And basest deeds, and now unknown as they.’
A SUGGESTION OF THE NORTH LOCH AND ST CUTHBERT’S
from Allan Ramsay’s Garden.
[MEMORIALS OF THE NOR’ LOCH.]
He who now sees the wide hollow space between the Old and New Towns, occupied by beautiful gardens, having their continuity only somewhat curiously broken up by a transverse earthen mound and a line of railway, must be at a loss to realise the idea of the same space presenting in former times a lake, which was regarded as a portion of the physical defences of the city. Yet many, in common with myself, must remember the by no means distant time when the remains of this sheet of water, consisting of a few pools, served as excellent sliding and skating ground in winter, while their neglected grass-green precincts too frequently formed an arena whereon the high and mighty quarrels of Old and New Town cowlies[88] [etymology of the word unknown] were brought to a lapidarian arbitration.
The lake, it after all appears, was artificial, being fed by springs under the Castle Rock, and retained by a dam at the foot of Halkerston’s Wynd;[89] which dam was a passable way from the city to the fields on the north. Bower, the continuator of Fordun, speaks of a tournament held on the ground, ubi nunc est lacus, in 1396, by order of the queen [of Robert III.], at which her eldest son, Prince David, then in his twentieth year, presided. At the beginning of the sixteenth century a ford upon the North Loch is mentioned. Archbishop Beatoun escaped across that ford in 1517, when flying from the unlucky street-skirmish called Cleanse the Causeway. In those early times the town corporation kept ducks and swans upon the loch for ornament’s sake, and various acts occur in their register for preserving those birds. An act, passed in council between the years 1589 and 1594, ordained ‘a boll of oats to be bought for feeding the swans in the North Loch;’ and a person was unlawed at the same time for shooting a swan in the said loch, and obliged to find another in its place. The lake seems to have been a favourite scene for boating. Various houses in the neighbourhood had servitudes of the use of a boat upon it; and these, in later times, used to be employed to no little purpose in smuggling whisky into the town.