Skulferatu #132 - Old Railway Path, South Queensferry

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Skulferatu #120 - Bell's Wynd, Edinburgh

 

On a cold winter’s day with a bitter wind almost too cold to walk in, I went for a walk around the Old Town of Edinburgh.  Despite it being freezing and not the sort of weather you would expect to attract tourists, there were thousands of tourists around.  Maybe global warming attracts those from hotter climes to the harsher colder ones.  Personally, at this time of year, I’d rather be somewhere warmer.  As I wandered around, I came to one of the many narrow streets off the High Street, Bell’s Wynd.  This is now a rather non-descript street of rubbish bins, worn stairs and drab buildings, but it is a street with a rich history.

 

Bell’s Wynd is believed to be named after John Bell, who had a brewery at the foot of the Wynd in the 1520s.  At the top of the Wynd, facing out onto the High Street, was the Clam Shell Turnpike, a church residence that was built during the reign of James V (1512 to 1542), for George Crichton, the Bishop of Dunkeld.  The rather strange name for this building came from the fact that there was a turnpike stair in the tower of the residence, and on the outer wall of this tower was carved a clamshell.  The clamshell being a piece of religious imagery that related to pilgrims having travelled to the church of St James at Santiago de Compostella in Spain, St James being the patron saint of Spain.  Like many buildings in Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots once stayed in the Clam Shell Turnpike.  She had fled Edinburgh along with her husband Darnley after the murder of her friend, David Rizzio, who had been stabbed to death in front of her at Holyrood Palace.  On returning to Edinburgh, she was a bit wary about returning to the palace, so called in on an ally, Lord Home, who lived at the Clam Shell Turnpike.  He made her welcome, until she felt she could safely return to the Palace.  

 

In 1824, the Clam Shell Turnpike was destroyed in a huge fire.  In the building on the site where it once stood, there is now a fish and chip shop called the Clamshell.

 

Entrance to Bell’s Wynd by the Clamshell

 

Entrance to Bell’s Wynd by the Clamshell

 

Bell’s Wynd

 

At one time there were many businesses and workshops along Bell’s Wynd.  Here you could employ a chimney sweep, have your wig made by the barbers, wigs being all the fashion at one time, buy a harpsichord, then purchase the sheet music, and learn to play the latest tunes on it.  If you weren’t living in one of the many houses and rooms on the Wynd, you could rent ‘chambers, fire, and a bed for twenty-four hours…in Bell’s Wynd…(for)…tenpence.’  

 

In 1708, Bell’s Wynd was the site of the first authorised newspaper in Scotland, The Scots Postman, later the New Edinburgh Gazette.  The publisher of the paper, James Donaldson, also specialised in printed funeral cards with skeletons and other ‘emblems of mortality’ on their borders.

 

View out to the High Street

 

A pigeon

 

Tall tenements of Bell’s Wynd

 

James Johnson, who was a struggling publisher of music, had his workshop in Bell’s Wynd.  He had a pet project of collecting traditional Scottish folk songs, and this project eventually found him fame, and also introduced him to Robert Burns.  Burns became a dear friend to Johnson, and an enthusiastic contributor to what became the Scots Musical Museum, a book in six volumes, that Johnson published between 1787 and 1803.

 

View down Bell’s Wynd

 

View up Bell’s Wynd

 

View up Bell’s Wynd

 

As well as being a home to Edinburgh publishers, Bell’s Wynd was also home to various musicians, such as Giuseppe Puppo, a violinist from Lucca in Italy, who was considered to be a virtuoso performer, and had been taught by Tartini.  He was the leader and violin concerto player at St Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh from 1778 to 1782. 

 

Bell's Wynd - illustration from New Lights on Old Edinburgh

 

Like many of the old streets in Edinburgh, Bell’s Wynd has a ghost story attached to it.  This story takes place in the 1770s, at a time when Edinburgh’s New Town was being built, and those with money were fleeing to it from the now overcrowded and crumbling tenements around the High Street, like the ones at Bell’s Wynd.  Many of the houses and rooms within the tenements were boarded up and abandoned, so it was not uncommon for those living in a building to have empty apartments below or above them.  Apartments with the doors chained, padlocked, and left to rot and decay. 

