CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
A few weeks ago I was on a train that stopped at Meadowbank and I noticed a path I'd never seen before -
I checked on Open Street Map - not there.
So I put it on and it's now usable by CycleStreets -
http://edinburgh.cyclestreets.net/journey/2501889
More of a curiosity than an important 'missing link', but if you live around London Road it's a neat way to the Park. No doubt the developers tried to block up this (presumably) Right of Way.
Very interesting. I live nearby and had no idea there was a path there. Must investigate soon!
Aha - I did wonder if you'd know about it.
Certainly not 'obvious' - or obviously a through route (from either end).
There are plenty of cut-throughs in various parts of Edinburgh that you assume local people (at least) know about.
Some perhaps should be signed, and some perhaps not(?)
It is odd, because I know the two streets it connects to quite well. I pass by the path at least once a week. Clearly I don't know the street well enough...
I used to use the path regularly between my pedicab Lockup and sainsburies/London road. It's pretty hard to find but noone seems to mind if you use it!
Interesting. I was down that way weekend before last and found the start in Holyrood Park, but missed the bit under the railway and ended up going back through Spring Gardens to London Road.
On the 1853 town map of Edinburgh, there's a culvert under the railway embankment in this location. I assume that whatever flowed through it no longer flowed as by 1977 edition it is marked as a path.
Culvert? Bartholomew in 1852/3 shows a path, as best I can make out. Maybe an old right of way?
crowriver -- if you use the permalink in the footer, you can generate a "zoomed in" URL link.
i haven't got round to dynamically updating the address bar URL lat long co-ords when the zoom is activated.
Cheers bax: Permalinked
Looking again, it does appear to be a burn or ditch or something like that, as it passes under the various roads around, including London Road. Drainage from Holyrood? An open sewer?
Traces still visible here, though as kaputnik opined, the function appears to have changed (at least south of London Road anyway).
You can get the 1:1000 scale town plan of 1853 at old maps.co.uk. Although the interface is horrible and you only get tiny squares and they appear to have disabled the "enhanced zoom" function.
Anyway, it could be a ditch / stream. Or it could be a path / track also. Then again, it's 1852, there's no reason it wasn't both! I assume it was to drain Holyrood park and surrounding land, perhaps to prepare it for building? I can't think they'd have bothered to build a tunnel / passageway under quite a large embankment just to maintain an old footpath in the 1850s. Although they were in the habit of putting railways in tunnels or re-routing them to avoid upsetting the gentry.
Anyway it seems much less irregular in later editions.
this town plan sheet?
Looks like it may be a culverted burn/drainage ditch as it runs all the way to the sea, around Seafield (or Sea Meadows as it seems to have been called then).
Anyway sorry to divert your stream of thought (ho ho ho) I just like looking at old maps to figure out how they relate to the current topography.
I love all the wee drawings of trees lining the various minor roads in what was then Craigentinny Meadows: they look as they might in an aerial photograph, but rendered with a beautiful economy of line.
Some of the NLS maps have Google underlays - though map doesn't zoom in as much and there doesn't seem to be a permalink option
http://geo.nls.uk/urbhist/75119808/googlemaps.html
Drainage ditch/burn must be mostly culverted.
Goes under Meadowbank Stadium and seems to be visible here.
Some of the NLS maps have Google underlays
These maps have been georeferenced by the community, via:
http://geo.nls.uk/maps/georeferencer/
there doesn't seem to be a permalink option
its a tilecache presentation, rather than openlayers.
i think that's the same one:
http://maps.nls.uk/towns/view/?id=2657&zoom=6&lat=9567&lon=12052&layers=B
I've been doing a bit of local research on the water that once flowed through this.
Historically it was known as the Tumble or the Clockmillburn, and drained the somewhat wet land of Arthur's Seat towards the sea, where it discharged nearby Fillyside.
It also had another important purpose; it was the route by which the effluent of the Old Town's chamber pots and the Nor Loch were disposed of. In reality it was an open sewer.
But why waste all that rich, brown water? After all, this was the time before chemical fertilisers and animal and human waste were important for agriculture. To capture the waste, there was a system of settling ponds around what is now Meadowbank and Restalrig. The solids were extracted for sale as fertiliser and the water used to irrigate a system of meadows.
This is how the area of Meadowbank got it's name; it was on the bank of the river and it was one of these irrigated Meadows. Fillyside and Craigentinny Meadows also.
Over time the burn was formalised into a system of man-made ditches and drains and had 2 routes under what is now London Road, one through what is now this tunnel and the other parallel to Clockmill Lane. When the railway was being constructed in the late 1830s, the burn was still referred to as the "Foul Burn" as although the system of human waste recover and open sewers were largely gone, they were still in living memory. The industry of Edinburgh now made use of the river to dump its waste, the New Street Gasworks was said to add its own particular smell and a certain effervescence to the water. So, they couldn't just stop the burn up and it was run in a culvert big enough that it was later converted to a footpath when the burn was diverted in a smaller pipe.
I'm trying to write a more complete story of the burn for a blog. Might get round to finishing it, but there's lots of detail.
I assume that whatever flowed through it no longer flowed as by 1977 edition it is marked as a path.
My grandmother lived in Royal Park Terrace and there was a path there in the early 1970s.
It was a lot more "open plan" in those days. It was only when they built the new houses (which it passes under) that it became narrow and hard to spot.
But it's still the same basic path, IMO, given it goes under the same rail bridge.
Really interesting bit of history, K. I never knew about the ponds or the irrigation, yet it's plain to see on the 1817 Kirkwood map!
Curiously, I was comparing the embankment over the years, and it's only by the 1893 OS map that a new access appears where the current footway is.
people on St Kilda nearly starved when crops failed as they were using human waste as fertiliser.
On the other hand the expression taking the piss appears to relate to shipping urine from areas of the country where pee was higher in salts (???)to other areas? YOu can see why the expression may have come about. ALso, seems we may have made spome progress.?
I seem to recall one of the problems on Kilda was that the fuel they used was the turfs. They then spread the ashes and the nightsoil back on the fields. Kildan diet was high in sea birds, and seabird waste was also spread on the fields. Seabirds are at the top of the marine foodchain and tend to accumulate heavy metals, mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic etc. (Tuna do the same things, hence the recommendation not to feed to babies). These levels were small enough in themselves so as not to pose a harm to human life, but over a series of centuries this process was constantly adding heavy metals into the soil, and with no possible escape route, concentrating them to toxic levels.
You must log in to post.
Cycling in Edinburgh Flickr group
Video embedded using Easy Video Embed plugin
posts