An afternoon in the Grassmarket

Re-reading my way through Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels is a self appointed task and with their heavy prose, an excellent soporific. No sleeping tablets required.

Having said that, they are grand tales of Scottish history even with the archaic and probably contrived speech of the "common" folk which was no doubt to give them authenticity but makes them a wee bit inaccessible to the modern reader.

After I was asked to do a background piece on Tales of the Covenant for the revival of Wilson's "Tales of the Border",

http://www.wilsonstales.co.uk/

 I read Old Mortality with its story of Covenanting times for some background colour and then carried on with The Black Dwarf, a failed Jacobite uprising and so to Heart of Midlothian with the Porteous Riots in Edinburgh and Rob Roy, the famous outlaw hero.

Coming down from Arthur's Seat (Blog 18/05/2017) with Scott fresh in my mind, I spent the rest of the day in the Grassmarket where the public executions of criminals and religious dissenters took place and features greatly in Scottish history and literature.

One of Rob Roy's sons was executed there on what was somewhat questionable evidence.

Many Covenanters died here and the site of the old gallows is now a memorial to them.

 Captain Porteous, a significant character in the first chapters of Heart of Midlothian, was the officer commanding the City Guard.  The Guard were universally disliked. They were mainly  Highlanders, armed with Lochaber axes, a fearsome weapon but were generally elderly  and less than competent. They were lampooned mercilessly by Robert Fergusson, the poet of Auld Reekie. 

Fergusson's statue outside the Canongate Kirk

At the execution of two men, Wilson and Robertson, Wilson had managed to impede three of the four guards while his companion Robertson knocked down the fourth and escaped.

The Edinburgh mob was always volatile and after Wilson was executed, they attacked the guard.  Captain Porteous ordered his men to fire on the crowd. Several were killed and the impetuous captain was tried for unlawful killing and sentenced to hang.  Queen Caroline in London granted a reprieve whereupon the incensed mob stormed the Tolbooth, seized Porteous and hanged him from a dyer's pole in the Grassmarket.   Not for the first, nor the last time, did the Scottish public resent interference from London in their affairs.

Executions were well attended and, if you owned a house or a "land" with a good view, then  there was money to be made...

"and to think what a weary walk they hae gien us", answered Mrs Howden with a  groan; "and sic a comfortable window I had gotten, within a penny-stane cast o' the scaffold – I could hear every word the minister said – and to pay twalpennies for my stand and a' for naething" *

 (The lady was extremely disgruntled at the reprieve of Captain Porteous)

A grand view of proceedings!

The  West Bow curves up from the Grassmarket to the Castle and at its foot is the old Bow Foot Well establish in1674 with water from a reservoir on the Castle mount to supply the townsfolk.

The Bow Head Well

It was up the West Bow that lived the notorious Major Weir and his sister. He had served with distinction as a Covenanter soldier being an original signatory to the document and was renowned for his strict Presbyterianism and preaching. On his sick bed, he and later, his sister, confessed to necromancy, incest and witchcraft. They were both executed. The confession may have been the deranged ramblings of dementia and religious mania and the sister's corroboration, an example of folie a deux in a submissive partner. Indeed, the provost, at first, did not believe them but as they persisted in their guilt then their fate was sealed.

Major Weir along with the more renowned, Deacon Brodie may have been an inspiration for RLS's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The only witchcraft on the West Bow now is aimed at the customer

 The houses on the south side of the Grassmarket that had originally been the property of the Knights Templar and then the Knights of St John had iron crosses fixed to them.

Such a cross can still be seen in Old St Paul's Church. It would have been the last thing seen by a condemned man...or woman.

 Half Hangit Maggie escaped the gibbet.  In 1742, she was accused of concealing her pregnancy and being delivered of a premature child which presumably died. She was sentenced to be hanged! Apparently, she revived in her coffin as it was trundled away and lived another forty years.

 A fascinating place is the Grassmarket.

* The Heart of Midlothian

Climbing Arthur's Seat

Arthur's Seat has been likened to a sleeping dragon or lion

How many capital cities have a mountain in the middle? Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro…..and Edinburgh. Rome might have its seven hills and Paris, its Montmartre but Edinburgh has eight hundred and twenty three feet of basalt towering over it, topping its volcanic siblings of the Castle Rock and Calton Hill.

Arthur’s Seat, likened to a sleeping dragon, is named after the legendary hero of the Goddodin, latinised to Votadini by the Romans and praised in poetry by the Welsh bards as the “men o’ the north”.  Arthur's surname was said to be Pendragon.

Iron Age ramparts can still be seen on the subsidiary summit of Crow Hill. and the crows are still there.

