The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: York to Edinburgh

by Charles G. Harper

Of course the approach to Edinburgh has, from the picturesque standpoint, been spoiled. Ranges of grim stone houses and sprawling suburbs now hem in the road and hide the view of Arthur’s Seat and its neighbouring eminences; but a few steps to the left serve to disclose them, the little loch of St. Margaret, and the ruined walls of St. Anthony’s Chapel on the hillside, once guarding the holy well. St. Anthony’s Chapel, within the rule of the Abbey of Holyrood, served another turn, for from its tower glimmered a beacon which in the old days guided mariners safely up the Forth, a service paid for out of the harbour dues.

The so-called “London” and “Regent” Roads that now lead directly into the New Town of Edinburgh are modern improvements upon the old approach through Canongate into the Old Town. If steep, rugged, and winding, the old way was at least more impressive, for it lay within sight of Holyrood Palace and brought the wayfarer into the very heart of Scott’s “own romantic town,” to where the smells and the dirt, the crazy tenement-houses and the ragged clouts hanging from dizzy tiers of windows, showed “Scotia’s darling seat” in its most characteristic aspects.

As Alexander Smith puts it, Scott discovered the city was beautiful, sang its praises to the world, “and he has put more coin into the pockets of its inhabitants than if he had established a branch of manufacture of which they had the monopoly.”

The distant view of Edinburgh is magnificent. The peaked and jagged masses of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Craigs, the monument-cumbered Calton Hill, the Castle Rock—all these combine to make the traveller eager to reach so picturesque a spot. Approaching it and seeing the smoke-cloud drifting with the breeze away from the hollow from which Edinburgh’s million chimneys are seen peering, one instantly notes the peculiar appropriateness of the Scots endearing epithet, “Auld Reekie.” But it was not only—if indeed at all—an admiration of the picturesque that made the sight of Edinburgh so welcome to old-time travellers. It was rather the prospect of coming to the end of their journey, and almost in sight of a comfortable hotel, that rendered the view so welcome to those who in the last thirty years or so of the coaching era made this trip of almost four hundred miles; but those who had come this way at an earlier period had no such comfortable prospect before them. Instead of putting up at some fine hospitable inn, such as they were used to even in the smaller English towns, they were set down at a “stabler’s,” the premises of one whose first business was to horse the coaches and to let saddle-horses, and who, as in some sort of an after-thought, lodged those who were obliged to journey about the country.

A traveller arriving at Edinburgh in 1774, for instance, had indeed little comfort awaiting him. “One can scarcely form in imagination the distress of a miserable stranger on his first entrance into this city,” says one writing at this period. No inn better than an alehouse, no decent or cleanly accommodation, nor in fact anything fit for a gentleman. “On my first arrival,” says this traveller, “my companion and self, after the fatigue of a long day’s journey, were landed at one of these stable-keepers’ (for they have modesty to give themselves no higher denomination) in a part of the town which is called the Pleasance; and on entering the house we were conducted by a poor girl without shoes or stockings, and with only a single linsey-woolsey petticoat which just reached half-way to her ankles, into a room where about twenty Scotch drovers had been regaling themselves with whisky and potatoes. You may guess our amazement when we were informed that this was the best inn in the metropolis, and that we could have no beds unless we had an inclination to sleep together, and in the same room with the company which a stage-coach had that moment discharged. ‘Well,’ said I to my friend, ‘there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be able to repose ourselves at some coffee-house.’ Accordingly, on inquiry, we discovered that there was a good dame by the Cross who acted in the double capacity of pouring out coffee and letting lodgings to strangers, as we were. She was easily to be found out, and, with all the conciliating complaisance of a Maitresse d’Hôtel, conducted us to our destined apartments, which were indeed six stories high, but so infernal in appearance that you would have thought yourself in the regions of Erebus. The truth is, I will venture to say, you will make no scruple to believe when I tell you that in the whole we had only two windows, which looked into an alley five feet wide, where the houses were at least ten stories high and the alley itself was so sombre in the brightest sunshine that it was impossible to see any object distinctly.”

Private lodgings, just as those described above, were the resort of those who had neither friends nor acquaintance in Edinburgh at that time; but travellers in Scotland were nearly always exercising their ingenuity to come, at the end of their day’s journey, to the house of some friend or some friend’s friend, to whom before starting they had been careful to obtain letters of introduction. So old and so widespread a custom was this that, so far back as 1425, we find an Act of James the First of Scotland actually forbidding all travellers resorting to burgh towns to lodge with friends or acquaintances, or in any place but the “hostillaries,” unless indeed he was a personage of consequence, with a great retinue, in which case he might accept a friend’s hospitality, provided that his “horse and meinze” were sent to the inns.

Of course such an Act was doomed to fall into neglect, but the innkeepers, equally of course during a long series of years, almost ceased to exist. A few “stablers’” establishments became known as “inns” at about the period of Doctor Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh. They were chiefly situated in the Pleasance, or in that continuation of it, St. Mary’s Wynd (now St. Mary Street). These inns, such as they were, burst upon the by no means delighted gaze of the wayfarer from England as he entered the historic town of Edinburgh, and when he saw them he generally lifted up his voice and cursed the fate that had sent him so far from home and into so barbarous a country.

The Pleasance was largely in receipt of the traffic to and from the south until the construction of the North and South Bridges, opened in 1769 and 1788, diverted it to a higher level. We may look in vain nowadays in the Pleasance for the inns of that day. They are demolished and altered so greatly as to be unrecognisable; but the “White Horse,” which stands in a court away down Canongate, will give us an idea of the kind of place. Situated in “White Horse,” or Davison’s Close in Canongate, and reached from that street by a low-browed archway, it remains a perfect example of the Edinburgh inn of nearly three hundred years ago. An inn no longer, but occupied in tenements, the internal arrangements are somewhat altered, but the time when the house extended a primitive hospitality to travellers is not difficult to reconstruct in the imagination. To it, at the end of their journeys, came those wearied ones, to find accommodation of the most intimate and domestic kind. Kitchen and dining-room were one, and it was scarce possible for a guest to obtain a bedroom to himself. Dirt was accepted as inevitable. In fact, the modern “dosser” is better and more decently housed. To the “White Horse” came others—those about to set out upon their travels. Booted and spurred, wills made and saddle-bags packed, they resorted hither to hire horses for their journeys, and it is not unlikely that the old house saw in early times many a quaking laird, badly wanted by the Government, slinking through the archway from the Canongate, to secure trusty mounts for instant flight. Scott, indeed, has made it the scene of strange doings in his Waverley.