Meggetland Playing Field

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 10 Oct 2023

This stretch of grass neighbours an area of sports facilities - Meggetland Sports Complex, owned by the council - that sits further East. It belongs to Boroughmuir High School, which is located just over a mile away. Although the school is currently in its third premises (on Fountainbridge - the previous two, on Warrender Park Crescent and Viewforth, have now been converted to flats) the playing fields have always been roughly the same distance from the school. This was presumably because even in the early 1900s, when it first opened, central Edinburgh was already low on big green spaces. At its opening a suffragette poured flour over the Secretary of State for Scotland who was doing the honours. The odd-shaped blocks of flats behind the playing fields are in Meggetland View and Meggetland Square. The name 'Meggetland', in various spellings, has been applied to this area for a few hundred years. There was once a Meggetland estate and it is not clear whether the estate got its name from its surroundings or vice-versa. It may be based on an old word for 'bog', or just come from a surname, which itself may of course have been based on a word for 'bog'.

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