This thread was originally written and published in July 2019.

Look what arrived when I was away…

Yes, this is a copy of the first known town detailed survey and map of Leith, all the way from the National Archives in Kew. It was surveyed in 1709 by the English engineer John Naish, who had been sent to the Forth to survey potential locations for a naval yard. There’s much to get excited about with this amazing old map. No, it’s not the earliest accurate representation of Leith on a map (Adair shows it in 1682, Grenville Collins in 1693, but the inner detail is stylised and figurative. And the Petworth House Map of 1560 is surprisingly accurate too, but it is a much older, birds-eye, illustrative style).

So is Naish’s survey accurate? Well, we can georeference the known points onto a modern streetmap, and I can tell you it lines up with remarkably little distortion – he did very well!

So now we know that we can trust what the surveyor recorded, let’s use his wonderful map to take a tour of Leith in the early 18th century! The dominant and unavoidable visual features are two generations of Leith’s fortifications. The town is ringed by the old 16th century walls dating back to the siege of Leith. It is clear that even 150 years later and after multiple demands that they be slighted, the corner bastions and much of the wall and ditch lines are still clearly in place.

And in North Leith, Cromwell’s mid-1650s Citadel fills the gap between the Water of Leith and the shoreline; the latter feature has clearly been nibbling away at the north of this structure, leaving only three walls and bastions in place. But once again, walls, bastions and ditches are clearly defined.

The town itself is a warren of closes and wynds, with a rather haphazard layout that predates town planning. At the letter A is the only substantial building of any note in Leith at this time, South Leith Kirk, or St. Mary’s.

The only other prominent buildings noted in the town are altogether smaller. The Town House (Tolbooth) at C, North Leith Kirk (or St. Ninian’s) at B, the sole bridge across the river at E (built in 1493 by Abbot Bellenden), and the Mary of Guise House (or “Palace”) at D.

At the south of the map we see “the foot road to Edinburgh“; what we would now call Leith Walk. This route was formed along a fortification built by General Leslie in 1650 to defend Edinburgh and Leith against Cromwell, and what do you know, we can see it clearly runs along a substantial old wall! Of interest as well is what appears to be a bridge at its head. Daniel Defoe described his 1706 visit to it thus; “a very handsome gravel walk, 20 Feet broad, continued to the Town of Leith, which is kept in good repair at the public Charge, and no Horse suffered to come upon it“. People walked along the top of the old wall where their feet would be drier (the High Walk) and although it was possible to take a horse along the Low Walk at its base, horse and cart traffic to Leith from Edinburgh went via Abbeyhill and the Eastern (Easter) Road. The latter road we can see running off to the bottom right on its old alignment.

In the area of the port we can see a lot more detail, unsurprising given the reasons that Naish was making his survey. In South Leith (right river bank), we see the quayside of the Shore at H, the old windmill at M and a wooden pier. On the North Leith (left bank) we see a pair of stone piers, with the outer one being wooden for some distance before turning to stone. The letters I refer to the proposed area of the Naval Yard, N we can assume is to be a large platform structure and O a graving dock or slipway. Over to the right we see the clear angular lines around “A wood yard”, this refers to the Timberbush area, the bonded store and exchange for timber imported into the town. Timber was tipped off ships and floated under the quayside to be stored and traded in the Bush; Bourse is an old French word for an exchange. Those clearly defined walls to seaward relate directly to the defences of 1560, the are the base of a bastion known as Fort Ramsay.

All out at sea at the very north of our map is the lonely Beacon which marked the entrance to the safe, navigable passage into the Port. It was a structure of wooden poles and iron, from which a bell and lantern were hung. Access to the port was tidal and tricky and required careful navigation. As early as 1504, King James IV had a pair of “bekynys” placed here.

There’s an intriguing ring of dots marked on what is Giles Street. For a long time I had no idea what they might refer to, but the answer is “the old green tree“. This was described as a “green tree growing on the south side of Giles Street at a point now just north of the entry of Spiers Place“. It was significant enough to be recorded on this map and be a local place name for a long time after its demise; an 1849 Town Plan of Leith shows the building here was called Green Tree Place and it is in use in newspaper death announcements up to 1869.

Naish’s survey was obviously done in a relative hurry, and concentrated on the nautical, navigation and defensive features. Although he recorded most of the blocks of buildings and the wynds and closes, it is hard to make things out. So I have taken my virtual crayons to the map and coloured things in to show some of the differences. The water is naturally in blue. The coastal mud and sands in a sandy colour. The fortifications are grey and the buildings are in red.

And with reference to later maps that record street names, we can fill some of these in too to help ourselves orientate 18th century Leith with the modern.

I can’t find much more out about this map. It’s not one that gets referred to in many references, and I can’t see there’s ever been an academic review of it. We know that it’s a military map, stamped with the symbol of the Board of Ordnance. As noted above, John Naish was an English surveyor and engineer for the Royal Navy. I wonder if we can assume this was the same John Naish who was soon master shipwright for the Royal Navy at Harwich from 1709-11 and at Woolwich in 1714-15?

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

---

_{These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur}