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‘The tinkler billies[17] o’ the Bow

Are now less eident[18] clinkin.’

Another remarkable circumstance connected with the street in the popular mind is its having been the residence of the famed wizard, Major Weir. All of these particulars serve to make it a noteworthy sort of place, and the impression is much favoured by its actual appearance. A perfect Z in figure, composed of tall antique houses, with numerous dovecot-like gables projecting over the footway, full of old inscriptions and sculpturings, presenting at every few steps some darksome lateral profundity, into which the imagination wanders without hindrance or exhaustion, it seems eminently a place of old grandmothers’ tales, and sure at all times to maintain a ghost or two in its community. When I descend into particulars, it will be seen what grounds there truly are for such a surmise.

To begin with

THE BOWHEAD.

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This is a comparatively open space, though partially straightened again by the insertion in it of a clumsy, detached old building called the Weigh-house, where enormous masses of butter and cheese are continually getting disposed of. Prince Charles had his guard at the Weigh-house when blockading the Castle; using, however, for this purpose, not the house itself, but a floor of the adjacent tall tenement in the Lawnmarket, which appears to have been selected on a very intelligible principle, in as far as it was the deserted mansion of one of the city clergy, the same Rev. George Logan who carried on a controversy with Thomas Ruddiman, in which he took unfavourable views of the title of the Stuart family to the throne, not only then, but at any time. It was, no doubt, as an additional answer to a bad pamphlet that the Highlanders took up their quarters at Mr Logan’s.