by Neil Henriksen
Dear Gwalia! I know there are
Towns lovelier than ours,
And fairer hills and loftier far,
And groves more full of flowers
In 1759, tobacconist James Gillespie built a snuff mill and workers cottages. As laird of Spylaw he is remembered for kindness towards his small tenants with whom he enjoyed a close, patriarchal relationship. An unassuming man, he lived frugally, with few comforts and was buried in the churchyard. Eighty-five years on, James Ballantine described Colinton “with its exquisite valley, its lines of cottages embedded in the hollows, its kailyards and their rows of currant bushes, its sylvan pathways threading the mazes of wood, deep, deep down in the beautiful dell.” Around the same time, Rev Lewis Balfour regretted the closing of the distillery, skinnery, magnesia factory and waulkmill.” The Gazetteer (c1898) notes that: “the village has changed a little since then, but always for the better, a good many comfortable, old-English looking houses having arisen upon its upper outskirts within the last two or three years.”
In the year CAA was founded, Will Grant tells us: “the quiet and the peace with which Colinton was synonymous is being disturbed, so that even the rooks and the crows, the wind among the tree tops, and the sound of running water, can scarcely now be heard. The electric tram has arrived in the village.” The landslide that closed Gillespie Road a few years ago, however unfriendly to village trade, briefly recaptured that peacefulness. Grant added that happy villagers on summer evenings danced around the Sixpenny Tree.
When I came here in 1960, our milk was delivered from Blake’s farm. There were a brace each of newsagents, fruiterers/greengrocers, garages with pumps and sweetie shops, a fishmonger, shoe shop, drysalter, three butchers and three grocers, a coal merchant and tobacconist. Harwells the baker offered high teas with waitresses in caps and cuffs. There was sawdust on the bar floor of The Railway Inn and an oil painting of Queen Victoria’s ‘wet review’ on the wall. All of which brief conspectus will be familiar to many but tells us little about those who lived here. The villas designed by architects such as Sir Robert Lorimer were for the comfortable middle class, the successors of the lairds and mill owners. Their lives were not those of villagers.
As an evacuee in Newbigging, I learned how bleak life in a village can be surrounded by fields and moor. The houses smelt of damp and poverty, ill health was endemic. Have you noticed how, even today, country folk walk with their dogs along roads? The countryside is not necessarily accessible. Worse, they are far from libraries, theatres and the social delights which thirled Dr Johnson to the great wen.
Yet the allure of village life is powerful: church, pub, village green – safe, friendly, timeless, a haven of peace after the day’s work or in retirement amongst friends and family. A villa, the word is the Roman ideal of civilised living – is what we most desire, in or near a village. We are all, in Simon Jenkins’s phrase: ‘villagers of the mind’.
How happy he who crowns in shades like these,
A youth of labour with an age of ease.
Dream on, Goldsmith! The ‘real’ villagers, those who live and work in Colinton, who have known one another since childhood and from whom no fact of village life could be kept secret, must now be few. A larger community cherishes the village for its setting and proximity to Edinburgh. The epigraph, Rev Eli Jenkins’s paean from Under Milk Wood, is uttered “softly, to empty Coronation Street”. Strangely, the other fictitious ‘Street’ is the TV village – coincidence? Our village exists, in Euclidean space not as a poetic fantasy, the locus of a soap or a weekender fairyland. House building has gone on but we still have parks, Polofield and woods, the Dell and playing fields of Merchiston Castle as open space. Our good neighbours, the army, are set to remain for the foreseeable future. Most of us are well housed but there can have been few first-time buyers of late; my home has increased in value by a factor of seventy-five, far outstripping any increase in income. There is so much that is congenial to anchor us and curb wanderlust: the City and the hills, the many clubs and societies, the library, inns and churches, and the shops.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides: crowding of the green river banks by zealous developers has not erased all past connections. We should do all we can to give a tone of private amenity to our public spaces and our public amenity must be guarded jealously. When CAA was founded there was no planning system such as exists today but an effective consensus was achieved between CAA and homebuilders. Read Richard Illingworth’s excellent history of the Association’s first seventy-five years; it's titled "Enhance and Preserve".
There are bright spirits still at work. The amazing transformation of the Triangle is the result of a cooperative effort based on one man’s vision. CCCT has beavered away, inviting student designs, raising funds, employing contractors and all whose experience might contribute to this glorious enhancement of our village-scape. I don’t doubt Trustees would agree that the creative and driving force was Duncan Campbell’s. Now the belvedere is complete, the view along Bridge Road can be enjoyed on a trip to the post office, and on the gentle return ascent, one may pause for a glimpse down the Long Steps. On this evidence the Trust must have our unstinted support. |
The Community