 

On Bell’s Wynd there was a house that had been abandoned and locked up years before the flight from the Old Town had started.  Above it lived a blacksmith and locksmith by the name of George Gourlay.  He had lived there for nine years with his wife Christian, and in all that time had seen no-one enter or leave the house below. Indeed, Christian had told him that she had worked in that house when she was a girl, and that it was nearly twenty-one years since the owner had left it very suddenly to travel abroad.  When George tried to pry further into who had lived there, Christian would refuse to talk any further about it, or would change the subject.  This, of course, just made George more and more curious about the house and its history.  Sometimes, as he returned from work, he would stop outside the padlocked door of the house and listen to the silence within.  A silence in which he was sure he could sometimes hear a faded scream, and then low and gentle sobbing.  

 

As time went by, George’s curiosity grew to such an extent that he knew he just must get into the house to see what was there, and to learn its secrets.  So, one night when his wife was sleeping, he quietly got up from their bed, lit a candle, took a set of keys and lock picks, and made his way down the stairs to the house below.  There, he tried various keys on the rusting padlock, but it would not give.  Then he tried the lock picks and eventually, click, the padlock sprung open.  Gently pulling away the chains it held, George then turned the door handle and tried to push the door open.  It wouldn’t budge.  Warped by age and damp, it was jammed in the doorframe.  George put his shoulder against it and pushed and pushed with all his might.  At first it wouldn’t give, but then with a mighty scream it burst open.  As it did, George thought he saw the ghostly figure of a naked man rush past, his mouth open in a shriek of terror.  Shaking the image from his head, George convinced himself that it must just have been the flicker of the candlelight and his mind playing tricks on him.  He did, however, feel a slight uneasiness creep over him.

 

On pushing the door fully open, George found himself in the kitchen of the house.  In front of him there was a table covered in a faded and dusty cloth.  It was set with two plates, two wine glasses and an opened bottle of wine, with the wine now just a coating of red dust.  Walking further in, he saw in the fireplace the ashes and charcoal from the kitchen fire, and on the spit above, the skeletal remains of a goose that must have been cooking there.  Whoever had lived here must have left in some hurry, George thought to himself.

 

Making his way through and out of the kitchen, George came to a hallway that led to three doors, all of which were shut.  On opening the first of the doors he found he was in the sitting room.  A room in which there were several pieces of what would once have been luxurious furniture, but were now all rotten and broken.  They had been nibbled by mice, which had pulled the stuffing from the chairs, and an ornate chaise longue, to make their nests with.  In the flickering light of the candle, George saw that there were various paintings on the walls.  One was of an attractive, young woman with long, red hair.  George walked up to study the picture more closely and was taken in by just how beautiful the woman was.  Looking at the painting hanging next to it, he saw the portrait of a handsome young man.  He wondered if these were the likenesses of those who had once lived in the house.  They must have made quite a stunning couple.

 

George left the sitting room and tried the next door. It led into a narrow bedroom, that must have been for the family servant.  Could it have been the bedroom that his wife had slept in as a young girl when she worked here?  All that was in the room now was a thin bed, a chair, and a table with a musty bible sitting on it.

 

On leaving that room, George walked further down the hallway, and as he did so his candle flickered and sputtered, as if nervous at what scene it may illuminate through the final door. On twisting the cold brass handle and pushing the door open, George could smell a damp, sweet smell, a smell he recognised as the smell of death.  Hesitating before entering the room, George wondered if he should go further.  There was something dark and sinister about this room, and he could feel the bile in his stomach rise with a fear at what might be in there.  ‘Get a grip of yourself man,’ he told himself, and holding the candle up high he walked into the room.

 

In the sputtering light George almost screamed as he saw the pale and translucent figure of a woman standing beside the four-poster bed that dominated the room.  The ghostly woman looked up at him, her ghostly cheeks wet with ghostly tears. She pointed down at the bed and silently mouthed something to him.  Despite his fear, George found that he was walking over to the bed to see what was there, and as he did so the ghostly woman slipped past him and out of the room. 

