A Journal of the Deacon Brodie Summer:

The Diary of George Sandy 1788

George Sandy’s Buildings

George Sandy’s diary is graced with excellent sketches of buildings both old and ruined in Edinburgh and Leith. The creation of these drawings was driven by Sandy’s antiquarian instincts and desire to record parts of the city that were threatened by Edinburgh’s Georgian transformation or that were decayed almost beyond repair. In some instances, his pictures are the only visual record that survive of a particular structure and in others his is the most reliable record to remain.

Page 59: the west bastion of Leith

This sketch is the only record of this final fragment of the fortifications built in 1548 by the Catholic Queen Regent Mary of Guise and the Scottish and French forces besieged in Leith by the Protestant Lords of the Congregation and their English allies.

Page 74: St. Mary’s Chapel, Portsburgh

St Mary’s Chapel was built in 1508 on a site now concealed by later developments at the eastern end of Kings Stables Road where it meets the Grassmarket. Dr. Malcolm described it as a chapel for the Barras or tournament ground situated at the base of the Castle Rock, where a chaplain would receive the oaths of those about to fight. Sandy’s sketch is the only visual record of the chapel to survive.

Page 99: The Black Turnpike

In George Sandy’s time, the “Black Turnpike” was reckoned one of the most ancient structures in the city – he places its construction at 1430, but other accounts believed it even to be pre-Norman. It is reputed to have been the home of the Provost Simon Preston to which Mary Queen of Scots was brought after her defeat at Carberry Hill in 1567 prior to her imprisonment in Loch Leven Castle. The building stood just to the west of the Tron Kirk on the High Street, and stood directly in the alignment of the new South Bridge. The demolition was a cause for intense regret, and Sandy was not the only inhabitant to make a special trip to see it before it was levelled. George Sandy’s drawing is the only contemporary illustration that survives: James Skene’s 1827 sketch is a fanciful and exaggerated reconstruction of the building as it might have been in Queen Mary’s day, and the drawing in James Wilson’s Old and New Edinburgh (published as a serial in the 1880s) is based on Skene.

Page 113: Perspective view of the North Loch (“Nor’ Loch”) and Princes Street

This drawing and Sandy’s account on page 112 of the building work in and around the Loch (and the difficulties it was encountering) are unusual and important but difficult to interpret with any certainty. The drawing appears to show the western side of the Mound as it stood in 1788, with two streams approaching a pair of culverts passing beneath the Mound. The draining of the North Loch was complete by this stage, and a map in Signet Library collections engraved by Daniel Lizars in 1787 shows the remnant of the Loch west of the Mound as a “morass.” The barrack-like uniformity of Princes Street in its first form is clearly visible, as is the spire of what is now St. Andrew’s and St George’s Kirk.