This thread was originally written and published in July 2019.

I was quite very excited to find this image in the Edinburgh City Libraries collection that I’d somehow missed before. It’s the “Gate of the Old Citadel of Leith“, an 1818 watercolour by the lawyer and prolific landscape artist of Edinburgh, James Skene.

The Citadel was part of Oliver Cromwell’s plan to subdue and control Scotland during his occupation of the country after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650. It could control the Port of Leith, from where the occupying forces could be provisioned. Its construction was ordered in 1653 and was subsidised by the City of Edinburgh to the tune of £60,000 Scots (£5,000) and overseen by Cromwell’s man on the ground, General Monck. According to Nicoll’s Diary, construction began on May 26th 1656. The occupiers brought with them a printing press to churn out official declarations and propaganda and so it’s no coincidence that the first newspaper in Scotland is said to have been printed on an English press within the Citadel; “The Mercurius Caledonius – Comprising The Affairs now in Agitation in Scotland With A Survey of Forraign Intelligence“. It only ran for 12 issues from Dec 1660 – Jan 1661 and is not to be confused with the later Caledonian Mercury. It printed reports from Parliament, “Forraign Intelligence” and other stories sourced from the London papers. Monck also encouraged other English merchants and industrialists to set up in the safety of The Citadel and they introduced the craft of glassmaking, something Leith would later become famous for.

As I may have said many times before, as far as I am aware there are no surviving contemporary illustrations or plans of The Citadel and the earliest map showing it accurately in plan was not made until 50 years later, after it was abandoned as a fortification and encroached upon by the sea. Before we look further at Skene’s illustration, it’s worth getting an idea of the layout of the fortress.

The Citadel followed the classic 5-pointed “Star Fort” layout, with projecting, arrowhead-shaped bastions at each point of the star. These were fortifications explicitly engineered for the age of artillery; the corner bastions formed raised firing platforms to mount your defensive cannons. Gone were the tall, stone walls of medieval castles, in were carefully sculpted and aligned ditches and earthen mounds to resist cannon fire. John Naish’s 1709 survey and plan of Leith is the best reference to get an accurate survey of some of the walls and internal buildings. Note we can only see three sides and corners of the five walls; even at this stage he calls it the “Ruins of the Cittadell”. It can be seen from where he delineates the “high water mark on a raging full sea” that where the remaining walls and bastions should be has been reclaimed by the North Sea. The ditch that surrounds it all could be filled to a depth of 6 feet, and it can be seen on Naish’s map that a small pond has formed to the east of the walls.

We also have a first-hand description of it during construction from the travelling English naturalist John Ray:

…one of the best fortifications that we ever beheld, passing fair and sumptuous. There are three forts [bastions] advanced above the rest and two platforms; the works around about are faced with freestone towards the ditch and are almost as high as the highest buildings within, and withal thick and substantial. Below are very pleasant, convenient and well-built houses for the governor, officers, and soldiers and for magazines and stores. There is also a good capacious chapel, the piazza, or void space within, as large as Trinity College, Cambridge, Great Court.

After the Stuart Restoration in 1660, The Citadel was abandoned as a military fortification. The contents of its chapel; its timber, seats, glass, masonry and even its steeple, were used in 1673 to refurbish that of Heriot’s Hospital. The City of Edinburgh were allowed to buy it back by King Charles II, so in effect they paid for it twice. Its walls were abandoned to the sea, or quarried out for building materials, and the modern buildings within them became something of a desirable place to live. John Skene’s delightful little sketch was made in 1818, a full 109 years after Naish’s map and 150 or more years after it was first built. But even in this time period, few other images of the subject matter were created and it remains a real rarity. So what does it show us of The Citadel, how does that relate to what we know of it and where was the artist positioned to sketch from. Let’s now find out, shall we?

