Where that battle was fought, there is to-day the most extensive cabbage-plant cultivation in Scotland. It is a usual thing in the early part of the year for almost daily special cabbage trains to be despatched to all parts of Britain.
And so downhill, and then over the awful cobbles into the accursed town of Musselburgh. “Accursed,” not by reason of those self-same cobbles, but for the sacrilegious doings of its magistrates who rebuilt their Tolbooth, burnt after the battle of Pinkie, with stones from the Chapel of Loretto. Now that chapel, which stood at the entrance to the town, was the place of business of one of those roadside hermits of whom we have in these pages heard so much (would that he had a successor in these times, for then the road would perhaps be in better condition), and the Pope, indignant at the injury done to the wayside shrine, solemnly anathematised town and inhabitants in sleeping or waking, eating and drinking, at every conceivable time and every imaginable function. No Pope since that period seems to have removed the curse, and no one is particularly anxious that it should be removed, Musselburgh being rather proud of it than otherwise. When it begins to take effect will be quite time enough. There were those who at the close of the coaching days perceived the beginning of it, although then three hundred years overdue, but as the town has rather increased in prosperity since that period, the time evidently is not yet. Nor do the burghers anticipate it, for they still repeat the brave old rhyme:—
Musselburgh was a burgh
When Edinburgh was nane;
And Musselburgh shall be a burgh
When Edinburgh is gane.
This, however, is a quibble, for Musselburgh derived its name from the “broch,” or bed, of mussels at the mouth of the river Esk. Looked at in this light, the statement is true enough and the prophecy a not particularly rash one. The sponsorial shell-fish have an honoured place in the town arms, in which three mussels are seen in company with three anchors: the motto “Honesty” writ large below. This was probably adopted at some period later than the purloining of the stones of the Loretto Chapel.
The Town Hall, with that tower whose building brought about the curse, forms the centre of Musselburgh, a fishy, stony, picturesque place with four bridges over the Esk, leading to the western bank, where the fisher quarter of Fisherrow straggles towards Joppa, two miles distant. Joppa Pans are gone now, just as those other pans at Preston, but factories of sorts, with clustered chimney-stacks, are still grouped about the melancholy sea-shore, where gales set the very high-road awash on occasion. Not vulgar, modern factories, but of a certain age; old enough and grim enough to look like the scene of some thrilling story that yet awaits the telling. Somewhat thrilling is the report as to the condition of the road here in 1680, a complaint laid before the Privy Council stating that, four miles on the London side of Edinburgh, travelling was dangerous, and travellers to be pitied, “either by their coaches overturning, their horses falling, their carts breaking, their loads casting, or horses stumbling, and the poor people with burdens on their backs sorely discouraged; moreover, strangers do often exclaim thereat.” All this reads with a very modern touch to those who know the road to-day, for it is as bad now as it could have been then, and so continues, in different kinds of badness, through adjoining Portobello into Edinburgh itself. Here seas of slimy mud, there precipitous setts, here again profound holes in the macadam, or tramway rails projecting above the road level, make these last miles wretched. Portobello, that suburban seaside resort of Edinburgh, fares in this respect no better than the rest of the way, and the original road across Figgate Whins, the lonely moor that was here before the first house of Portobello was built, could have been no worse. That house was the creation of a retired sailor who had been at the capture of Portobello in Central America by Admiral Vernon in 1739. He named it after that town, and when the present seaside resort began to spring up, it took the title. Now it has a promenade, a pier, hotels, and crowds of visitors in summer upon the sands, and calls itself “the Brighton of Scotland.” Observe that Brighton does not return the compliment, and has not yet begun to style itself “the Portobello of England.”
XXXIII
Leaving the “Brighton of Scotland” behind, we come to the flat lands of Craigentinny, stretching away from the now suburban highway down to the wind-swept and desolate seashore, where the whaups and the sandpipers make mournful concerts in a minor key, to the accompaniment of the noise of the sullen breakers and the soughing of the wind amid the rustling bents. Overlooking the road, within sight and sound of the tinkling tramcars passing between Joppa, Portobello, and Edinburgh, is that singular monument, “Miller’s Tomb.”
William Henry Miller, whose remains lie beneath this pile of classic architecture, was an antiquary and bibliophile, and obtained his nickname of “Measure Miller” from his habit of measuring the margins of the “tall copies” of the scarce books he bought. His beardless face and shrill voice led to the lifelong belief that he was really a woman. The tomb is elaborately decorated with a carved marble frieze representing the Song of Miriam and the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. Miller and his father were both Quakers, and the wealth of which they were possessed derived from a prosperous seedsman’s business in Canongate, Edinburgh. To the father came an adventure which does not fall to many men. He was married in 1789 for the third time, when nearly seventy years of age, to an Englishwoman, who conveyed him against his will in a post-chaise from Edinburgh to London.
Passing Craigentinny and Jock’s Lodge we are, in the words of the old song, “Within a mile of Edinburgh town.” The more modern and acceptable name of Jock’s Lodge is Piershill, but it has been known by the other for over two hundred and seventy years. Who the original Jock was seems open to doubt, but he is supposed to have been a beggar who built himself a hut on this then lonely road leading to Figgate Whins. Even in 1650, when Cromwell besieged Edinburgh, the spot had obtained its name, and is referred to as “that place called Jockis Lodge.” Towards the close of the eighteenth century a Colonel Piers had a villa here, pulled down in 1793, when barracks—known as Piershill Barracks—were built on the site. It is a district slowly emerging from the reproach of a disreputable past, when footpads and murderers haunted the muddy roads, or took refuge amid the towering rocks of Arthur’s Seat, Crow Hill, or Salisbury Craigs, or hid in the congenial sloughs of the Hunter’s Bog. Close by the road, at the entrance to the Queen’s Park of Holyrood, is Muschat’s Cairn, the place where Scott makes Jeanie Deans meet the outlaw Robertson. This heap of stones marks the spot where Nicol Muschat of Boghall, a surgeon, a man of infamous character, murdered his wife by cutting her throat in 1720, a crime which, with Scottish old-time mysticism, he said was committed by direct personal instigation of the devil. All the same, they hanged him for it in the Grassmarket, where martyrs “testified” of old and the criminals of “Auld Reekie” expiated their crimes.