 

Slowly approaching the bed, George felt his foot clunk against something on the floor.  Looking down he saw a large kitchen knife, on its blade was a dark crust of something awful.  George shuddered, stepped over it and walked up to the bed.  There he could see that the mouldering bed covers were pulled up high, up to the top of the pillows, and underneath the covers were the outlines of two people.  Putting his candle down on the table beside the bed, George took a breath, prayed silently and then taking the edge of the cover, pulled it back.  In a cloud of dust, he saw that underneath were the mummified corpses of a man and a woman.  The leathery dark and corrupt skin of the woman’s head was framed by long, flame red hair. Dropping the covers, George let out a scream and stepped back.  His candle on the table, then sputtered out, leaving him in pitch darkness.  In a complete panic, George stumbled around, as he tried to find his way out. Tripping and falling, he crawled to the bedroom door and in the hallway saw the dim light of the entrance out of the house.  Rising to his feet he ran out, knocking over a chair in the kitchen as he went.  Out of the house, he pulled the door closed and with shaking hands re-attached the chains and padlock.  Making his way back up the stairs, George sat for a while on one of the cold stone steps and calmed himself down.  He wondered what his wife knew about what had happened in that house, but decided that he would not ask her or speak about what he had seen.  She had her reasons for not speaking about what had gone on there, and maybe he would rather not know.  Having decided this, George made his way back up to their house, and back into their bedroom where his wife lay snoring gently in their bed.  Climbing into the warm bed, George decided that when he woke it would all have just been a bad dream and easily forgotten.

 

George’s resolve not to speak to his wife did not last long after he woke that morning.  Christian sensed there was something wrong and asked him what the matter was.  Before he knew what he was doing he blurted out to her that he had broken into the locked house, seen two mummified bodies in the bed, and that their unhappy ghosts had appeared to him.  On telling her this, Christian turned pale and became unsteady on her feet.  George sat her down and she told him a terrible tale.

 

‘When I was a young girl, I worked for the husband and wife in the house below as a maid servant. They were a handsome couple, Patrick Guthrie, a dashing young gent, and Henrietta Douglas, his beautiful, red headed wife.  At first all was well, and it was a happy house, but then Patrick’s work took him away from home more and more.  Henrietta grew lonely and bored, and fell for the charms of another man. A slippery chap, who presented himself as a member of some aristocratic family from the Highlands.  He oozed an oily self-assurance while bombarding her with compliments and presents.  As soon as Patrick left on his travels, this chap would appear to woo Henrietta.  Sadly, she fell under his spell and took him to her bed.   As a lowly servant I witnessed all this, but could do and say nothing about it.  One morning her lover appeared shortly after Patrick had left.  He brought with him a goose and all the trimmings and asked me to prepare a meal for my mistress and himself.  I plucked and prepared the goose and put it on the spit to roast, as the two of them laughed and frolicked through in the bedroom.  I set the table for the two of them, and had just opened the bottle of wine the lover had brought for them when in walked Patrick.  I didn’t know what to do or say and just placed the bottle on the table as the noise of the two lovers echoed through the house.  Patrick, who was always such a gentle and kind man, stood frozen for a second or two and at first I thought he was going to walk straight out of the door and leave, but no.  His face changed from a pale white of shock to an angry purple of rage.  He suddenly ran to the kitchen block and picked up a large carving knife, and then he flew down the hallway and into the bedroom.  The screaming was terrible, and I stood frozen to the spot.  At one point the lover ran naked into the kitchen pursued by Patrick, who grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back into the bedroom.  The screaming then stopped soon afterwards, and all was quiet.  Even though I was terrified, I felt drawn to see what had happened and found myself walking down the hallway.  Slowly, slowly and as quietly as I could, I stepped around dollops of bright red blood, and then stood in the doorway.  Patrick stood in there by the bed, the knife lay on the floor.  On the bed he had arranged the bodies of his wife and her lover lying side by side.  Both were naked and bloody.  Patrick glanced over to me, the rage had gone from him, and he looked deflated and broken.  He picked the bed covers up from where they had fallen on the floor, and covered the two bodies with them.  After that, he just stood there, silent, and lost.  Then he spoke to me saying that he would pay me forty sovereigns if I would leave immediately and speak of this to no one.  Being young, in shock and frightened by what had just happened, I agreed, and to this day have not ever broken my promise…until now that is.’

 

George was stunned by Christian’s story and didn’t know what to say. He opened his mouth several times to speak, and then lost for words, closed it again, making him look much like he was doing an impression of a goldfish in its bowl. He sat down next to Christian and had just taken her hand in his when, RAP, RAP, RAP, someone knocked on their door.  George got up and opened the door to find a well-dressed, but wizened old man standing there.  The man’s face was a mass of wrinkles so deep that they almost resembled the crags and cracks in a mountain.  He asked if George was a locksmith, to which George replied he was, and invited the man into his home. Noticing how frail the old man seemed, George offered him a seat. Gratefully he accepted it and sat down. 

