I say pamphlet, the thing is actually 166 pages long and I spent quite some time reading it (skimming much of it) so that you don’t have to. It is Victorian local politics at its best and wors, and much of it is indeed pure agitation. But it was worth ploughing my way through it as it happens to contain a complete and detailed description of Edinburgh’s largely forgotten East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadow systems of Craigentinny and Restalrig, their history and their method of operation.

Anyway, what is this East Foul Burn of which I speak? Well it’s the principal watercourse that in olden times drained most of the Old Town, the Nor’ Loch and the small suburbs south of the city into the sea; rainfall, sewage and all. We can see it on the below map of 1750 by William Roy. It is the stream which flows from bottom left to top right – the stream originating in Lochend Loch in the centre left is the tail burn of that body of water.

If you examine a old map of the Old Town and consider the topography, it’s obvious that gravity will carry anything liquid downhill. John Slezer’s remarkably accurate 17th century sketches of the city help us to visualise this from a contemporary point of view; any waste discharged on the north side of the ridge on which the Old Town of the city was built is obviously going to drain itself into the Nor’ Loch.

That loch could only drain eastwards, in the direction of the sea. James Gordon of Rothiemay’s remarkable 1647 bird’s eye view of Edinburgh shows it clearly. After irrigating the pleasant-looking Physic Garden by the Trinity College Kirk, it ran off down the North Back of Canongate (what we now call Calton Road) where it was joined by any runoff from the community nestled below the crags of the Calton Hill and from the streets and closes of the north side of the Canongate itself. The stream (in reality an open sewer) passes a number of round structures; these were wells and water cistern – one of the reasons so many breweries would congregate here. 100 years later, Edgar’s map of 1765 still shows that this open sewer still ran here.

Stuart Harris, the late local historian and custodian of Edinburgh place names, refers to the wells here as being along the Tummel Burn (and you will also see it given as Tumble) which is an alternative name for the East Foul Burn, this refers to the water flow, although one imagines it wasn’t so much a pleasant babbling brook as a bubbling cauldron of filth.

The burn worked its way down the North Back of Canongate to the Wateryett (a Scots placename meaning water gate; the word for a gate was commonly port but can occasionally be yett; the word gate or gait meant a roadway e.g. Canongate). The water part of the name refereed as much to this being the route into the Canongate for drinking water from the wells as it was from being alongside a watercourse. The yett part refers to the area at the foot of the Canongate where there was a physical gateway; not a defensive structure, but a civic boundary and customs barrier. This is confirmed by a reference from a title deed in 1635 which describes the Foul Burn as being in a gutter known as the Strand. This latter term is an old Scots word for “an artificial water-channel or gutter, a street gutter” – the Abbey Strand is the name of the old building that stands to this day at the foot of the Canongate, just before you enter the grounds of the Holyroodhouse.

After the Water Yett, Edgar’s 1765 map shows that the burn ran in a culvert here, but we can infer its route. This map is the extent of 18th century town plans so to follow the burn we move onto an 1804 plan by John Ainslie to pick up the trail once more. It re-surfaces around Croftangry (corrupted in modern times to the Gaelic-sounding Croft-an-Righ) before disappearing underground again in the property of the Lord Chief Baron (Sir James Montgomery, 1st Baronet Stanhope) only to re-appearing on the property boundary between him and Mr Clerk. Comley Gardens and Clock Mill on Ainslie’s map are old placenames here still recalled by modern street names. The burn here now contains almost the entirety of the effluent of the city of Edinburgh, the Canongate, the burgh of Calton and the village of Abbeyhill.

The Comely Gardens referred to on the map above were a Tivoli Garden, a sort of Georgian amusement park where – for a fee – one could stroll the gardens and admire the roses, could take tea or coffee or fruits and entertainment such as dances and musicians may be laid on. Comely Gardens is to be forever remembered as the starting point of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon, the first manned aerial flight in the British Isles. In August 1784, James Tytler rode a Montgolfier-style balloon all the way to a crash-landing in Restalrig and his name is recalled in a couple of the modern street names in this area. But back to the matter in hand, following the burn east we have reached the Clock Mill, an old house named for a mill that was driven by the burn. The name came from Clokisrwne Mylne or Clocksorrow; clock is a corruption of the Scots clack, being a specific type of mill, an onomatopoeia based on the noise its mechanism made. Sorrow refers to some form of hollow in various old tongues.

