The thread about Wardie House: from 16th century fortification to 20th century cul-de-sac

There is an interesting property listing that has recently come up for sale; “3 bed cottage for sale in Trinity” at number 2a Wardie House Lane. Offers over £550,000 if you’re interested! With “magnificent views over the Firth of Forth“, the estate agent describes it as a “charming stone built cottage requiring upgrading” but the name on the garden gate should give a clue that all isn’t quite what it seems: Wardie House. For a start, this property isn’t in Trinity, and this is no cottage – it’s actually the sole remaining part of a once grand mansion house, a reconfigured kitchen wing that survived the twentieth century wreckers’ ball.

Wardie itself is an ancient placename, recorded as far back as 1336 with spellings like Warda and Weirdie that suggest a root in the Anglian wearda or Norse varthi for a beacon or cairn. It is easy to imagine that such a structure may once have stood on this prominent position above the foreshore of Wardie Bay. The Blaeu atlas of Scotland of 1654 records the place as Weirdy along with the symbol of a tower house. That tower house had been built here in the early 16th century by the landowning family – appropriately the Touris (or Towers) of Inverleith – apparently to protect their estate to seaward. However when the English under Hertford landed at Granton in 1544 it offered little in the way of defence and was slighted, along with most of the city of Edinburgh and Port of Leith.

Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, Lothians sheet, 1654. A 17th century coloured map print showing Edinburgh and surrounding places. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The tower was rebuilt by the Touris and a century later when another English invader took the city and Leith – Oliver Cromwell after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 – “the mannour place or house of Wardie” was sold for £60 by Sir John Touris to the occupiers; to be pulled down to provide construction masonry for Leith Citadel.

The only surviving fragment of Leith Citadel, perhaps some of the stones from Wardie tower house are mixed in with this lot… The upper level of dressed masonry and the wall to the left are more modern © Self

The Touris kept ownership of the land itself but granted a tack to the Commonwealth to quarry stone “betwixt the house of Wardie and the sea” for the construction of the Citadel and also for 100 “faggots of whins” (Scots, gorse) on the Wardie Muir (Scots, moor). The map below was made in 1682 and shows these places. The muir is recorded in 1588 when gunners from Edinburgh Castle were sent there to retrieve a cannon ball that had been fired in salute from its ramparts. It occupied most of the present-day district of Trinity on the northern bank of the Water of Leith, from Bonnington to Inverleith, and there would have been very little, if any, occupation beyond rough grazing and cutting the whins and some shallow coal pits.

1682 map of Edinburgh and Midlothian by John Adair, showing the walled burgh of Leith, the water of Leith and surrounding places. Wardie is show with a tower house symbol as “Werdie”, and is surrounded by an area marked out as rough land as “Weirdy Moor”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

In the 18th century Wardie was detached from the Inverleith estate and came into the possession of the Boswells of Blackadder, in Berwickshire, who rebuilt the house here. This holding was bounded by the Wardie Burn to its west – beyond which lay the estates of Granton (owned by the Dukes of Buccleuch) and East Pilton (owned by the Ramsays of Barnton). To the north was a short strip of coast fronting Wardie Bay and the Forth. To the south was Ferry Road and Inverleith and to the east were the former lands of Trinity, the border being on the alignment of what is now Netherby Road. In modern day toponymy many might consider Wardie to be either part of the districts of Granton or Trinity, traditionally it was in neither and was distinct. While traditionally Wardie was part of the parish of St. Cuthbert’s and therefore Edinburgh, in 1833 the line of the Granton road was taken as the boundary of the Parliamentary Burgh of Leith and thereafter it sat part in Leith and part in Edinburgh.

The Wardie estate was largely agricultural, centred on the farm with the charming name of Winnelstraelee, the winnelstrae being the Scots name for what in England they called windlestraw, a type of rough grass useful for making ropes. Remarkably this farm survived well into the 20th century, but its name was progressively Anglicised, first to Windlestrawlee and then to what Stuart Harris calls the “vapid invention” of Ferryfield.

