IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Hawkhill Avenue, EDINBURGH, EH7 6BY

Lochend Serviced Apartments on the right.

The older houses were built up to the railway to Leith Central, now Lochend Butterfly Way. New flats have been built beyond the site of the railway. Old maps show allotments and various earthworks between the tracks and Hibernian's stadium and I remember a lot of wasteland here behind the football ground in the 1980s. In the 19th century, there was another Scottish Football League stadium nearby (to the right) Bank Park, home of Leith Athletic. It looks as if that fell foul of the Leith railway.

Modern flats on the east side of Lochend Road. I wouldn't mind the top one with the big pointed window!

There is an old Scottish superstition that the destruction of a doocot will mean the death of the lady of the house within a year - a fact that might explain the survival of doocots even though the house to which they belonged has long disappeared.

Category B-listed 16th century beehive type doocot said to have been used as a kiln for disinfection during the plague of 1645.

This structure is clearly a doocot, and it dates from the 16th century, but unusually for a doocot it contains remnants of a chimney. It is marked on the map as 'Plague Kiln' because it is said to have been used to incinerate the clothing and belongings of victims of the plague during the epidemic in 1645.

The doocot is marked as a plague kiln on Ordnance Survey maps. It is believed that infected clothing was incinerated here.

Due to the slightly confusing gothic typeface used to denote historic stuff by Ordnance Survey this site actually looks like two when first looking at the map: one called 'Plaque' and one called 'Kiln'. It is actually a 500ish year old doocot, built to provide the wealthy landowners at the time with a constant supply of pigeon meat, but is famous because in the notorious plague of the 1640s - which by most accounts wiped out almost half of the local population - it was used to burn clothing, bedding and other things from the homes of those infected. There is an actual plaque, as it happens, by the old doocot that says this, along with other grisly facts such as the houses of those infected were boarded up and guarded while the church provided them food in their final days. The most curious thing about it is that, for reasons that are unclear, it was used as a kind of office by the Royal Humane Society at some point in the 19th Century. The society's name is a bit misleading, in modern terms at least. It was concerned with keeping alive, or bringing back to life, those who seemed superficially dead through drowning. As well as giving out awards for heroic deeds (which it still does) it was at the forefront of new (at the time) resuscitation techniques. Whilst mouth-to-mouth has stood the test of time, the 'tobacco smoke enema' has not. It seems to have been acceptable a bit over 200 years ago to blow tobacco smoke into a seemingly drowned person's rectum in order to revive them, and Wikipedia details a husband supposedly bringing his wife back from the brink by inserting the stem of a passing sailor's pipe into her anus and kind of doing some backwards smoking by blowing into the bowl of the pipe. Quite incredible really!

The doocot almost certainly belonged to nearby Lochend Castle which was originally owned by the Logans of Restalrig. It is believed that it was used as a kiln to burn the infected clothing of plague victims during the outbreak of plague in Leith in the winter of 1645. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leith_Links