This thread was originally written and published in February 2020. It has been lightly edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

There was some chat the other week about place names that were so unapparent in their pronunciation that they were the shibboleth of the real local. One which kept coming up for Edinburgh was “Sciennes”. First things first, it is Sciennes; as in Sheens; as in Machine; as in Rise of the Machines.

The name comes directly from St. Catherine of Siena, a convent in her honour being established in the locality in 1517. In Scots, Siena was Seynis or Schiennes. From there it’s a short leap to the modern Sciennes, but the pronunciation has remained true to the original Scots form.

The convent occupied a 2 acre site and was surrounded by an enormous wall, some 13 feet high. The land had been fued off the Burgh Muir (common moor land owned by the city) to the Canon of St. Giles in 1513, who founded a chapel and hermitage to St. John before giving it to the Sisters.

Given the location of the convent some 1,000m outside of the city walls (hence the big defensive enclosure) it is consistently missed off of all the older town plans and it’s not until Kirkwood’s plan of 1817 that it makes an appearance. We can see an old rendition of Scienes and the reference to Siena. The designation as a monastery is a mistake.

Notice the 2 arrows in the last map; and notice that they correspond to 2 obvious kinks in the street layouts. These mark the turn of the boundary wall of the convent. I have found a good rule of thumbs when looking at older streets in Edinburgh is that if there is a bend or kink in a road that seems to serve no real purpose, and interrupts an otherwise regular patter, it’s more than likely that it respects the alignment of an even older property boundary.

It also explains why Sciennes Street (marked in green, now just Sciennes) splits off at a very shallow angle from Causewayside (red arrow) – until the early 19th century one of the two main road south east out of the city – leaving that odd gushet of Lord Russell Place; it was the alignment of the original footpath to the convent from St. Giles.

After the quagmire of the Boroughloch was drained and the Meadows began to be laid out as a pleasant, formal park, some of the rich of the city built large villas off it. A roadway formed at the back of the plots to give coach access, but couldn’t run straight through at the east end as it was blocked by Sciennes Hill House (red X), so instead only got as far as Sciennes Street.

Now Sciennes Hill House isn’t actually on a hill as such, but when entering the city from Causewayside it is at the top of the rise in the land. The Scottish philosopher and historian of the Enlightenment, professor Adam Ferguson, lived there at the end of the 18th century.

The National Gallery has this sketch of his house at Sciennes Hill and notes a party there in 1786 attended by a young Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Dugald Stewart, Joseph Black, James Hutton, and John Home! One can only imagine how inadequate you’d feel, staring into your tea, sitting round a table while that lot had a debate! This was both the first and last time that the young Scott met Burns, and it was a formative experience for the former, then just 15 years old.

By this time, Sciennes was a well-established place name, and had given its name to that coaching lane along the back of the big villas, as Sciennes Road and to Sciennes Hill House; in turn the latter gave its name to Sciennes House Place and Sciennes Hill Place. And what of Sciennes Hill House itself? Well, believe it or not it’s actually still there, hiding in plain sight, even if you look straight at it. The clever disguise is that the back of the house is now the street façade, and the house has been subdivided and reconstructed into a tenement.

When you look at it armed with the facts, suddenly it looks incongruous. That rubble finish doesn’t quite look Victorian, that stair door is out of alignment, and the vertical spacing of the windows is well out with its neighbours.

Oh and those plaques are a bit of a give away too…

And if you can get around the back, this ain’t your usual finish for a tenement back green! It’s quite obviously the façade of a much grander Georgian house.

The building was restored in 1989 (there are pictures of it here just prior) and given the much more uniform appearance above. In the old engraving below it can be clearly seen where the original doorway and portico was, at 1st floor level, by the gap in the horizontal bands of masonry and window spacing.

St. Catherine of Siena lent her name to one other street in the neighbourhood, that of St. Catherine Place. A street of grand Victorian semi-detached villas on the boundary with The Grange. For some reason though, when Bertrams Ltd. built a large factory in Sciennes, they went for a different spelling and we got the St. Katherine’s Works. Bertrams were ironfounders and engineers, specialising in roller machines for papermaking and printing.

Bertram’s were a very successful company, with a foundry in Gorgie at Westfield and also one in London – another St. Katherine’s Works – to serve the London newspaper industry. Sadly the Sciennes works burned down in 1983 at what was a difficult time for the company, as the Scottish print and papermaking industries declined and contracted. The whole company was gone by 1985 and when new housing was built on the site later it was appropriately named “Siena Gardens”.

Sciennes of course also lends its name to the local school (I am typing to you from an old teacher’s desk of that establishment, recovered from a skip). I recall the first time I saw the name, written on an Edinburgh schools football league fixtures sheet about 30-odd years ago, and yes I too read it as Scy-ens.

There’s one more “place” in Sciennes that’s been lost to time, that’s the romantic sounding Glen Sciennes. Indeed it’s a place that never even existed anywhere but on paper, and then only for 5 or so years. It was a faux-Highland trademark name for the spirit from the Sciennes distillery! The distillery ran through a number of other names; the Newington Distillery, the West Sciennes Distillery; the Edinburgh Distillery. It closed in 1925, the last malt distillery in the city, killed off by competition from the big grain distilleries at Dalry and Gorgie (the Caledonian and the North British respectively). The buildings were incorporated into Bertram’s works.

I don’t know of any contemporary illustrations of the Sciennes distillery, but a William Channing sketch of 1852 of Sciennes Court – where the Sienna Gardens student flats are these days – shows its chimney in the background.

Always be on the lookout for unexplained kinks in old streets or buildings that feel a bit out of place; if you dig into them a little bit you might find out more local history than you bargained for!

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