1836 map by Robert Stevenson & Son showing the plan and section of the new Granton Road from Granton Harbour to Ferry Road and the outlines of the Granton, East Pilton and Wardie estates. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

You can see from the above map that before Granton Road, or Wardie Road, or almost any other road in this district existed, there was a road leading from Wardie House directly to the Ferry Road with a gate lodge where the two met. This road actually remains to this day, but only as an un-named stub at its southern end.

Streetview image showing the old alignment of the road to Wardie House, with later Victorian houses to its right and left.

When Alexander Blackadder of Boswell died in 1812, his will disposed of his Wardie estate to one Lieutenant John Donaldson, RN, whose grandmother was in the line of the Boswells of Blackadder. A condition of his inheritance was that he take up the family name and so he restyled himself, by grant of the Prince Regent, as Captain Boswall of Wardie (note the “e” to “a” spelling change). Many streets in present-day Wardie now have Boswall in their names. Captain Boswall died in 1847 and Wardie House was split off of the estate, which remained with his heirs, and sold to Michael Anderson esq. a legal printer. On Anderson’s death in 1858 it passed in turn to a Leith merchant, Thomas Bell Yule, who had it considerably enlarged and remodelled in a Scots Baronial Revival style. Perhaps this largesse over-extended Yule, because in 1865 he was bankrupted and his creditors seized and sold the house.

The Scotsman – Wednesday 09 August 1865. Advert for the sale of “The Mansion House, Offices, Grounds of Wardie House”.

Wardie House was bought at this auction by John Gillon esq., another merchant of Leith, for £3,760. By this time the area was undergoing change. The Donaldson Boswalls had allowed Granton Road to cut through their holding in the 1830s and began feuing along its length (the Scots legal term for splitting a landholding into smaller plots for sale and development). This exercise proceeded slowly but some impressive villas were built from the 1840s to the 1870s, such as Wardie Lodge (now St. Columba’s Hospice), Wardie Villas, Erneston and Queensberry Place. These somewhat overshadowed old Wardie House; being larger, grander and more impressive when viewed from the shore below. There was also commenced, but never completed, a Georgian-style crescent named Wardie Crescent. In the 1850s there was a short-lived brick and tile works in the western corner of the estate, making use of the local clay measures and potentially also the coal outcrops. As a result of this slow and somewhat piecemeal residential development of the district, the majority of the lands of Wardie would remain in agricultural use well into the 20th century.

John Gillon died in 1879 and on the death of his widow Wardie House was bought by Thomas Symington, a manufacturing chemist at Beaverbank Works in Warriston. Symington had gotten rich developing and popularising instant coffee essences and alternatives based on dandelion and chicory for the health-conscious Victorian.

Advertising poster for “Symington’s Edinburgh Coffee Essence”.

Symington died at Wardie House in 1896 and once again the place found itself up for sale. It was subsequently owned by James Roger, a timber merchant, and after him Archibald William Forbes, a retired engineer, who died there in 1953. By the time of Forbes’ death the rambling house had been split into three separate residences and was reported to be “falling down“. A mish-mash of Victorian additions on top of Georgian rebuilding on top of a Jacobean bones, it was “consumed by dry rot which ‘crumbled its flooring, warped its panelling, cracked its walls and sagged its painted ceilings“.

Wardie House in 1955. Newsprint photo showing a decaying, rambling mansion house with broken windows and overgrown with vegetaion.

There was no preservation movement to step in and save it, Wardie was just another decaying old villa in a city full of decaying old villas and without the money or the will to do much about them. And so the pile was sold and all but the kitchen wing was demolished. It was survived by its garden cottages – the imaginatively named West Cottage and South Cottage and the developers erected six neat but anonymous sem-detached bungalows in its place on a suburban cul-de-sac renamed Wardie House Lane.

Google streetview image of Wardie House Lane. A 1950s semi-detached bungalow house in brick and pebbledash, with red-tiled roof and neat front gardens. There are two similar blocks in the distance behind trees.

While most of the old lands of Wardie were finally covered in a mixture of municipal housing schemes in the 1920s, a significant portion of it escaped development entirely and remains open and under grass as it was purchased as the Wardie Playing Fields, which regular listeners will now be aware has an interesting and surprising history all of its own.

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