Chapter XXXIV

THESE concluding pages of a book on the road to Edinburgh form no fitting place to attempt the description or history of so ancient and historic a town. Our business is to reach the northern capital, leaving the story of Edwin’s Burgh to be told by others. Yet we cannot leave it thus without some brief survey.

[Picture: “Squalor and Picturesqueness”] The modern traveller by road, coming in by the London Road, Greenside, Leith Street, and Princes Street, comes in by the New Town, and sees on his left, across a deep ravine, partly occupied by a huge railway station and partly by beautiful public gardens, the dark mass of the Castle and the Old Town crowning the opposite heights, grey and stern, in effective contrast with the gay flower-beds down below, the old houses huddling together on the scanty foothold of the ridge and rising to sheer heights. _That_ is the original historic town: _this_, to which the modern traveller comes by road, the new. Little more than a hundred years ago this New Town was not thought of: its site the meadows and wastes that sloped down to the Firth of Forth and the sea, and the site of the railway station and the Princes Street Gardens covered with the dark waters of the Nor’ Loch.

Old-time arrivals in Edinburgh, coming in by Canongate, found themselves in midst of squalor and picturesqueness; and although much of the picturesque is gone, it is still a quaint street and the squalor survives. The poor who live here “hang forth their banners from the outward walls,” in the shape of their domestic washing, fluttering in the breeze from every window, at the end of long poles, and how poor they are may be judged from the condition of the clothes they consider worth keeping. That sometime prison, the Canongate Tolbooth, facing the long street, remains one of the most curious relics of Edinburgh’s past. Not a very ancient past, for it was only “biggit” in 1591, but old enough to be regarded with reverence, and quaint to admiration, with its spired tower and tourelles, so eminently Scotch of that period when the French influence in architecture was yet strong. You can match those curious spires time and time again among the old châteaux of the Loire, and in Brittany; just as in the old Norman town of Coutances one can find the counterpart of the old theatre in Playhouse Close, near by.

[Picture: Canongate]

From here, those travellers saw the Old Town ahead and, progressing up High Street, came successively to the Tron Church, the Market Cross, St. Giles’s Cathedral, and, before 1817—when it was pulled down—to the Old Tolbooth. Beyond this, the Lawnmarket conducted to the Castle, which then marked the end of the town. In this progress the tall and crowded houses and darkening wynds and closes stood to right and left. Later years have seen the disappearance of many of these places, where in old times the ferocious Scots nobles lived, poor and proud, bloodthirsty and superstitious, but those that are left are very grim, dark, and dirty, and the ten-and eleven-storied houses of such a height that only by great exertions is it possible to crane the neck and lift the eyes to the skyline, against which the belching chimneys of the piled-up “lands” are projecting the smoke of domestic hearths and eternally justifying the old Scots term of endearment for Edinburgh. The nobles are gone, lang syne, their old dens occupied now by the very poorest of Edinburgh’s poor; but sanitary conditions, even with the present occupants, are not so degraded as they were when the flower of Scotland’s nobility dwelt here; when pigs and fowls were herded in the basements, or ran unheeded in the alleys, and wayfarers skulked under the walls at the sound of voices above, calling “gardy-loo”—a call which accompanied a discharge of overflowing household utensils from inconceivable heights into the gutters below. “Gardy-loo” was a term which, with this dreadfully unclean custom, derived from France, having been originally _gardez-l’eau_; just as the cakes sold at Craigmillar, called “petticoat tails” were originally _petits gateaux_.

Still, the Old Town is sufficiently grimy and huddled yet to fitly illustrate the Scottish saying “The clartier (_i.e._ the dirtier) the cosier.”

[Picture: Old Inscription, Lady Stair’s House]

Nothing is more characteristic of the Old Town than the religious texts carved upon the stone door lintels of these ancient houses. Few are without them. To a stranger they would seem to tell of a fervent piety, but they meant more than that. They were always accompanied with a date and with the initials—sometimes also the arms—of their owners; as in the beautiful example still remaining in Lady Stair’s Close, and represented both pride and a fearful superstition. Superstition, because the improving texts and pious ejaculations meant little beyond talismanic protection against “Auld Hornie,” wizards, and warlocks, wehr-wolves, and all those frightful inhabitants of Satan’s invisible world in which the Scotch most fervently believed, from king to peasant. Thus when we read over one of these old doorways the queerly spelled

Blissit be God in all His giftis,

we know that this was little less than an incantation, and marked a lively sense of favours to come; and when our eye lights upon the inscription next door,

Pax intrantibus: Salus exevntibvs,

we know that the good feeling thus prominently displayed would by no means have prevented the fierce lord of the house from stabbing his guest in a dark corner, if he had a mind to it.

[Picture: The “Heave Awa” Sign] A highly interesting book might be written on these old sculptured stones alone. Nor are they in every instance old. Some modern ones exist, and the entirely laudable passion for commemoration has caused interesting tablets to be set up, marking many of Edinburgh’s famous spots. A curious modern piece of sculpture decorates more or less artistically the archway leading from the High Street into Paisley Close, supporting a tall building erected in 1862. It represents the bust of a boy, and includes an inscribed label. It seems that the old building standing on this site suddenly collapsed on a Sunday morning in 1861, and buried a number of people in the ruins, thirty-five actually dying from their injuries. Some were fortunate enough to be screened from the heavy masses of stone and brick by timbers which in falling had imprisoned them. Among these was the lad whose face is represented in the carving. The rescuers who came with pick and shovel to dig out the survivors had succoured many, and were turning back when they heard the muffled cry, “Heave awa, lads, I’m no’ deid yet,” and redoubling their efforts, extricated the author of it.

No relic now remains upon the door-posts of these old houses of the curious contrivance which preceded the door-knocker, and for the sight of a “tirle-pin” the stranger must needs go to the museum of the Royal Scottish Society of Antiquaries, to which the last example was long since removed, from an old house in the Canongate.

[Picture: A Tirle-Pin] The tirle-pin had a variety of names. Sometimes it would be called a “risp” or a “ringle,” and there were those who knew it as a “craw”; that is to say, a crow, from the harsh crow-like sound produced by its use. A tirle-pin was just a rasping contrivance made of a twisted bar of iron fixed against the door post with an iron ring hanging loosely from it, as in the accompanying sketch. Instead of knocking, one who desired admittance would seize the ring and rasp it up and down the twisted iron, producing a noise which could be distinctly heard within.

The origin of the tirle-pin, like that of many another Scottish custom, was French. It originated in France in the times of the Valois, in days when it was not etiquette to knock at the doors of royal personages. In face of this, courtiers were reduced to scratching with the finger-nails—a disagreeable sensation when practised upon wood, as any one who tries it may readily discover for himself. Perhaps from this cause, or because the scratching was not loud enough (or, perhaps, even because the polish began to disappear from the royal portals) this mechanical scratcher was invented. The fashion spread from France to Scotland in times when the two countries were linked in close ties of friendship. From the palace it spread down to the mansions of the nobles and the houses of the merchants, finally coming into general use. It was never acclimatised in England, although another kind of scratching was, if we may believe the satirists, who say that James the First and his Scottish followers imported the itch.

However, the tirle-pin is obsolete, but it did not disappear without leaving a trace of its existence in old Scots ballads; as, for instance, that of _Sweet William’s Ghaist_:—

There cam a ghaist to Margaret’s door,
Wi’ mony a grievous groan;
And aye he tirled upon the pinne,
But answer made she nane.

Is that my father Philip?
Or is’t my brother John,
Or is’t my true love Willie
To Scotland now come home?