History of Leith, Edinburgh

The Strangers Guide, being a Plan of Edinburgh & Leith exhibiting all the streets principal buildings & late improvementsÂ…
Imprint: Edinburgh : R. Scott, 1805
source-nls

The Strangers Guide, being a Plan of Edinburgh & Leith exhibiting all the streets principal buildings & late improvementsÂ…
Imprint: Edinburgh : R. Scott, 1805
source-nls

(c) John Arthur

We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns” (Lowland Scots for we’re all John Thomson’s children) is a popular saying in Scotland and the far north of England, and is known in other parts of the world. Nowadays, the phrase is often used to mean “we’re all the same under the skin”. for more click here

(c) John Arthur

Work on the Heslington East campus extension has unearthed the skeleton of a man believed to be one of the first victims of tuberculosis in Britain.

Found in September during archaeological investigations on the site, the skeleton was found in a shallow grave close to an old Roman road between York and Barton-on-Humber. Close analysis by experts from York Osteoarchaeology confirmed the cause of death to be tuberculosis, a disease that affected the man’s spine and pelvis. for more click here

(c) John Arthur
On the Craig above Dunsappie Loch are the remains of an Iron Age Hill fort along with the later remains of a farmstead. There are the traces of earlier hill forts on Salisbury Craigs and at the summit of Arthur Seat.

Henry Thomas Cockburn (October 26, 1779 – April 26, 1854), was a Scottish judge and biographer, with the style of Lord Cockburn (pronounced Co’burn).

His father, a keen Tory, was a baron of the Court of Exchequer, and his mother was connected by marriage with Lord Melville. He was educated at the Royal High School and the University of Edinburgh.

He was a member of the famous Speculative Society, to which Sir Walter Scott, Henry Brougham and Francis Jeffrey belonged. He entered the Faculty of Advocates in 1800, and attached himself, not to the party of his relatives, who could have afforded him most valuable patronage, but to the Whig party, and that at a time when it held out few inducements to men ambitious of success in life.
for more click here

(c) John Arthur

The Quintinshill rail disaster occurred on 22 May 1915, at Quintinshill, an intermediate signal box (on what is now the West Coast Main Line) with refuge loops on the Caledonian Railway near Gretna Green in Scotland. Involving five trains, the crash killed 227 people and caused by far the most casualties of any rail crash that has happened in the UK. The accident is not well known because the majority of victims were soldiers and it occurred during World War I, when all news was subject to official censorship. A trial afterwards convicted two negligent railway workers of having caused the accident. for more click here

(c) John Arthur