Waypoints

1. S/E : km 0 - alt. 82 m - Blackford Pond
2. 1 : km 0.23 - alt. 78 m - Pond
3. 2 : km 0.78 - alt. 93 m - Braid Avenue
4. 3 : km 1.45 - alt. 96 m - Ethel Terrace
5. 4 : km 2.66 - alt. 102 m - Y-junction
6. 5 : km 2.99 - alt. 111 m - Braid Burn - Bridge
7. 6 : km 3.86 - alt. 115 m - Braid Burn
8. 7 : km 4.83 - alt. 157 m - White Lady Walk
9. 8 : km 5.71 - alt. 148 m - Pentland View
10. 9 : km 6.28 - alt. 152 m - Entrance way
11. 10 : km 7.72 - alt. 136 m - Lang Linn Path
12. S/E : km 9.39 - alt. 82 m - Blackford Pond

Useful Information

Start : Blackford Pond (EH10 6BJ) Grid ref : NT 25542 70979

Parking : There is a small car park at the starting point of the walk.

Find out more about Roy's Edinburgh Walks here.

Always stay careful and alert while following a route. Visorando and the author of this walk cannot be held responsible in the event of an accident during this route.

During the walk or to do/see around

(A) Two cobbled plinths of the Hanging Stones where the last two highwaymen in Scotland were hung by public execution in 1815. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of being shown the flat stones as a child and hearing of “a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains…”

(B) Stevenson was very dismissive of the ever-increasing signs of suburban creep and sprawl in this area. “Day by day, one new villa, one new object of offence, is added to another; all around Newington and Morningside, the dismallest structures keep springing up like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with them, each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and carrying chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an eye discovers their true character. They are not houses; for they were not designed with a view to human habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they tell me, fantastically unsuited to the needs of man. They are not buildings; for you can scarcely say a thing is built where every measurement is in clamant disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no style of art, only to a form of business much to be regretted.”

(C) You can visit five graves of interest. Once inside the Cemetery there is a helpful map on the right (we visit locations 12, 4, 2) :

1. The first is of Stevenson's nursemaid known as “Cummy”. Head straight ahead down the broad, brick pathway to reach an avenue of trees and stony path. Turn right. Proceed roughly three-quarters of the way (100 large paces) towards the far eastern end of the graveyard. Turn left. You should be facing a distinctive block of more modern flats with blue-grey cladding situated, in the distance, on Balcarres Street. Cummy’s grave is the leftmost of a pair of standing stones about 25 paces downslope. Alison Cunningham (1822 – 1913), who was RLS’s nurse, was deeply devoted and loyal to the Stevensons and particularly loved RLS. Cummy’s strict religious views had a strong influence on the young Stevenson. Return to the wooded avenue and turn back to the west.
2. On reaching the far western end bear slightly left. Beyond the angle in the boundary wall, the leftmost of a small group of four rough-hewn headstones is Sir Edward Appleton (1892 – 1965): Nobel Prize winner (1947) and pioneer in radiophysics. Appleton managed to discover layers hundreds of km high. These were found to reflect short radio waves and enable communications as far afield as Australia and America. He used the BBC radio broadcast transmitter at Bournemouth to send a signal towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere. He then received the radio signals near Cambridge, proving they were being reflected. Without Appleton's scientific work, radar would have come too late to have been of decisive use in the Battle of Britain. Several paces further south, and one row east is a tall, distinctive, fluted half-column with ivy carvings marking the graves of two suffragettes: the Cadell sisters.
3. Dr. Grace Ross Cadell (1855 – 1918) was in the first group of women to qualify in medicine in Scotland. She became a very lively, active suffragette becoming well known for public acts of defiance in the cause of women's suffrage. Her younger sister, Dr Martha Georgina Isabella Cadell (1858 - 1905), was also one of the students in the first intake at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, receiving lectures in Surgeons' Square. She qualified as one of 57 candidates, out of 121, who passed the 'Triple Qualification' of LRCSE, LRCPE and LFPSG (Licentiate awarded jointly by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow) that year before becoming a Medical Practitioner. Next we locate the gravestones of two famous geologists. Head east (for four rows), keeping to the right of the tall spire of Cluny Church.
4. The gravestone of James Geikie (1839 - 1915) has a distinctive asymmetrical rough-hewn top. Professor of Geology at Edinburgh University from 1882 to 1914, Geikie became an expert on glaciations and the leader of the school that upheld the all-important action of land-ice, as against the work of pack ice and icebergs, in forming glacial deposits. Turn around three quarters to the right and head southwest. By the back wall, in a closed-off private area, the low boulder-shaped gravestone of Ben Peach (1842 – 1926) is just visible beyond closed metal gates. Peach with his colleague John Horne helped bring the “Highlands Controversy” to an end by establishing, through careful mapping, the structure of the North West Highlands.

(D) This historic relic is set in a cobbled area, next to the old Buckstone farmhouse, on the right, about 40 m beyond Buckstone Drive. Tradition associates the Stane with the Barony of Penicuik and the royal hunts on the Boroughmuir. This marchstone, a relic of feudal times, occupied, until recently, a site on the Roman road about 250 yards north. It is said to have marked the spot where the buckhounds were unleashed when the King of Scotland hunted in the region.

Braidburn Valley Park
This open hillside is a good place to pause, to take in the lie of the land, and to work out where you would have laid the pipes. The steep-sided Braidburn Valley was created as a result of glacial and fluvial activity and is likely an overflow channel from an ice-dammed lake. (Such channels are characterised by having tiny misfit streams in flat-floored, steep-sided valleys). When the City water supply was first put in (1675) this whole area was countryside. A direct route could be used to pipe the water from a newly commissioned gathering tank at Comiston Springs (which we will shortly be visiting) to a large storage/distribution tank high on Castle Hill above the Old Town. The pipe runs north from here beneath the garage on Comiston Road. The gravity-fed, syphoning pipe had to rise and fall and cross four distinct topographic features: four ridges separated by four valleys; the Braid Burn, the Pow Burn, the old lake bed of the Meadows and the deep cleft of the Grassmarket. An amazing hydro-engineering feat.

Cockmylane
From the Gaelic cuach na leanaidh, meaning hollow on the sloping meadow containing springs. This path was favoured by RLS, in the 1860s, to reach Swanston Cottage every summer. Swing around the back of new buildings to pass, in roughly 150m, the ancient Comiston Springs Gathering House. In a further 100m, to the right, find Oxgangs Loan and there, through the trees, in a small grassy patch is the wellhead of one of the six original Comiston Springs. Stevenson was well aware of these springs as Swanston Cottage, his summer holidaying home, was built in connection with an extension to the City water supply when in 1761 the springs at Swanston were piped to this spot to join and augment the Comiston supply. The ever burgeoning population of the City was always requiring additional ‘sweet’ water. Return to and continue up Cockmylane.