 

Once seated, the old man told George and Christian that he’d been travelling abroad for over twenty years, and had that morning returned to Edinburgh to live out the remaining time he had, and to make peace with his past.  A past in which he had done a terrible wrong and now must face up to it.

 

Christian, who had been looking intently at the old man, suddenly gasped in recognition.  ‘Patrick Guthrie’, she cried.  ‘Is that you?’  The old man sighed and said that yes that was he, and Christian told him she had once been his servant girl.  That she had kept her promise to him up until that very morning when George had confessed to entering his long abandoned house. 

 

‘Ah, so you both know of my terrible misdeeds,’ sighed Patrick.  ‘Can I then please ask you to come with me to the Fiscal, as I must hand myself in to make amends for a crime that has haunted me and turned me into the broken old man you see before you.’

 

Christian and George agreed to accompany Patrick to see the Fiscal, and off they went.  The Fiscal listened to both the tales told by Patrick and Christian.  He then ordered them to the house, and had George open the locks so he could look inside for himself.  After a short while he came out and looked sternly at Patrick.  ‘So, from what I understand this heinous crime took place twenty one years ago?’  Both Patrick and Christian confirmed that was so.  ‘Well,’ said the Fiscal. ‘The limitation for prosecuting a crime is twenty years, so there is nothing to be done, but for God’s sake man, get your wife and the man who lies beside her buried.’

 

And so, there ends my ghostly tale.  I can find no evidence anywhere to back up this story, so I assume it is just a yarn that was spun by someone long ago and has been embellished with each telling.  Saying that, I have been told that on the darkest nights of the year, if you walk down Bell’s Wynd to where the house once stood, you can see the ghostly figure of Henrietta Douglas, standing with her head bowed, gently weeping.  And, as she weeps the faded figure of her dead lover will run past naked, his hands covering his manhood, and his mouth open in a silent scream.

 

***

 

I left the Skulferatu that accompanied me on my walk to Bell’s Wynd, in a gap in a wall.  There it can watch over the ghosts of the many past occupants of the street.

 

Skulferatu #120

 

Skulferatu #120 in a gap in a wall on Bell’s Wynd

 

Skulferatu #120 in a gap in a wall on Bell’s Wynd

 

Map showing location of Skulferatu #120

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are

 

Latitude 55.949749

Longitude -3.188704

 

what3words: school.bleak.nerve

 

I used the following sources for information on Bell’s Wynd –

 

New Lights on Old Edinburgh

By John Reid

1894

 

Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland.  Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative.

Revised by Alexander Leighton

1889

 

Close Encounters in the Royal Mile

By Alastair M.R. Hardie

1995

 

 Article and photographs are copyright of © Kevin Nosferatu, unless otherwise specified.

Skulferatu #93 - Tolbooth Wynd, Leith, Edinburgh

You may not guess it from walking down this street, what with the Brutalist flats of Linksview House dominating it, but Tolbooth Wynd is one of the oldest streets in Leith and was once described as being one of the most picturesque in the area.  In the early thirteenth century the first houses built in Leith were built upon the land that now stands between Tolbooth Wynd and The Shore.

 

View of Tolbooth Wynd by Linksview House

 

Linksview House on Tolbooth Wynd

 

View from The Shore looking towards Tolbooth Wynd

 

View of Tolbooth Wynd from The Shore

 

View down Tolbooth Wynd towards The Shore

 

Tolbooth Wynd takes its name from the fact that about half way down the street there used to stand the Old Tolbooth, a building that served as a meeting chamber, courthouse, a jail and occasionally, accommodation for soldiers stationed at Leith.  The Tolbooth was built in 1565 and was in use for nearly two hundred and fifty years, before falling into disrepair.  It was then proposed that it should be demolished and a new court house and prison built in its place. There was a campaign, led by Walter Scott, to preserve the façade of the building, but this was ‘cavalierly dismissed’ by the Lord Provost and the building was demolished in 1825.  The new building only functioned as a courthouse for a few years before being converted into shops and offices.

