Page:Annals of Duddingston and Portobello.pdf/52

Rh former village extended from the north side of the village westward to the Figgate Burn, occupying the ground now taken up by Joppa Quarry, Duddingston Mains, and the railway, northward to the back garden walls of East and West Brighton Crescents. It was known as the Figgate Myre or Moor. This in all likelihood had remained unbroken pasture or moorland till about the middle of last century. In recent times, when stone walls and fences came to be erected along the King’s highway (now the high road through Portobello), access to this common from the road was provided at the "Black Roads,” or Brunstane Road, and another near to Hope’s Lane, where a little shieling, named "Pike a Plea," stood on the site of the present blacksmith’s shop.

The common for the use of Wester Duddingston adjoined the Loch, and, as we learn from a letter from James V. to the Edinburgh Town Council in 1536, it marched with the Edinburgh Burgh Moor, and "the tenentis of Duddingstoun has kepit and defendit their use and possessioun of the said common myre past memorie of man.” When or how the right of the tenants of Duddingston over their common ceased we have been unable to discover. Gradual appropriation by the superiors has been condoned by too long a lapse of time now for their rights to be called in question.

In reference to the domestic comfort, mode of living, and general condition of the rural population of the parish in olden times, we may remark that until the middle of last century these were not satisfactory. So long as the land was poor and unproductive, luxury or even comfort as now understood was rarely found in the cottages of the peasantry. The dwellings were of the rudest and cheapest construction, made of such materials as came readiest to hand; and both in respect to furnishings and sanitary arrangements they were sadly deficient.

According to Hugh Arnot, it appears that in the reign of James I. (1406-37) the houses within the city of Edinburgh were not at that time more than twenty feet high, and even in the sixteenth century the smaller churches were generally covered with thatch. The houses or towers of the gentry were built with a view to defence, but were small and confined, and exhibited an absolute ignorance of every art or refinement in domestic life. The remains of the castles of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, and the stately abbeys of Dunfermline, Melrose, Arbroath,