of Lauder,
and she was the only child and heiress of William
Dick of Grange, whose arms, argent a fesse wavy,
azure, between three mullets gules, were thenceforward
quartered with the rampant griffin of the
Lauders. She died in the old Grange House in
1758; and there also died her mother, in 1764,
?Anne Seton, relict of William Dick of Grange:
and eldest daughter of Sir Alexander Seton of
Pitmedden, some time senator of the. College of
Justice.? (Edinburgh Advertiser, Vol. I.) Her
sister Jean died in the same house four years after.
Dr. William Robertson, the historian and preacher,
resided in the old Grange House in the later years
of his life, and there his death occurred, on the I I th
June, I 7 93-
It was after the succession of Sir Thomas Dick
Lauder, a well-known Zittirateur in Edinburgh society,
who, early in life, was an officer of the Cameron
Highlanders, that the Grange House was enlarge<,
103