 

The Old Tolbooth - from ‘Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time’

 

The Tolbooth housed many prisoners in its time, though not that many of note, as most of the more infamous criminals ended up in the Tolbooth at Edinburgh.  Probably the most distinguished prisoner who had the misfortune to reside there was William Maitland of Lethington.  He was the Secretary of State to Mary Queen of Scots and was imprisoned in the Leith Tolbooth in 1573 by the Regent Morton.  Fearing he would face the humiliation and cruelty of a public execution, he took a dose of poison and died in his cell.  It was said that his corpse was left lying in his cell for so long that it was partially eaten by the numerous rats that infested the building.  So, you can probably imagine that it was not the healthiest place to serve out any time as a prisoner.  On a lighter note, another of those imprisoned within the Tolbooth was a rather hapless thief.  In 1763 a sailor arrived in Leith on a ship from London and went for a few ales in one of the local taverns.  While there he boasted to his new found companions that he had made some money while away and had a chest on board the ship with over £200 in it.  This boast was overheard by a local ne'er-do-well who saw a way of making some quick money.  He disguised himself as a porter and went to the ship where he told the crew that he had been sent by the sailor to collect the chest.  The unsuspecting crew handed the chest over to him.  However, the thief, being unused to ships, slipped on the plank leading down to the dock and fell into the sea, along with the chest.  A host of people quickly gathered around to rescue the poor man, including the owner of the chest, who was shocked to see that it was his own chest that was fished out of the water along with the would be thief. The thief, still dripping wet and half drowned, was quickly marched along to the Tolbooth, and locked up in a cell.

 

At the eastern end of Tolbooth Wynd there stood for many years a signal tower looking out over the Forth.  It was said to be of a sturdy design, much like an old fort.   It had portholes at the top like those often designed for firing muskets out of, but that were actually for the local merchants to look out from and watch as their ships sailed off from, or returned to, the harbour.

 

Signal Tower at Tolbooth Wynd - from ‘Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time’

 

Like any old street, Tolbooth Wynd has a ghost story attached to it.  Not to be outdone by other tales of headless horsemen and the suchlike, it was said that on stormy nights at midnight, a coach could be heard thundering down the street.  Anyone brave enough to peek out through their window as it passed would see a funereal looking coach tearing down along the cobbled street, driven by a tall, gaunt man, dressed all in black and without a head, and drawn by six black horses who were all also headless.  Through the coach window, it was said you could glimpse a mysterious woman sitting inside, her face covered by a black veil. 

 

Around midnight, during a foggy and cold night a few years ago, I was making my way back home from a local pub and walked up along Tolbooth Wynd.  There I heard a terrible rumbling and screeching.  On looking up and fully expecting to see the dreaded ghostly coach approaching, I instead saw a demonic like figure on an off road motorbike tearing down the road.  He wasn’t headless but rather had his head hidden in the depths of a grey hoodie.  With blue lights flashing and sirens wailing like a screaming banshee, a ghostly police car was in hot pursuit behind him.  They were soon lost in the swirling darkness of the night, like an apparition of old, and I continued my slightly inebriated stumble home.

 

A large part of Tolbooth Wynd was demolished and rebuilt in the 1880s.  During the slum clearances in Leith during the 1950s and 1960s much of it was again demolished and replaced with a housing scheme and the Linksview House tower block.  In 2017 Linksview House became a listed building with Category A Status, being seen as an important example of Brutalist architecture.

 

Tolbooth Wynd – from ‘Old and New Edinburgh’

 

Tolbooth Wynd, Leith, circa 1900 – from a postcard by Valentine & Sons

 

Linksview House, Tolbooth Wynd

 

Today, in the not so cold light of day, I took a walk around Leith and through Tolbooth Wynd.  In a gap in a crumbly, stone wall by the small park there, I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me on my walk.

 

Skulferatu #93

 

Skulferatu #93 in a gap in the wall at Tolbooth Wynd

 

Map showing location of Skulferatu #93

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –

 

Latitude 55.974437

Longitude -3.171031

 

what3words: riches.moons.clear

 

I used the following sources for information on Tolbooth Wynd –

 

Historical Notes Concerning Leith and its Antiquities, Volume 1

By James Campbell Irons M.A.

1897

 

Cassell’s Old and New Edinburgh, Vol 3

By James Grant

1883

 

Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time, Vol 2

By Daniel Wilson

1891

 

 

Historic Environment Scotland

Iconic Leith flats recognised at highest listing category