Dunbar's Close Garden & Panmure House
Why is it significant?
Walk through the dark passage and suddenly the noise of the Canongate falls away. In front of you lies a small formal garden of clipped box hedges, gravel paths, herbs and young trees, laid out the way a seventeenth-century Edinburgh merchant would have known it.
Key Facts
| Place | Dunbar's Close Garden & Panmure House |
|---|---|
| Address | Dunbar's Close, Canongate, Edinburgh EH8, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95220, -3.17840 |
| Part of Walk | Crowns, Kirks and Sanctuary: Edinburgh's Canongate and the Palace of Holyroodhouse |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk through the dark passage and suddenly the noise of the Canongate falls away. In front of you lies a small formal garden of clipped box hedges, gravel paths, herbs and young trees, laid out the way a seventeenth-century Edinburgh merchant would have known it. Behind you rise the backs of the old tenements, and ahead the green cliff of Calton Hill.
The garden is younger than it looks. It was created in the 1970s and handed to the city in 1978, an attempt to recall the long, narrow back gardens that once ran behind every house in the Canongate, when this was a separate burgh belonging to the abbey and a fashionable suburb for courtiers serving the palace. The story goes that Cromwell's soldiers camped in this close after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, though the name may simply come from a past owner.
Now find Panmure House, the sturdy harled house with crow-stepped gables just beyond, off Lochend Close. It was built in the late seventeenth century, and from 1778 until his death in 1790 its tenant was Adam Smith. By then he was famous across Europe, and he worked here as a Commissioner of Customs, collecting the kind of duties his own book had criticised. On Sunday evenings he held suppers for friends, and the talk was some of the best in Britain.
Before he died, Smith asked his executors, the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton, to burn his unfinished manuscripts. They did, sixteen volumes of them, in this house. What we lost, nobody will ever know. The house decayed through the industrial nineteenth century and was restored only in recent years as a place for debating economics.
No king ever lived in this garden, yet it explains the Canongate. Nobles built here to be near the royal palace, and when James VI left for London in 1603, taking his court with him, the street slowly slid from fashion into breweries, tanneries and crowded tenements. Return to the Canongate, turn left and keep walking downhill to an archway on your left near the very bottom, the entrance to White Horse Close.