Despite being a small watercolour, Skene has crammed a lot of interesting detail in there. The obvious thing is it shows a port (gateway). From this we can confirm that the gateway was surrounded with dressed masonry, the walls themselves were faced in stone and were likely filled with earth and rubble. It also gives us an idea of overall idea of the height of the walls and gateways as there are figures here for scale. If we suppose these are accurate, then the gateway might be 10-12 feet high and the walls 20-30 feet in total. The wall height of the contemporary Ayr Citadel is 25 feet, so this fits nicely.

In the background of the image we can see limewashed buildings with pan-tiled roofs; standard, vernacular east coast Scottish style at this time. This building looks particularly tall, but if we work it out from the window spacing, it’s probably just 3 storeys plus an attic dormer. Skene often plays with the height of buildings and stretches them to make the scene look more dramatic. The chimneys are smoking, so these buildings are in use, most likely residential.

We can also see that the blocks of buildings here don’t meet at right angles, given it was a five-sided fortification we would expect them to therefore be at about 72 degrees (give or take, as it was a slightly squished pentagon in plan). This distant range again looks to be 3 storeys with perhaps 2 in the attic dormer.

We see can also see street lighting. From a previous thread on the topic we can be sure these are “train oil” (i.e. whale) lamps.

And a woman hangs out her washing to dry on the grassy slope that is all that remains of the former wall embankment.

In the foreground, two men appear to be working stones. He in the red seems to have a regular block propped up and his partner in the blue looks like he’s trying to heave a slab off the ground. I wager they are reclaiming masonry from the collapsed walls; we know at both Leith and Ayr that this took place.

And just to the right of the two masons are two intriguing square posts. The Citadel was surrounded by a broad engineered ditch, which we can clearly see on Naish’s map, and it’s more than likely it would have had wooden trestle drawbridges across it. It’s nice to think that those posts may be part of that, they are after all aligned with the gateway.

In the left midground we have yet more pantile roofed, whitewashed buildings. This range is two storeys and has curving, external stairs to the 1st floor. We know that there were at least two 2-storey blocks within the complex which would have been barracks quarters and stables and we can see evidence in maps of the late 18th and early 19th century that some of the buildings had external staircases.

And lastly, auld Leith wouldn’t be auld Leith without a forest of masts and rigging in the background. These are the ships of the port, crammed into the river basin beyond. There were no formal wet docks here at this time, everything tied up in the river mouth and alongside the quays of North and South Leith.

So to conclude an answer to the first question, we can see rather a lot. We can see that the fortifications were largely gone, but bits remained; we can see its buildings were actively occupied and in reasonably good repair at this time, and we get a good idea of the building style and some of its inner layout.

And on to the second part; where was Skene’s viewpoint from where he made his drawing? Well that’s easy of course because we know exactly where The Citadel’s port was as it’s still there! (Many people are amazed to find out that there’s a well preserved section of Cromwellian Fort wall hiding in plain sight at the end of a car park in Leith).

An 1804 Town Plan showing Leith by John Ainslie is roughly contemporary with Skene’s illustration. The gateway in the photograph above is marked S, and so Skene would have to have been outside (to the east or right of the S), looking inwards or west.

Except there’s actually three problems with this hasty conclusion.

1. Firstly, in Skene’s image we are looking into The Citadel from outside and there is no way for there to be ships and masts in the left background as that is dry land well away from the shoreline. Skene is a reliable and accurate illustrator, it’s not likely he just made a big mistake.
2. Secondly, there was no range of buildings in the north of the inner courtyard of The Citadel; the buildings on the right of Skene’s image should not be there.
3. Thirdly, and crucially, the arch in Skene’s picture is a plain, rounded arch and clearly doesn’t match the segmental profile of the one in the photo above; it is also finished plainer, missing the tracery.

So how can we be looking at the arch from outside The Citadel bearing all of this in mind? The answer is quite simple actually, we can’t be. We are looking at a different arch! – Until the early 19th century, there was the remains of another port; the western or St. Nicholas Port. It is clearly marked T on the map below, set into W, which is the remains of old walls.

