On the small river that runs beneath Edinburgh, and what a city gains from a waterway it mostly ignores
The Water of Leith is Edinburgh's small river — 35 kilometres from the Pentland Hills to the Firth of Forth at Leith. Through the city, it runs in a gorge below the street level, audible from the bridges above and invisible from most of the streets that cross it.
The Water of Leith is Edinburgh's small river — 35 kilometres from the Pentland Hills to the Firth of Forth at Leith. Through the city, it runs in a gorge below the street level, audible from the bridges above and invisible from most of the streets that cross it. The river exists at a different vertical level from the city, which gives the walkway along its banks the quality of a hidden passage through Edinburgh: you are in the city without being on its surface, at the level of the water rather than the level of the street.
The Dean Village section, immediately west of the New Town, is the most architecturally concentrated part of the walk. The village — a former milling community that operated on the river's power from the 12th century — is now entirely residential, but the mill buildings survive as converted apartments and the weir that controlled the water flow is still in place. The Well Court building of 1886, a philanthropic housing development for the mill workers, faces the water with a red sandstone tower that is the most recognisable feature of the Dean Village skyline.
St Bernard's Well, further east in Stockbridge, is a neoclassical pump room from 1789 — a round Doric temple built over a mineral spring thought to have medicinal properties. The pump room was restored by William Playfair in 1887 and the statue of Hygeia inside dates from this restoration. The spring was closed to public use in the 20th century; the building remains as a folly in the landscape, which is a more honest function for a mineral water pump room than any alternative use would provide.
The walkway connects Balerno in the west to Leith at the coast — a 35-kilometre walk for which the city maintains a designated path. The sections through the city are the most used: Stockbridge to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, where the walkway passes through the gallery's grounds and the Charles Jencks landwork in the garden, is the most convenient half-day walk in Edinburgh.
A small river in the middle of a city is not a dramatic thing. It is a quiet thing: the sound of water, the trees that line the banks, the occasional heron standing on a stone in the current. What it provides is the particular form of urban rest that only moving water produces — the attention that is engaged but not demanded, the sound that is present without requiring a response.