 What attracts them to that bare hill-top and has done so for centuries, long enough for folk to call the place after them? It can't be food or shelter. A puzzle.

The hill is a Marilyn (Blog 12/09/16) and an easy climb up to its summit affords magnificent views of the city, Auld Reekie of Robert Fergusson’s verse.

On a warm spring day the coconut-Malibu scent of the whin bushes in full flower filled the air with the hweet-hweet of the chiff-chaff as an accompaniment.

The summit was as busy as Princes Street with the chatter of a dozen languages as selfies were taken to be posted on social media proclaiming the achieving of the top to the entire world.

Edinburgh with the Forth Bridges

The views are great. The Pentlands hills to the south and north, across the Forth, to the Lomond hills and the Fife coast. The island of Inchkeith and Inchmickery lie off-shore with the Isle of May a smudge on the horizon.

Across the Firth of Forth

Dunsapie Loch and down the coast

 Eastwards, down the coast, the cone of Berwick Law, another volcanic plug, is easily seen (Blog12/09/16) and the white cap of the Bass. 

Edinburgh Castle

Westward lies the city with the Castle on its own craggy height and below, Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament.

Holyrood, the Scottish Parliament and the Calton Hill

On the way down, a wee diversion took me out to St Anthony's chapel perched on its own promontory above St Margaret's Loch. This and Dunsapie loch were created from boggy marshland in Victorian times.

The chapel seems to have been built as early as the 13th century possibly to take advantage of the local use of a traditional healing well nearby.

Edinburgh lassies would wash their face with the May Day dew to enhance their looks as recounted by Robert Fergusson in his poem Auld Reekie

On May-day, in a fairy ring,
We've seen them round St Anthon's spring,
Frae grass the cauler dew draps wring
To weet their een,
And water clear as crystal spring
To synd them clean

Surely a hearking back to a time even before St Anthony's chapel, to the time of Arthur and the sleeping dragon that is Arthur's Seat.

A grey heron stalks the waters of St Margaret's Loch

 From the chapel, a shady path gave me a chance to watch the bird life on the quieter end of the loch then back to the car and off to visit the Grassmarket with its grisly history of which more anon.

The Pech Stane

I went looking for the Pech-stane.    It is still listed in the RCAHMS Canmore website as one of our local standing stones.   A pech stane is an old Scots name for any such solitary stone. It was last visited by reviewers for RCAMHS in 1972 when it still measured 4' x 4' 6''x 4' 6'' - slightly less than the, probably fanciful, drawing in an old book on local history.

Alas, the Pech-stane is no more.  It has vanished, vanquished, after standing for millennia, by the demands of modern agriculture. It was just too much in the way of the tractor and combine harvester.

Fragments of the Pech-stane?

 The stone stood on a ridge in what had been the great Billie Mire. a vast quagmire so difficult to cross that it thwarted the advance of armies from Julius Agricola to Oliver Cromwell.  It is is still recalled in farm names such as Causewaybank.  The Pechstane on its rise may have been a marker for safe pathway through the morass.

The mire was guarded on its northern edge by the castles of Billie and Bunkle (Bonkyl) which sound like characters from a children's television programme. The castles were derelict long before the mire was drained in the nineteenth century.

Billie Castle

Bunkle (Bonkyl) Castle

The mire was the haunt of the bittern, the myre- drum in Auld Scots, a reference to its call, the myre snipe and the horse-gowk or greenshank.

No more the screaming bittern bellowing harsh

To its dark bottom shakes the shuddering marsh

John Leyden Scenes from Infancy

The draining of the bog meant the end for its inhabitants including those supernatural beings, the will o' the wisps and bogles that haunted it.

 From the earliest times folk had held these places in awe, entrances to the underworld. They had thrown valuable offerings into them and even sacrificial victims.

 A folk memory of this superstitious fear is captured in the fragment of verse.

Grisly Draedan* sat alane

   By the cairn and Pech-stane

          Said Billie wi' a segg** sae stout

          I'll soon drive grisly Draedan out

           Draedan leuched and stalked awa

             Syne vanished in a babanqua.***

*       (The) Dread one

**     probably, a bull-rush

***   a quaking bog

Now the Draedan Burn is a harmless watercourse and the great babanqua of the Billie Mire is fertile, productive farmland.

The Draedan Burn

The rich farmlands from the Billie Mire

The dreaded spirits of the bog have all vanished like the bittern and the Pech-stane. 

No sane person would like to return to those times but, wandering along the Draedan Burn  one feels, as Leyden did a couple of centuries ago, a twinge of regret, a fleeting wish to hear the myre-drum booming again among the rushes.