Moat Street, Slateford

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 5 Jun 2024

This street has older buildings at the top - from where this picture was taken - and newer council (originally at least) buildings at the bottom. The flat roofs of the houses on the right look fairly unusual for buildings of their age and appearance, but I certainly don't pay enough attention to architecture to state that as fact! The big question here is the street name. There are four here that all start with 'Moat'. Moats are generally castle-related, but maps going way back show no castle close to here. My go-to for Edinburgh's street name etymologies is the easily found 'The Derivation of Edinburgh's Street Names', written quite a long time ago, which often proves insightful as the research was done at a time far closer to the actual naming process than we are now. All the author can come up with on this subject, however, is a bit of a stab in the dark really. He says that because the Water of Leith lies a few hundred yards to the North and there is a canal a few hundred yards to the South, due to the views still being fairly open at the time of the building of Moat Place in the 1890s - the first 'Moat', comprising of a row of tenement blocks on Slateford Road - it might have felt as if you were surrounded by a moat. This is fanciful at best, as there was already a long-standing train line between Moat Place and the canal at the time of the tenements' construction. So my alternative, similarly tenuous, theory is that the name was taken from a long-gone cottage opposite Moat Place, called simply 'Mount', shown on the first Ordnance Survey map of here. The two words sound similar and it is plausible that either the original OS map got the name wrong, or that locals had started to refer to the original name as 'Moat', for whatever reason. It is likely nobody will ever know for sure. Mount was neither located at a particularly impressive high point nor anywhere surrounded by water. So there may of course have been a shadowy Mr Moat operating somewhere behind the scenes early on.

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