Craiglockhart Pond

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 26 Mar 2022

There are a few pictures around online of this former boating pond in its heyday, which roughly seems to have been from around 1900 - World War Two. And what always strikes me from these and similar old pictures is that people really did seem to throw themselves into having fun in numbers a lot more than we do now. But I might have it completely wrong - they didn't have big musical festivals for instance, and maybe as a society we save ourselves up until we're further away from home these days. I'd be intrigued to read some sociological papers about it though! It was built in the 1870s, along with quite a few adjoining curling and skating ponds beyond and behind. This is the only proper surviving water body out of what there was. My theory, for what it's worth, is that the curling and skating ponds, so prevalent on old Scottish maps, disappeared due to climate rather than fashion. Following the Mediaeval Warm Period there was the fairly well-known Little Ice Age, which they reckon was at its coldest around 1700. It all came to an end in the mid 1800s, and there are of course debates whether this coinciding with the Industrial Revolution was a coincidence or not. But, regardless of all that, it seems that, as curling and skating had become a part of life by then, people ploughed ahead with building these ponds regardless of the climatic changes. By the early 1900s almost all had gone. The pond was apparently formed by the damming of Megget Burn, which is said to have once drained into a marsh somewhere to the East of here, but, as so often happens, old boundary lines along old watercourses make it very hard to figure out what was actually happening on the ground before all the ponds appeared. I am confident that the two fat and fearless birds on the jetty (or pontoon as the excellent Friends of Easter Craiglockhart Hill's map of the Local Nature Reserve calls them) are Canadian Geese, from looking at the RSPB's site guides. They were massive and not going anywhere - perhaps why the RSPB states that they are sometimes regarded as a nuisance. A final point of note is that this pond was once used for rehabilitation of patients of Craiglockhart Hospital (previously some kind of spa, and now part of a university), which was used in World War One to take care of shell shocked soldiers. The poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (who both referred to it as 'Dottyville') were patients, but whether they took part in the model boating activities on here is still unknown.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0