Once
upon a time, long long ago, in a far off land there was a fort full of
soldiers...well, actually not that long ago there was a fort full of soldiers
in Leith. And being a fort in Leith it
was aptly named – Leith Fort. Now, all
that remain of it are a bit of the wall, the main gate, and the guardhouses.
Leith
Fort was built in the 1780s to protect the harbour at Leith, the city fathers
being spurred into action during the American war of Independence after three
ships led by the Scottish American naval captain John Paul Jones, attempted an
attack on Leith and were only thwarted by a storm.
The
original fort was designed by James Craig, the architect who designed
Edinburgh’s New Town, and it had a battery of nine guns that were pointed out
over Leith Harbour and the Forth. During
the Napoleonic wars, the fort was expanded quite considerably with more
buildings being added to house French prisoners of war. It
then carried on as a military base, and was the headquarters for the Royal
Artillery in Scotland. In the mid-1950s the
fort was closed and abandoned.
In
the 1960s most of the buildings were demolished to make way for a large, seven
storey block of flats - Fort House. A building that from the 1980s gained a
notorious reputation for drugs and violence.
I have a distant memory of visiting the building once, back in the late
Eighties. On a Friday evening after work, I met up with one of my friends in a pub in Edinburgh. At that time, we were both working in those sorts of offices where we were expected to be in suit and tie, so were suited
up. After a few beers, my friend was
having one of those drunken teenage moments of regret, and decided he wanted to
get back with his ex-girlfriend. He
asked if I’d chum him, not for moral support, but rather because she’d recently
moved to a flat in the Fort and he was scared to go there on his own. So off we went. My only real recollections of the place are
of a large dog that someone had tethered up outside the flats who growled and
snarled at us, then, as we went into the building, some bloke on seeing us two
in our suits came up to us and said - ‘Youse are no fucking debt collectors,
are you?’ Shitting our pants a bit we
said no, to which he replied - ‘Just as well, cause I’d ‘ave kicked yer cunts
in if ya were.’
In
2009 it was decided by Edinburgh Council to demolish the flats due to
maintenance issues and costs. The
tenants were then rehoused, and Fort House was demolished in 2013. In its place were built the terraces of
‘colony style’ homes that now sit on the site.
Today, after my toddle around the remnants of the old fort and the new streets of new houses, I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me in a gap by the drainpipe on one of the guardhouses.
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –
Latitude
55.976781
Longitude
-3.185499
what3words:
vague.chips.tiles
I
used the following sources for information on Leith Fort –
Historic Environment Scotland
Leith Fort Lodges, North
Fort Street, Edinburgh
Canmore
Canmore - North Fort
Street, Leith Fort
The Sphere - Saturday 17 August 1957
Photo of Fort House by Jonathan Oldenbuck and
sourced from Wikicommons
