I looked up the actual map and still got it wrong.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Infrastructure
Scottish Govmt announces £10m for pop up cycle/walking lanes
(3661 posts)-
Posted 3 years ago #
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“The boundary moved south at the last election“
Unclaimed borderland then??
Posted 3 years ago # -
Went for a stroll on Liberton golf course. Never walked there before. Compact course with some nice holes and a few plain vanillas but I digress....
Found where all the northbound orange plastic wands off Old Dalkeith Road went. All neatly slung over the boundary wall at their original spacings.
Posted 3 years ago # -
When did they first go in?
Actually on StreetView!
Posted 3 years ago # -
In the summer some time. I have begun an utterly futile campaign to get them back.
Posted 3 years ago # -
The new cycle lanes on Comiston Road were not cleared of snow today. Mind you, neither were the (not so new) pavements.
Oddly, Caiystane Crescent did seem to have been ploughed as far as West Camus Road, where the plough appeared to have made right turn and headed down towards Camus Avenue, leaving a sizeable pile of snow partially blocking further access westward along Caiystane Crescent. Never seen that before. (Actually, if it puts off rat-runners who typically end up slipping and sliding up & down Caiystane Hill in this kind of weather then I'm all for it.)
Posted 3 years ago # -
This is as good a place as any to ask.
How is the "Camus" in Camus Avenue pronounced?
Posted 3 years ago # -
For u Frenchy it has to be Camooo
Posted 3 years ago # -
A multi-level pun, nice.
Posted 3 years ago # -
For everyone else, cam us?
Posted 3 years ago # -
As a local resident I have always assumed that the "-us" is pronounced as in "bus" (mode of transport). Of course, how you pronounce "bus" will depend to a degree on your geographical origins. When, in my tenth year, my family moved from south-east London to Derby I had to learn a new way of dealing with certain vowels - including "u" - or else get bullied for "talking posh".
I think the pronunciation is the same with Camuscross on Skye, Camusdarroch near Mallaig, and indeed Camusfeàrna, the name that Gavin Maxwell used for Sandaig near Glenelg. In all those cases "camus" is from the Gaelic for "bay". What the word is doing being used as a street name in Edinburgh I have no idea. There is reputed to have been a Viking leader called Camus who caused a bit of trouble in Scotland. His existence and/or what he actually got up to when/if he came here is disputed but that wouldn't necessarily have stopped an imaginative developer from proposing the name for his new streets of bijoux 1930s residencettes.
Sadly, though, I doubt that the name was intended to commemorate a certain French Algerian philosopher and goalkeeper. Camus Avenue and its southward-heading cousins appear on the OS six-inch map surveyed in 1938, though not on the one surveyed in 1932, which would seem to pin down the date of the development fairly clearly to the later interwar years. AIUI Albert Camus didn't really come to public attention until during the war itself.
Posted 3 years ago # -
@gembo
Correction: For your joke to work fully the answer was 'kæmɥ'.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Kam-OO in US
Soon will be the 61st anniversary of the car crashing in to the plane tree and killing him.
He did not rise to prominence until after WWII when he was in his early thirties. Prior to this he edited the resistance newspaper Combat. According to Wiki.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Ca-µ would also have worked as a pun.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Contents of this used to be on CEC website -
“
A. S Boog-Watson, Charles B; Crockett
History And Derivation Of Edinburgh Street Names“
Posted 3 years ago # -
@ejstubbs - thank you for the actually helpful non-pun answer as well!
Posted 3 years ago # -
“
Most authorities agree it was also the stone referred to in some old sources as the Camus Stone, though the author of the 1840 book referred to above suggested that the Camus Stone was actually a separate stone that stood nearby until being broken up for use in road construction.
“
https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/edinburgh/caiystane/index.html
Posted 3 years ago # -
According to Stuart Harris' book on the placenames of Edinburgh, Camus is a "spurious" modern form of Caiy as in Caiy Stane, therefore we can infer that the pronunciation should be something like Caiymus. Cat or Ket are alternatives to Caiy also, the meaning could derive from the stone being on the side of a hill.
Posted 3 years ago # -
@kaputnik
Spurious. I knew it.
Posted 3 years ago # -
@Frenchy, our plan worked, you have tempted The Mighty @Kaputnik out of his silence. Obviously not as long as the Caiystane has stood silent or the Camus Stone took to be ground up for roads.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Kaputnik is pretty well right: we know it as the Caiystane but it was also known variously as the Cat Stane, Ket Stane, the Kel Stane or the Camus Stone. Ket and Cat both come from the Gaelic-derived word for battle. There is the theory, advanced by Charles J Smith, whom my Mum looked after in his final year, that Camus was a Danish commander killed in one of the battles and the stone is a memorial.