In the vicinity of Clock Mill, two further open sewers joined the burn, adding yet more effluent. The came from the Pleasance (and by extension much of the Southside) and from the Cowgate to its payload. Both of these first drained into a myre just south of Holyroodhouse, marked on Kincaid’s map of 1784 as Common Sewer Kept Stagnate for Manure, i.e. the sewage solids would settle out of the slow moving water and could be collected to fertilise the city’s gardens and orchards. There was good money to be made in such “soil” or “dung”. Before the advent of early industrial fertilisers or the Kelp Boom it was one of the few copious and economical sources of fertiliser for fields and was much in demand – all you had to do was collect it (or pay someone to do this)!

After Clockmill House, which was demolished in 1859 to landscape its grounds as a military parade ground, the burn passed beneath the main road east out of the city (the London Road would not be built until 1819). The bridge here was known as the Clockmill Bridge. It is the presence of the burn that explains why significant culverts were built here under both the North British Railway and the London Road when each was constructed. Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson, the engineer of the London Road, produced beautiful drawings for the culvert here under his road;

By the time the burn passed under this culvert, it was carrying the daily sewage of about 60-80,000 people, not to mention their animals. The Foul Burn Agitation! pamphlet describes it as “a rapid and copious stream… to which [is] added the impure waters that proceed from the houses, streets and lanes of the city“. From there, the effluent of the city should have been a relatively straightforward journey down the broad, shallow natural valley in which Restalrig sits to the sea, at Fillyside (roughly where the Matalan store now is).

However it could not take this natural procession to the sea as its process was interrupted; it was industriously turned over into a series of irrigated meadows, “irrigated by the waters from the City” at Restalrig, Craigentinny and Fillyside.

In the irrigated meadows, the Foul Burn was intersected by “principal feeders“, ditches cut along the topographic gradient. Water could be admitted to the feeders by means of sluices or damming the outflow. These feeders in turn fed further side-ditches into individual plots. The plots would be subject to controlled flooding from April to November, the fodder growing season. For two or three days a plot would be flooded, saturating the ground with sewage which would settle. The water was then allowed to run off and the plot was given three to five weeks for the grass to grow. It could then be cropped and the process could begin again. The process of flooding and cropping plots was rotated so that there were always fields ready to crop, and there was always a good supply of sewage with which to flood it. The whole object of this exercise was to provide a steady supply of food for the city’s dairy herds – this was a time when milk could not be preserved or transported any great distance, so the cattle had to be kept in and around the immediate vicinity. The system also had dedicated settling ponds where the soil could be collected and sold off by the cartload.

The Restalrig Meadows were at the turn of the 19th century the property of the forementioned Sir James Montgomery Bt. and extended to around 30 acres. The Craigentinny and Fillyside Meadows were owned by William Henry Miller of Craigentinny and were the largest at c. 120 acres.

There were further such irrigated meadows at the foot of Salisbury Crags, about 14 acres – the property of the Earl of Haddington – and near Coltbridge (modern Murrayfield) to the west, some 40-50 acres owned by Russell of Roseburn. This latter ground was fed by a much smaller foul burn – the West Foul Burn – which drained the portion of the city around Tollcross, West Port and Lauriston and the west end of the Boroughloch, making its way west via Dalry to Roseburn and then into the Water of Leith.

While the soil of the city had been collected since time immemorial, it’s not clear when this industrial-scale meadow system evolved. The Foul Burn Agitation! recounts testimony of elderly farm workers of Restalrig that they had been in place since at least 1750. However a document from 1561 when the lands of Restalrig Kirk were confiscated during the Reformation records “of certain prebendaries yardis, in Restalrig and Chalmeris pertening to the saidis prebendaris, callit their Mansis and pece of suard Meadow” – the suard here referring to a piece of marshy or boggy ground. The pamphlet states the “practice existed from time immemorial of flooding the Meadow grounds by means of the Foul Burn“. So we can say with some certainty that it was an old and established practice, and indeed the courts agreed with this when Alexander Duncan WS of Restalrig House tried to sue his neighbouring sewage barons, Miller and Montgomery, on account of the smell from the meadows spoiling his quality of life.

Indeed the legal action ended up backfiring on Duncan because in 1833 the Burgh Police Act protected the proprietors from any act “to divert or alter any stream or watercourse, or diminish the ancient and accustomed quantity of rain or other water or soil flowing therein“, guaranteeing their right to operate the meadows and collect the profits. (Side note, this was included in a Police Act because at that time in Scotland the Police had the powers and responsibilities for cleansing the burgh, distributing water and preventing disease).

The other aspect of the system was the settling ponds. These are recorded as far back as 1738 when Mr Baird of Clockmill was irrigating his fields and “collecting dung“, but by the late 18th century they were beginning to be infilled and had vanished by the 1820s. These are clearly shown on Kirkwood’s 1817 town plan. Appropriately enough parts of it look like a bit like a drawing of the human digestive system! The reason for abandoning the ponds because of two problems; firstly, there was too much sandy sediment washed off the city streets into the burn, and the customers – market gardeners mainly – were loathe to pour sand onto their plots and orchards. More importantly however the sediment was found increasingly to be full of seeds. Without putrefaction (fermentation), these seeds could not be killed, and when the seed-rich manure was spread it was an instant recipe for spreading weeds.

