Leith Uncovered: The Shore, the Docks and the Birthplace of Golf's Rules in Edinburgh

From a Cromwell-era rampart to a Cromwellian fortress gate: siege mounds, the first rules of golf, a queen out of the fog, a windmill that talked to ships, and the claret and whisky of Edinburgh's stubbornly independent port

Edinburgh · 12 stops · 29 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Foot of the Walk: Where Leith Begins

   Foot of the Walk, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK

   Listen · 2:39

   You are standing where Leith Walk finally runs out of slope, at a jumble of bus stops, traffic lights and a bronze Queen Victoria who has watched this junction since 1907. Behind you the long, straight road climbs back towards Edinburgh. In front of you begins another town, with its own accent, its own harbour and, for most of its history, its own grudges.

   Start with the street itself, because it began as a weapon. In 1650, with Oliver Cromwell's army marching on Scotland, the Scottish commander David Leslie had a long earth rampart thrown up between Calton Hill and Leith, a wall of soil to keep the English away from the capital and its port. The danger passed, the bank stayed, and people began to walk along the top of it. The rampart became a footpath, the footpath a gravel promenade, and the promenade the broad road you just came down.

   Leith and Edinburgh were never equals. In 1329 Robert the Bruce granted the harbour to the burgh of Edinburgh, and for centuries the capital's merchants kept the port's trade firmly in their own hands. Leith did the heavy lifting, the loading, the shipbuilding, the fighting off of fevers and fires... while the profits climbed the hill. That resentment lasted so long that plenty of people here will still tell you they live in Leith, not in Edinburgh.

   Now glance at the tall clock tower right beside the junction. It belonged to Leith Central station, opened in 1903 and closed to passengers in 1952. For decades its vast, empty train hall stood derelict, a shelter for pigeons, drinkers and worse. Irvine Welsh set a scene of his 1993 novel Trainspotting in that abandoned station, and the book takes its title from a bitter joke made there... a reminder that this neighbourhood's story is not all tall ships and royal visits.

   Ahead of you runs the Kirkgate, once Leith's crowded medieval high street. Most of it was flattened in the 1960s for a shopping precinct, but a few old survivors still hide behind the concrete, and they are the reason you came. Walk north into the Kirkgate, and within a couple of minutes you will see a Gothic church tower rising out of a graveyard on your right.

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

   Kirkgate, Leith, Edinburgh EH6 6BJ, UK

   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.

3. 3. Giant's Brae: Siege Guns and Plague on Leith Links

   Leith Links, Edinburgh EH6, UK

   In front of you the flat green of Leith Links suddenly heaves itself up into a smooth grassy hump, the kind of slope children roll down on summer evenings while dogs chase them to the bottom. It is called Giant's Brae, and a little further east there is a smaller twin, Lady Fife's Brae. Nobody piled them up for picnics.

   In 1560 Leith was a fortress. Mary of Guise, the French-born regent of Scotland and mother of Mary Queen of Scots, had ringed the town with modern walls and filled it with French soldiers. The Scottish Protestant lords, backed by an English army and fleet, laid siege to it that spring, and on this open ground they dug gun batteries to pound the walls. Tradition has long held that these two mounds are what remains of those emplacements, though historians still argue about it, and the braes have never been fully excavated.

   The siege ended without a grand storming. Mary of Guise fell ill and died in Edinburgh Castle in June 1560. In July the Treaty of Edinburgh sent both the French and the English troops home, and in August a parliament in Edinburgh broke with the Pope. So the Scottish Reformation was settled partly by sickness, partly by diplomacy... and partly by the cannon that may once have stood roughly where you are standing.

   The Links remember a darker year as well. In 1645 plague swept through Leith, and by some estimates it killed around half of the town's people. The kirkyards could not cope, and many of the dead are believed to have been buried out here, on the common ground beyond the town. It gives a different weight to all this cheerful grass.

   And yet this same turf gave the world something joyful. When Edinburgh's gentlemen were not besieging anybody, they came out here with long wooden clubs and stitched leather balls... and wrote down rules that golfers still recognise today. Walk north-east across the Links towards their northern edge by Links Gardens, where the old course once ran.

4. 4. Leith Links: Where Golf Wrote Its First Rules

   Links Gardens, Leith Links, Edinburgh EH6, UK

   Let your eye run across this wide municipal lawn, with its football goals, cycle paths and benches... and now try to see a golf course. Not a manicured one, but rough seaside turf, grazing sheep, washing laid out to dry, and gentlemen in tricorn hats striding between five very long holes.

