This thread was originally written and published in June 2019.

French troops arrived in the Port of Leith in 1548 under the terms of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. The English King, Henry VIII was at war with Scotland to try and force a marriage between his son and the infant Mary, “Queen of Scots” and Scotland needed help from her ally to try and resist this “rough wooing“. Henry’s forces burnt Edinburgh and Leith in 1544. When they returned in 1547, they crushed the Earl of Arran’s army at the Battle of Pinkie, but still Scotland refused to come to terms with Henry. It was feared that the English would fortify Leith in the manner of the English Pale around Dublin and so the French were invited to step into the void.

The first of what would total 8,000 French soldiers began to arrive in Leith on June 16th 1548 under Seigneur d’Essé. The following month the 5 year old Queen Mary was sent to France for safekeeping. Back in Leith, the garrison set about fortifying the town, initially under the direction of Italian military engineers. These fortifications were of the latest type, known as Trace Itallienne (“Italian Line”), engineered for the age of gunpowder. The walls of Leith were apparently amongst the oldest instances (by some 10 years) of modern (i.e. gunpowder age) fortifications in the British isles. Out were the tall, stone walls of medieval castles, in were thick, low embankments of earth with carefully crafted ditches and slopes to resist cannon fire. Gone were the and rounded corner towers and in were squat, arrow-shaped bastions which had no defensive blind spots and upon which could be mounted cannon. These Trace Italienne fortifications were often known as Star Forts on account of their regular plan, and followed a common set of principles which are outlined in the diagram below.

Military artillery at this time fired on fairly flat trajectories, and so the low, broad walls were perfect for resisting it. The lower sections of the walls may have been faced in timber or stone to maintain their integrity, however their earthen cores could simply absorb canonnballs, rather than shattering like stone. This also made repairs particularly easy; you could just fill any breaches with spoil. The gently sloping glacis outside the ditch would encourage incoming cannonballs to simply bounce off and lose their energy.

One of the principal engineers of the walls was the Italian engineer in the pay of the French army, Piero di Strozzi. On his arrival in Scotland he engineered fortifications at Haddington during which time he was shot by a musket. To supervise his works at Leith, had to be carried round on a chair held aloft by four women.

From later surveys of Leith in the early 18th century that we known to be quite accurate, we can get a good idea of the scale of the walls and ditches that the Italian engineers would throw up around Leith. The walls would have been around 12-15m thick, surrounded by a ditch 16-20m wide – the infill of the walls was whatever was dug out of the ditch. Archaeological excavations in 2012 suggested that the ditch was 3.6m deep. I’ve not come across a reliable source for the height of the walls, but Victorian polymath David Brewster suggests “up to 20 feet” (6 metres) in the Edinburgh Encyclopædia; an almost 10 metre difference between base of the ditch and wall parapet that formed a truly formidable obstacle. When you consider that the defences were eventually some 3.8km (2.4 miles) long, totally enclosing the town to all but the sea and beach, you get a real idea of scale and effort.

To get an idea of what the fortifications looked like, look no further than Bob Marshall’s stunning 3D reconstruction of the contemporary Eyemouth Fort. This was along the coast from Leith and too was held and reconstructed by the French for Mary of Guise.

But this was a turbulent time, and nothing was ever as simple as Scotland and France vs. England. In 1554 Mary of Guise (Mary Queen of Scots’ mother and widow of King James V of Scotland) removed James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, as Regent of Scotland and filled the position herself as Queen Regent; the key posts in her administration increasingly filled with Frenchmen. This set her increasingly at loggerheads with the Scottish nobility who were erring at the time towards Protestantism. In 1557, a group of Protestant noblemen who were against the marriage of the young Mary Queen of Scots in France to the Dauphin, Crown Prince Francis of France, signed a covenant towards a Protestant Scotland. They called themselves the Lords of the Congregation, and on their side was the religious leader John Knox.

By 1558 the Lords had gathered enough military strength to face off in a stalemate with Scottish forces loyal to Mary of Guise and their French allies at Cupar Muir. By 1559 they had taken Edinburgh, although they could not overcome Mary’s garrison in the Castle. French reinforcements pushed they back to Stirling and so in February 1560, in a rare show of Anglo-Scottish unity, the Lords of the Congregation signed a treaty with Elizabeth I of England to accept English military support to try and eject the French. The scene was now set for a full-blown Siege of Leith, and the French set about redoubling their fortifications around the Town.

The French occupiers are reputed to have “displayed their usual gallantry to a goodly number of ladies, and entertained them royally in their quarters.” So much so, that during the siege, “these ladies did take to the ramparts to assist the soldiers in loading their muskets and hurling missiles at the besieging English. John Knox was incensed by this and wrote of them:

The Frenchmen’s Harlots of whom the maist part were Scotch strumpets, did no less cruelties than did the soldiers, for besides that they charged their pieces and minstrate unto them ither weapons some continually cast stones, some carried chimneys of burning fyre, some brocht timber and other impediments of weight, quhlik with great violence they threw over the wall upon our men, but especially when they began to turn their backs.

That is, in modern English:

The women followers of the French army, of whom the most part were Scottish women of ill repute, did no less cruelty than did the soldiers, for besides that they loaded their muskets and handed them other weapons, some continually threw stones, some carried burning braziers, some brought timber and other heavy items, which with great violence they threw over the walls upon the English soldiers, especially when they had turned their backs.

