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Old and New Edinburgh Vol. VI

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3 18 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [cogs. p. baronet of Nova Scotia by James VII., in 1687. The close of the family is thus recorded in the Scottish Register for 1795 :-?September I. At Cramond House, died Adam, Inglis, Esq., last surviving son af Sir John Inglis of Cramond, Bart. He was instructed in grammar and learning at the High School -and University of Edinburgh, and at the Warrington Academy in Lancashire ; studied law at Edinburgh, and was ca!led to thc bar in 1782. In May, 1794~ was appointed lieutenant of one of the Midlothian troops of cavalry, in which he paid the most assiduous attention to the raising and discipline of the men. On the 23rd August he was attacked with fever, and expired on the 1st September, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, unmarried.? Cramond House is now the seat of the Craigie-Halkett family. Some three miles south of Cramond lies the district of Gogar, an ancient and suppressed parish, a great portion of which is now included in that of Corstorphine Gogar signifies ?? light,? according to some ?etymological notices,? by Sir Janies Foulis of Colinton, probably from some signal given to an army, as there are, he adds, marks of a battle having taken p1ac.e to the westward?; but his idea is much more probably deduced from the place named traditionally ? the Flashes,? the scene of Leslie?s repulse of Cromwell in 1650. The name is more probably Celtic The ? Ottadeni and Gadeni,? says a statistical writer, ?? the British descendants of the first colonists, enjoyed their original land during the second century, and have left memorials of their existence in the names of the Forth, the Almond, the Esk, the Leith, the Gore, the Gogar, and of Cramond, Cockpen, Dreghorn,? etc. The church of Gogar was much older than that of Corstorphine, but was meant for a scanty population. A small part of it still exists, and after the Reformation was set apart as a burial-place for the lords of the manor. Gogar was bestowed by Robert Bruce on his trusty comrade in many a well-fought field, Sir Alexander Seton, one of the patriots who signed that famous letter to the Pope in 1330, asserting the independence of the Scots ;? and vowing that so long as one hundred of them remained alive, they would never submit to the King of England. He was killed in battle at Kinghorn in 1332. Soon after this establishment the Parish of Gogar was acquired by the monks of Holyrood; but before the reign of James V. it had been constituted an independent rectory. In 1429 Sir John Forrester conferred its tithes on his collegiate church at Corstorphine, and made it one of the prebends there. In June, 1409, Walter Haliburton, of Dirleton, in a charter dated from that place, disposed of the lands and milne of Goga to his brother George. Among the witnesses were the Earls of March and Orkney, Robert of Lawder, and others. In 1516 the lands belonged to the Logans of Restalrig and others, and during the reign of James VI. were in possession of Sir Alexander Erskine, Master of Mar, appointed Governor of Edinburgh Castle in I 5 78. Though styled ?the Master,? he was in reality the second son of John, twelfth Lord Erskine, and is stated by Douglas to have been an ancestor of the Earls of Kellie, and was Vice-ChamberIain of Scotland. His son, Sir Thomas Erskine, also of Gogar, was in 1606 created Viscount Fenton, and thirteen years afterwards Earl of Kellie and Lord Dirleton. In 1599, after vain efforts had been made by its few parishioners to raise sufficient funds for an idcumbent, the parish of Gogar was stripped of its independence ; and of the two villages of Nether Gogar and Gogar Stone, which it formerly contained, the latter has disappeared, and the popu- Iation of the former numbered a few years ago only twenty souls. Grey Cooper, of Gogar, was made a baronet ot Nova Scotia in 1638. In 1646 the estate belonged to his son Sir John Cooper, Bart., and in 1790 it was sold by Sir Grey Cooper, M.P., to the Ramsays, afterwards of Barnton. A Cooper of Gogar is said to have been one Df the first persons who appeared in the High Street of Edinburgh in a regular coach. They were, as already stated, baronets of 1638, and after them came the Myrtons of Gogar, baronets of 1701, md now extinct. On the muir of Gogar, in 1606, during the prevalence of a plape, certain little ? lodges? were built by James Lawriston, and two other persons named respectively David and George Hamilton, for the accommodation of the infected ; but these edifices were violently destroyed by Thomas Marjoribanks, a portioner of Ratho, on the plea that their erection was an invasion of his lands, yet the Lords of the Council ordered theni to be re-built?? where they may have the best commodity of water,?? as the said muir was common property. The Edinburgh Cowant for April, 1723, records that on the 30th of the preceding March, ?? Mrs. Elizabeth Murray, lady toThomas Kincaid, younger, of Gogar Mains,? was found dead on the road from Edinburgh to that place, with all the appearance of having been barbarously murdered.
Volume 6 Page 318
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