This thread is part 1 of a series. The link to the next part can be found at the bottom. We begin with the wonderfully verbose cover of a Victorian pamphlet;

FOUL BURN AGITATION!
STATEMENT
Explaining
NATURE AND HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL IRRIGATION NEAR EDINBURGH;
Containing
A REFUTATION OF THE UNFOUNDED AND CALUMNIOUS MISREPRESENTATIONS ON THAT SUBJECT,
In
A PAMPHLET PUBLISHED IN THE NAME OF A COMMITTEE OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF POLICE, IN WHICH THE ANCIENT AND BEAUTIFUL CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND IS FALSELY DESCRIBED AS A RESIDENCE UNSAFE TO THE HEALTH OF ITS INHABITANTS

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 worst, 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 its 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 RoyDorrett.

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 sketches of the city in the late 17th century 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.

And the Loch itself could only drain eastwards, in the direction of the Sea. After irrigating the pleasant-looking Physic Garden of the Trinity College Kirk and hospital, it ran off down the South Back of Canongate, joined by any runoff from the community nestled below the crags of the Calton Hill and from the streets and closes of the Canongate itself. On its way east and downhill, Gordon shows the stream (in reality an open sewer) passing a number of round structures; these were wells, which was one of the reasons a lot of breweries would later congregate here.

100 years later, Edgar’s map of 1765 shows that the North Back of Canongate (present Calton Road) still has an open sewer running along it.

The historian Stuart Harris 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. It’s worth noting too that the line of the burn here forms the ancient boundary between South Leith and Holyrood Abbey (Canongate) parishes. For this reason, right up until late Victorian rationalisation, you will find that the High Calton was an exclave of the distant South Leith parish.

The Foul Burn works its way downhill to the Wateryett (“Water Gate”; the word for a gate was usually port but occasionally yett in specific cases; 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 being alongside the burn. 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 as old as 1635, which describes the Foul Burn as being in a gutter known as the “Strand“; an old Scots word for “an artificial water-channel or gutter, a street gutter” Coincidentally, 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.

By 1765, Edgar’s map shows that the burn/sewer was culverted here, but we can infer its route. This is the extent of the 18th century town plans, so to follow the burn we move onto the 1804 Town Plan by John Ainslie. , where we can pick up the burn again, re-emerging around Croftangry (Croft-an-Righ) before disappearing underground again in the property of the “Lord Chief Baron” (Sir James Montgomery, 1st Baronet Stanhope) and re-appearing on the property boundary between him and Mr. Clerk. Comley Gardens (Green) and Clockmill (Lane) are old placenames still recalled by modern street names. The burn here now contains most of the effluent of the city and the Canongate, the burgh of Calton and from Abbeyhill..

The Comely Gardens 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 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 he is recalled in a couple of the modern street names in this area. Back to the matter in hand, following the burn east we have reached at Clockmill, an ancient house named for a mill that was driven by the burn. The name came from Clokisrwne Mylne or Clocksorrow; clack being Scots for a specific type of mill (an onomatopoeia based on the noise it made) and –sorrow some form of hollow in various old tongues.

In the vicinity of Clockmill, two further open sewers joined the East Foul Burn, adding all the effluent from the Pleasance (and by extension much of the Southside) and the Cowgate to its payload. These collected in a settling area 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 “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)!

The Clockmill House, which was demolished in 1859 to landscape its grounds as a military parade ground, gave its name to the bridge where the old road from the Canongate to the east (the London Road would not be built until 1819) crossed over the East Foul Burn.

It is the presence of the burn that explains the culverts build 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 almost the entire waste of the Old Town, Canongate, Southside, Calton and Abbeyhill (apart from a small portion that drained west towards Dalry). That’s the sewage of about 60-80,000 people and 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 Matalan now is).

However it could not take this natural procession to the sea as its process was interrupted; That broad pastoral valley had been 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 a sluice (or simple damming). These feeders in turn fed side-ditches into individual plots. These plots would be subject to controlled flooding from April to November, the grass growing season. For 2 or 3 days a plot would be flooded, then it was given 3-5 weeks for the grass to grow, which would then be cropped. After cropping, the process started again. The process of flooding and cropping was staggered so that there were always fields ready to crop, and there was always a good supply of water and soil with which to flood. This provided a steady supply of food for the city’s dairy cattle. There were also dedicated settling ponds where the soil could be collected and sold 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 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 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 – that drained the portion of the city around Tollcross 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 Miller and Montgomery on account of the smell from the meadows.

Indeed the legal action ended up backfiring on Duncan because in 1833 the Burgh Police Act protected the proprietors (Miller & Montgomery) 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 soil was spread it was an instant recipe for spreading weeds.

And so the system settled 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. These were largely pen-fed dairy animals. At this time, dairy farming took place in and around the city as fresh milk could not be preserved and could not be transported anything other than a few miles. Dairies were small concerns, headed by 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 Mr 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. Mr 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 of Craigentinny (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 his lands. He then exchanged parcels of his land on the south of the new line with his neighbours who had parcels trapped by it on the north, maintaining a large single field system. He also made it 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, and waste needed to be piped under the ground, not just diverted into an open river 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, with its socking great chimney that dominated the Canongate.

You can guess where the gas works were dumping all the waste chemicals from the rather dirty process process of making town gas from coal; most of which were not being recovered at this time for use as industrial feedstocks.

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“; 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. How successful this was in dealing with the problem is unclear, perhaps the gas works had just began capturing the by products for commercial gain rather than letting them run away. Whatever the reason, the eastern meadows managed to persist; the 1888 OS 6 inch Survey shows they still occupy their main extent, and apart from a small portion near Meadowbank where the stadiums would later be built, almost no inroads were made into them until the 1930s.

At this point, there was rapid building of Corporation housing around Craigentinny (the Loganlea scheme) and of extensive streets of the uniquitous Edinburgh suburban bungalows along the Portobello and Craigentinny Roads. A fair portion of the land was never built on and was set aside as Craigentinny Golf Couse, the clubhouse occuping the plot of the former fair farm at Fillyside. A railway yard was also built on the shore at Fillyside, appropraitely it was called the Meadows Yard.

And what of the East Foul Burn? Well I can tell you it’s still there, but like many of Edinburgh’s old burns it’s just long been stuck in a culvert under the ground and built over. Very few people who live above it probably know it’s there. You can see its outlet in the sea wall here on the 1944s OS Town Plan, with a sewage pipe running to its right.

We get other reminders of its presence from local place names; the area name Meadowbank? Lifted directly off a house known as Meadow Bank, built on the southern of the meadows. And Sunnyside Bank off of Lower London Road? 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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