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

The original image here is from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant, which was published 1885. The toll house is in the middle of the image, you can see the barriers, one on each side of the cottage opened against its walls and another on the left side 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 behind belongs to the barracks’ chapel.

Another cavalryman is in the foreground, the pillbox undress hats of the troopers suggest a date of 1870s or thereabouts. Behind him is the row of taverns and villas at Piershill that grew up around the barracks, and where many of the officers and their families would have lived. In the distance is a stagecoach.

And on the right of the scene we can see a haycart approaching from the direction of Duddingston, a reminder that this part of Edinburgh was thoroughly rural and not even with the city’s administrative limits until the very end of the 19th century.

The 1876 OS Town Plan matches this view more or less exactly. The rounded western 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 on the right.

There had long been a village here at it was about the only settlement of note on the King’s Highway between Edinburgh and Musselburgh. It was conveniently located at a road junction, where alternative routes east via either Easter Duddingston or the Figgate whins met a road to Restalrig Village. This village seems to have included in the 18th century stables, taverns, lodging houses and a brewery, exactly what you’d expect on a Georgian transport route. The area was long the haunt of highwaymen, one of the earliest recorded incidents being in 1692.

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 whole lodge of persons. Specifically, the Jockies.

The Jockies were also known as King’s Bedesmen or Bluegowns; they were a class of Royally-appointed beggars, first licensed to beg by King James VI. They had a uniform of a licence 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 their dinner. David Allan, who painted lots of the city’s lower classes at work, has an illustration of a late 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 – possibly why he was accorded the “privilege” of his station.

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

The Bluegowns referred to themselves as Jockies and reputedly had a lodge house outside the city; the Jockies Lodge. 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 the earliest view identified as being Jock’s Lodge that I could find.

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 may have been the site of the Jockies Lodge. This house in turn was cleared away to widen the road to Restalrig, also known as Smokey Brae, in the 1930s.

A thread about Jock’s Lodge cannot fail to mention Piershill (and indeed, already has!). Suffice to say that in 1794 a big cavalry barracks was built immediately to the east on the site of a house called Piershill. This illustration below was made in 1798 and it is almost certain that the prominent 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 adopted it in the 1760s.

The barracks were demolished in the 1930s and replaced with two large U-shaped 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 as boundary walls of these houses. Macrae was a big fan of traditional Scottish building style and techniques and was not alone in Scottish City Architects of his time in persisting in the old ways, in the face of modernity, for a variety of reasons including job creation and the fact many of the tried and tested features performed their functions well in their native climate.

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

As if there was any doubt that this was from the Piershill barracks, if you look at an old photo of the main gate, the legend is a perfect match:

You can see this gate on old maps. The railway cut through the northern part of the barracks site in the 1840s, so rather than leave some of it marooned on the wrong side of the tracks, 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. In turn it kept the exclave to the north and built itself a gasworks here.

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