"My country-house", Meadow Place

Image: © kim traynor Taken: 9 Dec 2012

That's how the 18th-century advocate and biographer James Boswell described it in his journals when his family moved here, to his uncle's vacated property, in May 1777. The move was intended to improve the health of his ailing wife, Margaret Montgomerie, by removing her from the health hazards of the old town. Boswell retained his house in James's Court off the Lawnmarket which he continued to use for his legal work. The family moved from here to a new house at Drumsheugh (location unknown) in the Spring of 1781. The house was substantially altered in 1891, giving it a more Victorian than Georgian look. It was also divided into two halves, of which this is one. Along with some other contemporaneous properties it is now hedged in by several tenements from the time when the surrounding ground was feued in the 1870s, and faces away from the little back lane leading to it. The Boswell connection was made when some papers belonging to the uncle, Dr. John Boswell, were discovered during alterations. "We have a garden of three-quarters of an acre, well-stocked with fruit-trees and flowers and gooseberries and currants and peas and beans and cabbages, etc., etc., and my children are quite happy. I now write to you in a little study, from the window of which I see around me a verdant grove, and beyond it the lofty mountain called Arthur's Seat." -- letter to Dr. Johnson, 9 June 1777 See also Image

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