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Cowgate, Potts Land, Weavers Land
Skene, James, 1819, Watercolour
Cowgate, Potts Land, Weavers Land
Cowgate, Potts Land, Weavers Land
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Item no
959
Title
Cowgate, Potts Land, Weavers Land
Artist / maker
Skene, James
Date
1819
Type
Watercolour
Location
Edinburgh and Scottish Collection
James Skene's watercolour depicts Weavers' Court in Edinburgh's Cowgate. With it's smoking chimneys and drying washing, it depicts when the once fashionable Cowgate had become a byword for poverty and overcrowding.
The Cowgate runs immediately south of Edinburgh's High Street and links what is now the southern end of St Mary's Street with the Grassmarket. Cowgate is a corrupted form of "Commongate". Up until 1513, the Cowgate was "merely a country road"(1) but defeat at the Battle of Flodden, led to the construction of the Flodden Wall, which enclosed the area within the city fortifications. James Skene notes that during the reign of James VI, the district was well known as a fashionable residence, and that the "greater part of the south bank was laid out in gardens"(2) . In 1762, an elegant new music hall, St Cecilia's Hall, the home of the Edinburgh Musical Society, was opened in the Cowgate but the character of the area swiftly changed with the construction of the new South Bridge, which extended the southern approach to the city. "I felt regret", wrote Skene, "to see the Cowgate thus dishonoured in its old age, but such is the denting of cities as old men; the old must pass to make room for others"(3).
The increasing shift of the prosperous middle and upper classes to the Edinburgh New Town, marked the death knell of the Cowgate as a place of fashion. Its transformation was dramatic. St Cecilia's Hall, as a place of musical entertainment, closed in 1798. Towards the end of the 18th century the locality could be described as a place of "destitution and disease"(4). In the 19th century, Robert Louis Stevenson, commented that "to look over South Bridge and see the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society from another in a twinkling of an eye"(5).
(1) Skene, James, Reekiana, 1836, 151
(2) Skene, Reekiana, 152
(3) Skene, 152
(4) Cockburn, Henry Lord, Memorials of His Time, Edinburgh, 1856, James Thin 1988, 29
(5) Stevenson, RLS, Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, First Published 1878, Barnes and Noble 1993, 24, a view previously expressed by Alexander Smith, " the condition of the inhabitants is as little known to respectable Edinburgh as are the habits of moles, earth-worms and the mining population", Alexander Smith, A Summer in Skye, Strahan 1866, 19-20
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