South Leith Parish Church & Trinity House: Faith and the Sea

Why is it significant?

On your right a Gothic church stands among leaning gravestones and old trees, and facing it across the Kirkgate is a calm, pale classical building that looks more like a gentleman's townhouse than a sailors' hall.

Key Facts

Open the walk

On your right a Gothic church stands among leaning gravestones and old trees, and facing it across the Kirkgate is a calm, pale classical building that looks more like a gentleman's townhouse than a sailors' hall. Within a few steps you pass two of the oldest institutions in Leith: the parish kirk, and the guild of the men who went to sea.

The church began in the late fifteenth century as a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, serving the people of South Leith, and it has had a rough life. In 1560, when Leith was besieged, the fighting badly damaged it, and after the Reformation it was stripped and refitted for Protestant worship. Most of what you see now is a rebuilding of the 1840s by the architect Thomas Hamilton, wrapped around older fabric. In the kirkyard lie generations of skippers, merchants, ropemakers and their families, and the names on the weathered stones read like an old ship's register.

Now turn to the other side of the street. That is Trinity House, home of the Incorporation of Masters and Mariners of Leith, and its charity is far older than its walls. By the guild's own tradition, from 1380 shipmasters paid a small levy on every cargo, the prime gilt, to look after old and injured seamen and the widows of men who never came home. The present house went up in 1816, but the vaulted cellars beneath are said to survive from a sixteenth-century hospital for sailors on the same spot.

Picture the room upstairs on a winter afternoon two centuries ago: a sailor who had lost a leg to a falling spar, or a widow with three children and a husband missing at sea, waiting to be heard by the masters around the table. No state pension, no insurance... only the guild and the prime gilt. Inside today hang portraits, ship models and navigational instruments, the memory of a town that lived, and very often died, by the sea.

The fighting of 1560 was close at hand, too. Leith was then a walled fortress, and just to the east, out on the open grass, the besiegers dug in their cannon. Leave the Kirkgate, cross Constitution Street and head east for a few minutes, until the houses open onto the wide green of Leith Links.