Posted 3 years ago # -
@arellcat what about the theory that the Camus stone was next to the Caiystane and was ground up to make roads?
Posted 3 years ago # -
Stravaiging says that the Camus Stone stood near the Fairmilehead crossroads and was broken up along with the nearby Cat Stanes for road building.
Posted 3 years ago # -
@chdot: NLS has a copy of History And Derivation Of Edinburgh Street Names (and also of Harris' book which is just a tad too pricey for me to be able to justify buying out of idle curiosity). According to WorldCat there's also a copy of the council's book in the University Library. And one in the Library of Congress in Washington, if you happen to be passing by that way...
Shame it's no longer available online though.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Canmore has an entry for the Camus Stone, although it locates it further north than stravaiging.com does, in what is now the front garden of number 15 Oxgangs Road. It also has a scan of the relevant page from Drummond's The Market Crosses of Scotland, which appears to be the "1840 book" referred to on the undiscoveredscotland.co.uk page about the Caiy Stane (said book is apparently in the RCAHMS archive).
I'm not sure where stravaiging.com got its location information from, although ancient-stones.co.uk also states that the Camus Stone was "believed to have been situated 200m south of the toll house". However, that description doesn't seem to fit with the reference to it standing "on the brow of a hill" if the toll house in question was the one at the current Fairmilehead crossroads: 200m south from there puts you almost at the bottom of the hill heading down towards what used to be the Bow Bridge over the Swanston Burn.
On the other hand, 200m due south of the current crossroads would put the stone pretty much bang next to the alighment of the old roman road that is marked on the 1st edition of the OS six-inch map surveyed in 1852. If the current Buckstone Terrace/Biggar Road alignment replaced the roman road (which seems to be strongly suggested by comparing the current alignment to that shown on both this late 18th century map, and on Ainslie's 1821 map) and was the result of the "early 19th century" road building mentioned on stravaiging.com, then that could lend credence to the idea that the Camus Stone stood alongside the old road, and was broken up to provide stone for the new Biggar Road. But it still wouldn't put it "on the brow of a hill".
Canmore also has an entry for "Two large cairns ... destroyed during road construction in the 18th century" which does appear to tally with the location given on stravaiging.com for the Cat Stanes. (The cairn site is also marked on the 1852 six-inch OS map linked above.)
Posted 3 years ago # -
I have reference to an original copy of Boog Watson, who notes for Camus:
"From the Camus Stone, a battle memorial. See Caiystane."
and for Caiystane:
"Named from the Caiy Stane known as General Kay's monument and also called Kel, Kay, or Camus Stone. This marked the site of an ancient battle and can be seen on east side of Caiystane Drive. Battle stone means Kel Stone from which derived Kay Stane, the corruption of which is Caiystane."
Posted 3 years ago # -
But as noted above, other sources would disagree that the Caiy Stane and the Camus Stone are one and the same. Including one which would appear to have been written within a decade or so of the date of the supposed destruction of the Camus Stone.
None of which (AFAICS) explains why either the existing Caiy Stane or the now-lost Camus Stone it might have had that name. The Wiki article on Camus the supposed 11th century Scandinavian general doesn't add any weight to the theory that he had anything to do with the Camus Stone in Fairmilehead/Swanston - or even the Camus Cross near Carnoustie where he is supposed to have been defeated by Malcolm II in the Battle of Barry ("The history of the event relies heavily on tradition and it is currently considered to be apocryphal.")
What Charles J Smith says in his book is: "...certain local historians have suggested that the name Camus was that of a Danish chieftain or commander killed in one of [the local battles] and that the stone, erected as a memorial, later gave its name, Camus Stone or Comiston, the the district. However, no evidence exists to associate the stone with the name Comiston." My reading of that is that he wasn't particularly convinced by that particular theory.
It's not at all uncommon for popular folklore relating to what might once have been historical figures to be picked up far from the area in which the original events took place, or were supposed to have taken place. Obvious examples would include King Arthur and Ossian. It only takes a bit of 'folk etymology' to be added to the mix for that then to give rise to a dubious explanation for a wholly unrelated placename.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Posted 3 years ago # -
“Shame it's no longer available online though”
Yes, must have vanished one of the times CEC ‘upgraded’ its website.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Could it be found via wayback machine?
Alternatively a FOI request might tell you what the council has.
Posted 3 years ago #
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