And so the system concentrated around the production of grass for animal forage; a very productive and profitable system it was. 400 labourers were employed seasonally, and some 3,300 cattle in Edinburgh and 600 in Leith depended on it, mainly pen-fed dairy animals. Most dairies were small concerns, run by the occupation of a “cow feeder“, with 20-40 milk cows each.

The meadows were estimated to turn a profit for their proprietors of £5,000 per annum (about £600,000 in 2022), with William Henry Miller estimating he made £30,000 (c. £3.4 million) over 2 years. Rents were 20-30/s per acre, or up to double that for the better pasture or during times of food scarcity. Preparing a meadow cost £20-25 per acre and was a sound investment. Miller in 1821 spent £1,000 turning over 40 acres of “sandy wasteland” – the lands of Fillyside were ancient raised beaches – to meadow use. Each acre could provide up to 6 full crops per year.

All-in-all, this was a very productive and profitable concern, so much so that in 1834 the Police Commissioners tried to extend the burgh boundary to include the irrigated meadows and to give themselves rights over them. They spent 4,000 of the city’s pounds on the scheme, which the Foul Burn Agitation! describes as “Dung Speculation“. They were unsuccessful though as the proprietors and their one-time adversary Mr Duncan fought the Commissioners off. William Henry Miller (a former MP by this point, wealthy and influential) was quick to defend his profitable scheme. In 1843 when the North British Railway proposed running their line across his meadows, Miller had them shift it about 100 feet west so that it instead skirted around his lands. He then exchanged parcels of his land on the south of the new line with his neighbours – the Dukes of Abercorn – who had parcels trapped by the railway on the north, so each could maintain a contiguous field system. Miller also made thinds hard enough for the NBR that they never built their proposed shorter branch to Leith across his land.

But the whole system had a number of problems facing it. Firstly, the woeful sanitation of the Old Town needed resolving – it was recognised by now that waste needed to be piped under the ground, not just run in an open sewer for the benefit of a couple of wealthy landowners. And secondly, in 1817 the Edinburgh & Leith Gas Light Company began building a gas works at New Street, crowned by its great chimney that dominated the Canongate.

At this point, coal gas works had yet to begin extracting their by-products for industrial use, so you can guess where the gas works were dumping all the highly toxic waste chemicals. Coal tar, sulphur and ammonia as well as any other numbers and varieties of hydrocarbons went into the Foul Burn from New Street. The gas works “give forth an abundant stream, the odour of which is no doubt extremely offensive, being the most nauseous of all compounds… …This flows into a principal feeder of the old foul burn at the South Back of the Canongate“. To put it simply, the gas works was poisoning the burn. This was not the first time that the foul burns had been polluted by industry. In 1791, Russell of Roseburn attempted to use the courts to stop the Haig’s distillery at Lochrin from polluting his irrigated meadows at Coltbridge.

The proprietors of the eastern irrigated meadows managed to get fines applied to the gas works, £200 per instance of pollution and £20 per day – this seemed to have the intended effect. Or perhaps the gas works just found it more profitable to begin capturing its by products for commercial gain rather than letting them run away. Whatever the reason, the Foul Burn was “cleared up” and the eastern meadows managed to carry on; the 1888 OS 6 inch Survey shows they still occupy their main extent. In 1901, an attempt was made to bury the entirety of the burn underground as a sere, but this was unsuccessful. The scheme finally commenced in 1921 as a work programme for unemployed men; a £60,000 government grant being secured to provide employment for 400 men for six months. This “draining of the swap” opened up the lands of Lochend, Restalrig and Craigentinny for public housing schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the land of the Fillyside Meadow had already been set aside as Craigentinny Golf Couse, which had been undertaken by Leith Corporation to clear golfing off of the Links. A railway yard was later also laid adjacent, appropriately it was called the Meadows Yard.

And what of the East Foul Burn? Well I can tell you it’s still there but just like many of Edinburgh’s old burns it’s hiding under the ground in its culvert. Very few people who live above it probably know it’s there. We get other reminders of its presence from local place names; the area name Meadowbank? that’s lifted directly off a house known as Meadow Bank, built on the southern of the meadows. And Sunnyside Bank off of Lower London Road? that’s the south-facing (therefore sunnier) bank.

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This thread continues with part 2 – The thread about the problem of sewage disposal in 19th century Edinburgh and Leith; and how something ended up being done about it.

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