Suddenly it all begins to fall into place. Skene is located on the shore, to the left of the above map, looking at the St. Nicholas Port. The stonemasons are working not on the shore but in the ditch outside the walls, and the washerwoman is hanging up her whites on the slope of that wall W. Beyond is the range of buildings marked X and on the map can see two small projections on those buildings, which I would suggest are the external stairways. Beyond X is the further range of buildings offset from them at an angle around 72 degrees. Skene is now looking directly towards the piers and quayside of the Port, shown on the map below, and so the masts and ships are now in the correct place.

Lastly, we can corroborate all pf this with a further map, that by William Bell dated 1813, which shows the layout of buildings and land ownership in The Citadel at that time, and confirms two Citadel Ports again; you can see one marked on the left below the word “Property” of “Mr. Campbell’s Property” and the other on the right, to the right of “Citidal Green“. Bell’s map shows that at this time the whole area was being encroached upon by the building of the wet docks.

I’ve only ever seen one other illustration of the western port of the Citadel, which refers to it as “Oliver’s Mount” (i.e. Cromwell) on account of the mass of earth that had once formed the core of the wall rising above it. Confusingly it shows the passageway as bifurcating, which makes little defensive or engineering sense, and conflicts with Skene’s sketch. However, my understanding is at one time it may have been used as a cattle store and had been given a dividing wall internally. The artist of the below drawing may have been working off of a second-hand description and hence made it look like there were two separate passages, not one that had been divided.

Another semi-contemporary image shows the “Cromwell House“, in which Cromwell most likely never stayed. It was probably built as a governor’s mansion and would have been a desirable property to take over after the fort was abandoned to residential use. The general style and scale of this building does not contradict Skene’s illustration. This building, also known as the “Governor’s House” was still standing in 1825 when it was advertised as for sale.

A last piece of the puzzle and one which helps to tie everything nicely together can be found an etching by John Clerk of Eldin (who was a thoroughly good landscape draughtsman). It is something which is very easy to miss, but if we squint at “Leith from the West” we can see our gateway (highlighted blue) and the range of two-storey buildings with the curved, external staircases (red). The Leith Custom House is highlighted in yellow to help get our bearings. The full engraving is digitised in the National Galleries Scotland collection, you can zoom in on it and explore it at your leisure.

We can then take all of this evidence and add it on to Naish’s map to get a good idea of the layout and what the various features we can see on it actually were for.

I know of know reconstruction plan or illustration of the Leith Citadel, but one does exist for another one of the Scottish Cromwellian citaels of this era, that of Ayr. This is similar in some respects to Leith as it was built on the shore of a port town, but was larger and had 6 instead of 5 corner bastions. The illustration below gives a reasonable impression of what Leith would have looked like though.

Surviving sections of the walls of Ayr also give us a good idea of what Leith might have looked like:

I find the Leith Citadel hugely enigmatic. It was a massive, dominant fortification that was totally unlike anything else in this part of the world. It was built at great expense and yet from a military point of view was abandoned within a few years of completion. It very briefly saw some military action in 1715 when Jacobites under Mackintosh of Borlum occupied it and had a standoff with government forces before retreating and briefly in 1780 some old cannons were mounted on its walls to counter the threat posed by John Paul Jones. I also find it remarkable that even though much of The Citadel survived so long and after its abandonment, so little was left by the way of record. We are lucky indeed to have the remaining gateway and a small section of wall, tucked away in a car park in North Leith.

The other great survivor of The Citadel is less obvious from the ground, but it you look at a map of streets in the area it is immediately obvious that there is a pentagonal arrangement, bounded by Cromwell Place, Couper Street, Coburg Street and Dock Street. This directly aligns with the orientation of the walls, ditches and internal structures as you can see on the below animated image transition of old maps of Leith on the modern streetscape and overlaid with a schematic of The Citadel.

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