Lamb's House: Where a Queen Came Out of the Fog
Why is it significant?
Rising above the lanes is a tall merchant's house with rough harled walls, steep crow-stepped gables and a red pantiled roof, so different from its neighbours that it looks as if it had stepped out of a Dutch painting.
Key Facts
| Place | Lamb's House: Where a Queen Came Out of the Fog |
|---|---|
| Address | Water's Close, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.97520, -3.16960 |
| Part of Walk | Leith Uncovered: The Shore, the Docks and the Birthplace of Golf's Rules in Edinburgh |
| Generated | Generated |
Rising above the lanes is a tall merchant's house with rough harled walls, steep crow-stepped gables and a red pantiled roof, so different from its neighbours that it looks as if it had stepped out of a Dutch painting. This is Lamb's House, one of the finest surviving merchants' houses of its age in Scotland.
It was built in the early 1600s for the Lambs, a family of Leith merchants trading across the North Sea, and its layout was pure business. Bales, barrels and casks went into the lower floors, while the household lived and entertained upstairs, with windows looking towards the busy harbour and the ships that paid for everything. Warehouse below, drawing room above: the Leith merchant never had far to walk to check his stock.
Now the legend. On the morning of 19 August 1561, Mary Queen of Scots, eighteen years old and already a widow, sailed home from France and came ashore at Leith out of a thick sea fog, earlier than anyone expected. Nothing was ready for her. Tradition says she was taken to rest in the house of the merchant Andrew Lamb while Edinburgh scrambled to prepare a welcome. The house you see was probably built a generation later, so if the story is true, she rested in an older Lamb house on this same spot.
John Knox, the fierce Protestant preacher, read the fog as an omen. He wrote that the very face of heaven warned what the young Catholic queen would bring to Scotland: sorrow, darkness and impiety. It was a bleak welcome for a teenager stepping off a ship, and the six years of her personal reign that followed proved just as stormy as he predicted.
By the twentieth century the house had sunk into a crowded, crumbling tenement and came close to being lost altogether. It was rescued and restored around 1960, and its rugged silhouette survived while much of the old Leith around it was cleared away. Walk the few steps west to the river and turn right, north along the Shore, to the old stone building on the corner of Bernard Street.