To read about what life might have been like under occupation in Leith, you may enjoy this thread on that subject. The French occupiers were war-hardened soldiers and there are many nice old illustrations that show what the occupying French forces may have looked like. Don’t be fooled by their bright and gaudy costumes, these were some of Europe’s most efficient and feared warriors. Below is a selection of arquebusiers and musketeers (or a hackbutters as foot soldiers equipped with firearms were known in Scotland, from the Dutch word haakbus for hook gun).

Their opponents were largely an English force, again professional soldiers, with support given by their Scottish protestant allies. However, despite bringing sufficient money to hire a significant local force, the English commanders struggled to recruit and indeed the lack of local support from their apparent allies seems to have perplexed them.

We can be fairly confident about what Leith looked like in 1560 thanks to a military birdseye view map known as the Petworth House Map (on account of where it is located). It too may have been made by the English Engineer Richard Lees who made the 1544 map of the Burning of Edinburgh, except by now he was on the side of the Scottish protestants. You can take my word for having plotted out a lot of the details of this map on top of subsequent references that he got much of it spot on. We can see the town surrounded by the broad, sloping walls and their ditch, with the characteristic arrow-shaped bastions at its corners. We can see artillery mounted on these bastions, and we can see a network of surrounding trenches constructed by both sides. The Port of Leith appears to have been obstructed with blockships to prevent an assault from the sea, the Sandport (the sandy beach shown above the boulders of the harbour, which was used for launching smaller craft) has been fenced off, and upstream the river has been blocked by a timber paling.

A plate made for the History of Scotland by Raphael Holinshead in 1577 corroborates the above arrangement, showing Leith during the Lang Siege of 1573 in its top corner. We see the same pattern of walls and bastions and the trenches and arrow-headed Star Forts of the besiegers outside.

If we trace the Petworth map onto a modern map, using fixed reference points such as the churches, bridges, other older surveys and modern-day street lines that respect old boundaries, we can get a pretty good idea of the outlines of the walls and ditches. On the picture below, the main ramparts are in green with the brown lines the wooden palings. The names of the fortifications and other landmarks such as the churches have been annotated.

Nothing remains of these fortifications but some of the modern street alignments are remarkably faithful to them. The south part of Constitution Street, John Street, John Street Lane Lane, for instance, almost exactly follow the lines of the eastern wall and bastion. This should not be surprising really, the remains of these fortifications survived for almost 200 years after the siege and so came to form property boundaries in their own rights.

And in the streets of the Timberbush area, again we see a remarkable correlation. This had been named Ramsay’s Fort after its commander. That of Little London had nothing to do with that particular city, or the English, it was probably a pre-existing placename that comes from a word akin to the Gaelic Lunndan, for a green or marshy place.

The French fortifications were not the limit of the military engineering here; there was a whole counter-system of redoubts and trenches surrounding Leith that the besieging English forces (and their Scottish Protestant allies) constructed. These formed a ring from Madeira Street in the west to Leith Links via Pilrig Park. Below is my estimation of their positions, based on a number of previous archaeological and desktop evidence papers. The English / Protestant positions are in red, the defending French in blue. The thicker lines are the redoubts (“mounts“) and the thinner ones are the siege trenches. These extend all the way south to Lochend House, which seems to have been where one of the headquarters of the English positions were centred.

Queen Regent Mary of Guise died on June 11th 1560, allowing the siege to end (although the political turmoil in the country did not). The Treaty of Edinburgh was agreed in early July, and both French and English forces left the country and the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France was at an end. The fortifications of Leith were ordered to be slighted, and the stone and timber which had been used to face them would have been quickly liberated as building materials. The huger cores of rubble and earth took some 250 years to finally be flattened. Maps of 1682, 1693 and 1709 all clearly show the fortifications as being substantially present (if ruinous).

Until September 2022, I would have sworn blind to you that there were no first-hand images of any of the walls of Leith in situ. So on this occassion, I was very delighted to be proved wrong and find that as late as 1788, a precocious Edinburgh schoolboy by the name of George Sandy made a high quality sketch of the last remaining part of the “West Bastion at Leith”, which he definitely identified as being from the 1548-1560 period (and therefore not part of Cromwell’s Citadel).

It is my best guess that Sandy’s ruin was in the vicinity of Leith Mills, where the housing development known as The Quilts now stands. Maps of this time clearly show that the remains of the bastion known as The Little Bulwack were still present at this spot, best seen in Alexander Wood’s Town Plan of Leith of 1777. You can read Sandy’s diary in full courtesy of its keeper, the Signet Society, who digitised it in February 2022 as part of their 200th anniversary celebrations.

There is so much more to say about the Siege and walls of Leith, but let me conclude this thread by hopefully debunking what is a very common and well-circulate misconception. There are two large mounds on Leith Links known as the Giants Brae and Lady Fyfe’s Brae. It is repeatedly claimed that these are the remains of the English artillery forts from 1560, but the compelling mapping evidence, combined with written accounts completely contradict this. Furthermore, they are far too small and far too close to the walls of Leith to have been of any utility as siege positions. In my opinion it is most likely these were simply features made in the early 19th century on one of the numerous, documented occasions when the Links was being levelled and flattened to improve its utility as a public park.

If you’d like a “virtual tour” of the walls of Leith, I tried to animate this in a Youtube video a few years ago. It’s the best my technology will allow, so please be forgiving!

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