   In 1744 a club of Gentlemen Golfers asked the town council of Edinburgh for a prize, and the council gave them a silver club, to be played for every year here on Leith Links. To run the competition fairly, they wrote down thirteen rules. They are the oldest known written rules of golf, ten years older than those of St Andrews. The very first one tells you to tee your ball within a club's length of the hole you have just played... there were no tee boxes, only the turf and a pinch of sand.

   The first winner of the silver club was a surgeon, John Rattray. A year later, in 1745, he joined Bonnie Prince Charlie's rising as a surgeon to the Jacobite army, and after the defeat at Culloden he was taken prisoner. The story goes that his life was saved partly through the influence of Duncan Forbes of Culloden, the government's senior judge in Scotland... and a fellow golfer. Friendship or politics, nobody can quite say, but Rattray survived.

   Royal legends cling to these Links too. It is said that Charles I was in the middle of a round here in 1641 when a messenger brought news of rebellion in Ireland, and that he abandoned the game at once. Another tale has the future James VII, then Duke of York, winning a match here with a humble shoemaker as his partner, and sharing the stake so generously that the shoemaker built himself a house on the Canongate. Lovely stories... with very little paperwork behind them.

   In the end golf outgrew the Links. The ground became crowded and worn, and the Gentlemen Golfers, later the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, moved to Musselburgh in 1836 and then to Muirfield, where the Open Championship is still played. Leave the Links at their north-west corner and walk up Constitution Street to Bernard Street, where the road suddenly widens almost into a square.

5. 5. Bernard Street: Burns Among the Merchants

   Bernard Street, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK

   Notice how the street suddenly swells into something close to a square, lined with stately stone fronts built for money: banks, exchanges, merchants' offices. On his tall plinth, Robert Burns gazes out over the traffic, looking as if he were composing something rude about it.

   Why Burns, in a harbour town he barely knew? The Leith Burns Club put him up in 1898, and there is a joke hidden in the choice. Scotland's national poet spent his last years working as an excise officer, a taxman paid to catch smugglers. And here he stands, in a port where, in his day, brandy, gin and tea slipped ashore by night without paying a penny, keeping a stony eye on the quays.

   The street's name hides a courtier. According to Leith tradition, it remembers Bernard Lindsay, a groom of the chamber to King James VI, who was granted the old royal storehouse on the Shore and turned it into a tavern, with a tennis court for the gentry. The king's man became a publican... which, in Leith, may well have been the better job.

   A few steps round the corner on Constitution Street stands the old Corn Exchange of the 1860s, where grain dealers haggled beneath a carved frieze of cherubs ploughing, sowing and harvesting. All this confident architecture belonged to a town that ran its own affairs for less than a century. Leith became an independent burgh in 1833. In 1920 it was merged into Edinburgh, after a local vote in which Leithers rejected the merger by a huge margin. The city absorbed it anyway.

   In some families that vote still stings a hundred years on, and you will see the word Leith worn proudly on football shirts, shop signs and murals. Now walk west along Bernard Street towards the river, then slip into the lanes just south of it, Burgess Street and Water's Close, to find a tall old house with steep, stepped gables.

6. 6. Lamb's House: Where a Queen Came Out of the Fog

   Water's Close, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK

   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.

7. 7. The Shore & the King's Wark: Leith's Royal Quayside

   The Shore, Leith, Edinburgh EH6 6QU, UK

   Feel the cobbles under your feet and the river sliding past right beside you: this is the Shore, Leith's old quay, where for centuries ships tied up almost at the doors of the houses. On the corner of Bernard Street stands a solid old stone building with a pub on its ground floor. Its name, the King's Wark, means simply the King's Work.

   In 1434 King James I ordered a royal building on this spot: a storehouse, armoury and lodging for the king's goods and guns arriving by sea. It burned, was rebuilt, passed through many hands, and the building in front of you dates largely from the early eighteenth century. But the name has survived for almost six hundred years, which tells you how long Leith has been the place where Scotland's kings did business with the sea.

   Imagine this quay in its prime. Barrels of claret from Bordeaux, the favourite wine of Scotland thanks to the old alliance with France, timber and flax from the Baltic, coal and salt going out. And on 15 August 1822 the crowds packed in here to watch King George IV step ashore, the first reigning monarch to set foot in Scotland in more than 170 years. Walter Scott stage-managed the whole visit and wrapped the king in a tartan pageant that still shapes how the world pictures Scotland.

