It’s Friday, so let’s start the day with a #NowAndThen animated transition to visualise a bit of local history. This view shows Jock’s Lodge toll house in the mid-late 19th century, looking east down the Portobello Road at Willowbrae.

The original image is from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant, published 1885. The toll house is in the middle of the image, you can see the barriers, one on each side of the cottage, and another on the left of the road.

Other features we can see are what was the Jock’s Lodge Tavern (for now, The Willow), with a cavalryman from Piershill Barracks standing outside. The belfry belongs to the barracks chapel.

Another cavalryman is in the foreground, the “pillbox” undress hats of the troopers suggest 1870s or thereabouts. Behind him is the row of taverns and villas at Piershill that grew up around the barracks, the latter for officers accommodation. In the distance is a stagecoach.

And on the right a haycart approaches from the direction of Duddingston, a reminder that this part of Edinburgh was thoroughly rural (and not even part of the city itself) until the very end of the 19th century.

The 1876 OS Town Plan matches this view more or less exactly. The rounded gable of the toll house, sitting in the middle of the road junction, the buildings beyond, the Jock’s Lodge public house on the left, the barracks and its chapel.

As for the toponymy – the meaning of the place name – Jock’s Lodge is mentioned back in the 1650s in “Nicoll’s Diary” as Jokis Ludge. Oliver Cromwell mustered the New Model Army infantry here in July 1650 before his failed assault on Leith. Other forms of the name were always plural; Joks, Jokes, Jocks and Jock’s. So who was Jock?

Well Jock wasn’t one person, Jock was a lodge of persons. Specifically, the “Jockies“. The Jockies were “King’s Bedesmen“, or “Blue Gowns“; they were a class of Royally-appointed beggars, first licensed to beg by King James VI. They had a uniform of badge and blue gown. Every birthday of the monarch, each Bluegown received a new cloak, a tin badge with the motto “pass and repass“, a Scots shilling for every year of the monarch’s age and a slap-up dinner. They had a lodge house outside the city; the Jockies Lodge – Bluegowns referring to themselves as Jockies. I do not know of any further details or images of what this house may have looked like, or where exactly it was, but this 1818 sketch is probably the earliest view identified as being in Jock’s Lodge.

“Pass and repass” on the badge referred to the holder being allowed to pass freely through the land, not being subject to local begging laws or charges of vagrancy.

David Allan, who painted lots of the city’s lower classes at work, has an illustration of an 18th century Bluegown wearing his badge, begging at one of the city ports, the steeple of St. Giles’ in the background. Clearly an old soldier, he has lost a leg – probably why he was accorded the “privilege” of his station.

A photo in the Book of the Old Edinburgh Club (vol. 23) shows the back of the toll house and a now-demolished villa beyond, which is thought to be the site of the Blue Gowns or Jockies Lodge. This house was cleared to widen the road to Restalrig/ Smokie Brae in the 1930s

This is a thread about Jock’s Lodge and not Piershill, but suffice to say in 1794 a big cavalry barracks was built to to the east of Jock’s Lodge on the site of a house called Piershill. This illustration was made in 1798. It is likely that the central block of the barracks, the officers’ mess and accommodation, was an extension of the original Piershill House.

The origin of Piershill as a placename is lost to time, but it’s probably descriptive, something to do with willow trees, and nothing to do with a man named Piers or Pierre. The name is much older than the house which took it in the 1760s.

The barracks were demolished in the 1930s and replaced with two large circuses of showpiece council housing by the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae. Much of the masonry from the barracks was recut and used in the façade dressing and boundary walls of the houses. Macrae was a big fan of traditional Scottish style and building techniques, and many Scottish councils at this time persisted in the use of masonry in an attempt at job creation.

If you wander down Smokie Brae towards Marionville Fire Station and Restalrig, you can still find the back gate of the old barracks.

As if there was any doubt that this was from the barracks, the legend on the Main Gate is a perfect match.

You can see the gate on old maps. The railway cut through the barracks site in the 1840s, so in return the North British Railway bought a parcel of land to the east of the barracks and transferred it to the government, to where the barracks’ riding school, stabling, grazing ground and hospital were relocated.

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