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Gilmerton
from "The Fringes of Edinburgh" by John Geddie (circa
1930)
Gilmerton village, which, in sight of The Drum, sits on the
brow of another hill astride the highway, is divided in allegiance between
Drum and Gilmerton. In its vicinity are some of the oldest coal and
lime workings in the district. But its fame throughout the Lothians
has been chiefly on account of its ancient community of carters, whose
roughness of speech and behaviour, and notably during the annual
Saturnalia of the 'Carters' Plan', was proverbial. Manners and
morals have, it may be hoped, vastly improved at Gilmerton and in the
neighbouring city since the writer of the 'Old Statistical Account' of the
parish offered, in excuse, that 'Edinburgh throws out some of the refuse
of its population upon us,' and since his successor, nearly forty years
later, after explaining that the haulage in the mines was now done by
asses, not by women, remarked that 'the morals of the population in
general were not so inexceptionable as could be wished,' and added, 'no
wonder, when they live in the neighbourhood of such a city as Edinburgh.'
The modern village possesses and makes uses of a fair share
of the amenities of civilisation; and has the privilege of looking back
into its darker past in its once celebrated 'Cove,' a series of
underground chambers hewn out of the solid sandstone rock - the
enlargement, it has been suggested, of a prehistoric 'yird-house' - by the
five years of hard labour completed in 1724, of a Gilmerton blacksmith, of
whom the poet Penicuik wrote:
My hands hewed out this rock into a cell,
Wherin from din of life I safely dwell.
What seems incredible at the present day, this Cimmerian
cell is said to have been in use as smithy and dwelling-house so late as
1755, the year when the carver of our local 'Weyland's Hole' died.
Gilmerton's other antiquity is also of a kind to breed
melancholy. The Bairds of New Byth, North Berwick, purchased the
estate from the Crichtons in 1667; but the mansionhouse, which has been
allowed to fall into loathly decay and ruin, is on considerably later
date. Nothing can take away from old Gilmerton House its commanding
situation. The glory of its 'peculiarly pleasant' Long Walk - a
double avenue of limes - has not entirely departed; the archway and
terrace, built to 'improve the view,' are still to be seen in the gardens;
also the clump of yews, somewhat scrubby from bad usage, set thickly
around that somewhat unusual appurtenance of Scottish mansions of the
time, an outside bath-house. Otherwise Gilmerton House, roofless and
nettle-overgrown, has become an 'abomination of desolation.' |