   The waterfront has darker memories too. In April 1705 an English sea captain, Thomas Green, was hanged on the sands at Leith with two of his crew, convicted of piracy against a Scottish ship, a crime they very probably did not commit. Scotland was still raw from the collapse of its Darien colony, and the trial was driven more by fury at England than by evidence. Two years later the two kingdoms were united.

   By the 1970s the Shore was a tired, half-empty dockside. Today its old warehouses hold flats and restaurants, and on a sunny evening the quay is full again, with people instead of barrels. Keep walking north along the Shore, past the last of the old houses, to the squat round tower with battlements where it meets Tower Street.

8. 8. The Signal Tower: A Windmill That Talked to Ships

   Tower Street, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK

   At the end of the Shore stands a stubby round tower crowned with toy-fort battlements, looking slightly too small for its armour. It is one of the oldest buildings on the whole waterfront, and almost nothing about it is what it seems.

   It was built in 1686 by Robert Mylne, the King's Master Mason, the same man who worked on the rebuilding of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. But it was never meant for defence. It was a windmill, with sails turning on top, built to crush rapeseed into oil, and oil meant lamplight for houses, workshops and ships. A small industrial machine, in other words, perched on the edge of the harbour.

   In the early nineteenth century the sails came off and the battlements went on. The tower became a signal station: flags hoisted on top told captains waiting out in the Firth of Forth how much water lay over the sandbar at the harbour mouth. Before the great docks were dug, getting into Leith meant waiting for the tide, and a ship that tried too early could run aground on the bar and sit there, helpless, until the water returned. This little tower was the harbour's voice, calling the ships in.

   Leith's ships went much further than the Forth. The Leith firm of Christian Salvesen became one of the biggest whaling companies in the world, and a whaling station on the island of South Georgia, deep in the South Atlantic, was named Leith Harbour after this port. It processed whales from 1909 until 1965. It built fortunes here... and it helped drive several species of great whale to the edge of extinction.

   Look around and notice that the tower no longer stands at the edge of open water: docks, quays and new streets have crept far out beyond it over the past two centuries. Walk north along Tower Place towards the long iron bridge that spans the mouth of the river.

9. 9. Victoria Swing Bridge: Iron Over the Water of Leith

   Victoria Swing Bridge, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK

   Step onto this long, heavy iron bridge and look down: beneath you the Water of Leith makes its final run towards the docks and the sea. It feels less like a street than a piece of dockyard machinery, all girders, rivets and dark, weathered metal.

   The Victoria Swing Bridge opened in 1874, and it was said to be the largest swing bridge in Britain at the time. The whole span could pivot sideways, driven by hydraulic power, to open a channel for ships moving between the harbour and the inner docks, and then swing back so that railway wagons and carts could rumble across. Hundreds of tons of iron turning politely out of the way... Victorian confidence in a single object.

   It was built because Leith was growing at a furious pace. Through the second half of the nineteenth century the port dug one new dock after another, each bigger than the last, and gave them grand names: Victoria, Albert, Edinburgh, Imperial. Coal, grain and timber poured through, and steamers sailed regularly to London, Scandinavia and the Baltic, carrying cargo, passengers and emigrants. Leith yards built ships too, from sailing vessels to steamers, until the last shipyard closed in the 1980s.

   And the river under your feet has come a long way. The Water of Leith rises in the Pentland Hills and runs for about 35 kilometres through the city, past old mill villages like Dean Village and Stockbridge, before it ends here. Further along the docks, out of sight from this spot, the Royal Yacht Britannia has been moored as a museum ship since 1998, if you fancy a detour another day.

   The bridge has not swung for many years, and it now rests as a quiet crossing for walkers and cyclists, its machinery asleep beneath the deck. Cross to the western bank and follow the river back south for a couple of minutes, to the grand columned building facing the water.

10. 10. Leith Custom House: The Temple of Taxes

    Commercial Street, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK

    Facing the river stands a building that means business: tall Doric columns, a heavy pediment carrying the royal coat of arms, and not a single frivolous curve. This is the Custom House, and it was designed to make every ship's master feel that the state was watching him.

