Coaching days at Edinburgh ceased in 1846, when that sole surviving relic of the coaches between London and the North—the Edinburgh and Berwick coach—was discontinued on the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Company, completing the series of lines that connect the two capitals. It is true that passengers could not yet travel through without changing, for the great bridges that cross the Tyne at Newcastle and the Tweed at Berwick were not opened until four years later; but it was possible, with these exceptions, to journey the whole distance by train. The opening of the railway meant as great a change for Edinburgh as did the beginning of the New Town seventy years before. Just what it was like then we may judge from the drawing made from the Castle by David Roberts in 1847. The point of view he has chosen is that from the Mons Meg Battery, and the direction of his glance, omitting the Old Town on the right, is to the northeast. Changes in detail have come about since then, but, as a whole, it is the Edinburgh we all know: the Calton Hill, with its cluster of weird monuments, prominent; the New Town, stretching away vaguely to the water-side; while in the distance, on the right, is seen the shore curving to Portobello; the twin masses of the Bass Rock and North Berwick Law on the horizon. Down in the New Town itself the changes are evident. Where the toy train with its old-fashioned locomotive is crawling out of the tunnel under the Mound, and where the old Waverley Station is seen, alterations have been plenty. The old North Bridge pictured here has given place to a new, spanning the ravine in three spans of steel. Beyond it are still seen the smoked-grimed modern Gothic battlements of the Calton Gaol, but the huge new hotel of the North British Railway has replaced the buildings that rose on that side of the old bridge, while the towering offices of the Scotsman occupy the other, all in that florid French Renaissance that is the keynote of modern Edinburgh’s architectural style. The Scott Monument stands where it did, not, as David Roberts’s drawing shows us, among grounds but little cared for, but amid gay parterres and velvet lawns. The Bank of Scotland has been rebuilt and all the vacant sites long built upon; evidences these of half a century’s progress, the direct outcome of those railways that two generations ago wrote “Finis” to the last chapter in the romantic story of the Great North Road.
INDEX.
“Andrew Mills’ Stob” [113]
Asenby [84]
Aycliffe [107]
Ayton [208]
Bagby Common [59]