307 - Trinity.] EASTER AND WESTER PILTON.
Now Trinity possesses a great number of handsome
villas in intersecting streets, a railway station,
and an Episcopal chapel called Christ Church,
which figured in a trial before the law courts of
Scotland, that made much noise in its time-the
Yelverton case.
At Wardie, not far from it, there died, in only
his thirty-eighth year, Edward Forbes, who, after
being a Professor in King?s College, London, was
appointed to the chair of Natural History in the
University of Edinburgh in May, 1854. He was
a man of distinguished talent and of an affectionate
nature, his last words being ? My own wife 1 ? when
she inquired, as he was dying, if he knew her.
Soon after she contracted a marriage with the
Hon. Major Yelverton, whose battefy of artillery
had just returned from Sebastopol, and was
quartered in Leith Fort. The marriage took place
in the little church at Trinity, and was barely
announced before the Major was arrested on a
charge of bigamy by the late Miss Theresa Longworth,
with whom he had contracted, it was
averred, an irregular marriage in Edinburgh. Before
this she had joined the Sisters of Chanty at T?arna,
and lived a life of adventure. Not satisfied with the
Scottish marriage, they went through another ceremony
before a Catholic priest in Ireland, where the
ceremony was declared legal, and she was accepted
as Mrs. Yelverton. She then endeavoured to
prove a Scottish marriage, by habit and repute, residence
at Circus Place, and elsewhere, but judgment
was given against her by the late Lord Ardmillan,
and after twenty years of wandering all over the
world, writing books of travel, she died at Natal in
September, 1881, retaining to the last the title of
Viscountess, acguired on old Lord Avonmore?s
death.
Horatio Macculloch, R.S.A., the well-known
landscape painter, lived latterly in a villa adjoining
Trinity Grove, and died there on the 15th June,
1867.
In 1836 some plans were prepared by Messrs.
Grainger and Miller, the eminent Edinburgh engineers,
and boldly designed for the construction of
a regular wet dock at Trinity, with a breakwater
outer harbour of twenty acres in extent, westward
of Newhaven pier and the sunken rock known as
the West Bush ; but the proposal met with no support,
and the whole scheme was abandoned.
On the noble road leading westward to
Queensfeny there was completed in April, 1880,
near the head of the Granton thoroughfare, a
Free Church for the congregation of Granton and
Wardie, which, since its organisation in 1876, under
the Rev. P. C. Purves, had occupied an iron building
near Wardie Crescent. The edifice is an ornament
to the swiftly-growing locality. The relative
proportions of the nave, aisles, and transepts, are
planned to form a ground area large enough tg
accommodate the increasing congregation, and
galleries can be added if required. This area is
nearly all within the nave, and is lighted by the
windows of the clerestory, which has flying buttresses.
The style is Early English, the pulpit is of
oak on a stone pedestal. This church has a tower
seventy-five feet high, and arrests the eye, as it
stands on a species of ridge between the city and
the sea.
Ashbrook, Wardieburn House, and other handsome
mansions, have been erected westward, and
ere long the old farmsteading of Windlestrawlee
(opposite North Inverleith Mains) will, of course,
disappear. It is called ?? Winliestraley ? in Kincaid?s
?? Local Gazetteer? for 1787, and is said to take its
name from ?? windlestrae (the name given to crested
dogstail grass- Cynosurus prisfatus), and applied
in Scotland to bent and stalks of grass found OII
moorish ground.?
An old property long known as Cargilfield, lay to
the north-east of it, and to the westward are Easter
and Wester Pilton, an older property still, which
has changed owners several times.
On the 16th of May, 1610, Peter Rollock, of
Pilton, had a seat on the bench as Lord Pilton.
He had no predecessor. He had been removed,
when Bishop of Dunkeld (in 1603), says Lord
Hailes, that the number of extraordinary lards
might be reduced to four, and he was restored by
the king?s letter, with a special proviso that this
should not be precedent of establishing a fifth extraordinary
lord. The lands-or a portion thereof
-afterwards became a part of the barony of Royston,
formed in favour of Viscount Tarbet; but
previous to that had been in possession of a family
named Macculloch, as Monteith in his ? Theatre
of Mortality,? inserts the epitaph upon the tomb on
the east side of the Greyfriars Church, of Sir Hugh
Macculloch, of Pilton, Knight, descended from the
ancient family of Macculloch of CadbolI. He died
in August, 1688, and the stone was erected by his
son James. About I 780 Pilton became the property
of Sir Philip Ainslie, whose eldest daughter Jean
was married there, in 1801, to Lord Doune, eldest
son of the Earl of Moray-a marriage that does not
appear in the ?Peerages ? generally, but is recorded
in the Edinburgh HeruZd for that year. She was his
second wife, the first being a daughter of General
Scott of Bellevue and Balcomie. Lord Doune
then resided, and for a few years before, in the old
Wrightshouse, or ?? Bruntsfield Castle,? as it is
308 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Granton.
called in the Herar?d for 1797-9 in its announcements
of the purchase of the buildings for the erection
of Gillespie?s Hospital.
In one of the villas at Boswell Road, Wardie,
immediately overlooking the sea, Alexander Smith
the well-known poet and essayist, author of the
?? Life Drama,? which was held up to Continental
admiration in the Reuue des Deux Mondes, ? City
Poems,? ?? Dreamthorpe,? and other works, and
whom we have already mentioned in the account
in the western part of Royston and the adjacent
lands of Wardie, both above and below the tide
mark, and that when fuel was scarce, the poor even
went to carry the coal away; also that a pit
was sunk in Pilton wood in 1788, but was
abandoned, owing to the inferiority of the coal. In
the links of Royston there are vestiges of ancient
pits.
Bower mentions that a great ?carrick? of the
Lombards was shattered on the rocks at Granton,
MAP OF GRANTON AND NEIGHBOURHOOD.
of Warriston Cemetery, resided for many years,
and there he died on the 5th of January, 1867.
The Duke of Buccleuch is proprietor of Caroline
Park, and has at his own expense raised erections
which will attract shipping to the incipient
town and seaport of Granton, and lead to the
speedy construction of another great sea-port for
Edinburgh, to which it will soon be joined by a
network of streets ; in many quarters near it these
are rising fast already.
But before describing its stately eastern and
western piers, we shall glance at some of the past
history of the locality.
In the ?Old Statistical Account,? we find it stated,
that there are appearances of coal on the sea-side,
in October, 1425, where, curiously enough, some
ancient Italian coins were found not long ago.
The place at which the English army landed in
1544, and from there they began their march on
Leith, was exactly where Granton pier is now. In
an account of the late ? Expedition in Scotland,
sente to the Ryght Honorable Lord Russell, Lorde
Privie Seale, from the kings armye there by a
friend of hys,? the landing is described thus
(modernised), and is somewhat different from
what is generally found in Scottish history.
?That night the whole fleet came to anchor
under the island of Inchkeith, three niiles from the
houses of Leith. The place where we anchored
hath long been called the English R0a.d; the