    It was completed in 1812 to designs by Robert Reid, the architect who also shaped much of the later northern New Town, and it was enlarged a few years afterwards. Inside, officers measured, weighed and taxed the cargoes that came up the river: wine, spirits, sugar, tobacco, timber. Captains climbed these steps with their papers listing every barrel and bale, and woe betide the one whose figures did not match what the officers found in his hold. For the government, Leith was one of the great money pumps of Scotland, and this building was the valve.

    Where there are duties, there are smugglers. All along this coast, cargoes were landed at night on quiet beaches, hidden in cellars, or slipped past the officers with bribes and false bottoms in the barrels. The customs men answered with patrol boats, informers and searches, and the cat-and-mouse game ran for generations right under these columns.

    Some of the money that flowed through ports like this one was tied to the slave economy of the Caribbean. Sugar, rum and tobacco grown by enslaved people paid their duties here as everywhere in Britain, and part of Scotland's Georgian wealth, including some of the elegance you admire in Edinburgh, rested on that trade. It is worth remembering, standing in front of a building put up to count it.

    Leith's trade has changed beyond recognition since then, but the Custom House still stands over the river like a judge who refuses to retire. Now walk west along Commercial Street, with the long stone warehouses of Commercial Quay on your right.

11. 11. Commercial Quay: Whisky Bonds and Claret Ships

    Commercial Quay, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK

    On your right runs a long terrace of plain stone warehouses, their ground floors opened up with glass, tables set out where carts once backed up to the doors. Not far beyond rises the vast modern office block of the Scottish Government at Victoria Quay. Old Leith and new Leith, a few hundred metres apart.

    Warehouses like these were bonded stores. Imported goods could be kept under lock and key, with the customs seal on the door, and the duty paid only when they left. For Leith that meant, above all, wine and later whisky. By the nineteenth century the port had become a great centre of whisky blending and bottling, and casks from distilleries all over Scotland were brought here to be married into the blends that sold around the world.

    Wine came first, though. For centuries Leith was Scotland's door to France, and Scots drank claret from Bordeaux by the cask, long after the English had switched their loyalty to port. The old alliance with France had turned French wine into almost a national habit, and Leith merchants kept their vaulted cellars full of it. There is a saying that claret flowed in Leith like water... and in some taverns, it was probably cheaper.

    The first wet docks here were dug at the start of the nineteenth century to designs by the engineer John Rennie, and for generations they were the beating heart of the port. But in the twentieth century shipping changed, bigger vessels and containers went elsewhere, and by the 1980s Leith had become one of the poorest corners of the city. The warehouses stood empty for years, waiting for the revival that finally came with new flats, offices and restaurants.

    On a damp day, try to imagine the smell this quay once had: oak casks, spilled wine, malt, tar and coal smoke. Keep walking west to Dock Street, where a lonely stone arch stands among the houses.

12. 12. The Citadel Gate: Cromwell's Fortress in Leith

    Dock Street, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK

    Wedged between modern housing on Dock Street stands a single stone archway, a gate that no longer leads anywhere at all. Walk up to it and look at the rounded opening and the heavy masonry: this is all that remains of a fortress that once held Leith, and through Leith the whole of Edinburgh, in an iron grip.

    After defeating the Scots at Dunbar in 1650, Oliver Cromwell's English army occupied Scotland, and to hold it down they built a chain of great citadels, at Ayr, Perth, Inverness and here at Leith. This one was begun in 1656 under General George Monck. It was a five-sided fortress with bastions at its corners, barracks and stores, planted right on the harbour so that no ship and no soldier could move without English permission.

    Here is the neat irony of this walk. The earth rampart that became Leith Walk, where you started, was thrown up in 1650 to keep Cromwell out. Within six years his own fortress stood at the far end of it, right on the harbour. After the monarchy was restored in 1660 the English garrison left, and the citadel was gradually taken apart, its stones carried off into the houses, walls and quays of the growing port.

    So pieces of Cromwell's fortress may still be hiding in plain sight all around you, in the lower courses of old walls and in Leith's back yards. Only this gateway was left standing whole, like a full stop at the end of a sentence most people have forgotten.

    And that is Leith: a port of kings and pirates, siege guns and golf clubs, claret and whisky, where every quiet corner has an older story underneath. If you still have energy, the docks lead on towards Ocean Terminal and the Royal Yacht Britannia. Otherwise the Shore is a few minutes back the way you came... the perfect place to sit by the water and raise a glass to a town that never quite agreed to become part of Edinburgh.