The Top of the Mound: Geordie Boyd's Mud Brig
Why is it significant?
Catch your breath at the top of the Mound and turn to the grand building on the corner, with its dome crowned by a gilded statue and its rich Baroque front facing across the valley to the New Town. This is the head office of the Bank of Scotland.
Key Facts
| Place | The Top of the Mound: Geordie Boyd's Mud Brig |
|---|---|
| Address | The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95030, -3.19290 |
| Part of Walk | Painted, Carved and Planted: Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens and the Mound |
| Generated | Generated |
Catch your breath at the top of the Mound and turn to the grand building on the corner, with its dome crowned by a gilded statue and its rich Baroque front facing across the valley to the New Town. This is the head office of the Bank of Scotland. It stands like a lighthouse on the edge of the Old Town, and the hill beneath it was built out of rubbish.
The story starts with a tailor. In the 1780s George Boyd, a clothier in the Lawnmarket, was tired of the long detour around the boggy valley to reach the new houses on the other side, so he began dumping rubble across the bed of the drained loch to make a path. Locals called it Geordie Boyd's Mud Brig. Then the city realised it had found the perfect place to dump the earth being dug out for the foundations of the New Town.
For decades carts tipped soil here, around two million loads by the usual estimate, until a muddy path became a man-made hill linking the old city and the new. In the nineteenth century it was graded, paved and crowned with Playfair's temples. Every step you just climbed was carried here by hand, horse and cart from somebody's cellar in the New Town.
The bank itself is the oldest in Scotland, founded by an act of the Scottish Parliament in 1695, and it began issuing paper banknotes within a year. Its head office here was first built in the early 1800s as a plainer building, then wrapped in its present Baroque costume in the 1860s by the architect David Bryce. Even banks need a makeover.
From here the view runs straight down over the gallery roofs and across the valley to Princes Street. Now walk a few steps back and turn into Mound Place, then climb Ramsay Lane towards the Castle, until you reach a cluster of red-roofed towers and white walls that looks like a fairy-tale village.