The Cowgate
THE "Cow - gait" - the "Via Vaccarum" of Alexander Alesse in the early sixteenth century; the "Platea Bovina" of Gordon of Rothiemay in the middle of the following century - proclaims its own origin and uses.
It was the road taken by the cows of the community, on the way between the meadows around St. Cuthbert's Kirk, at the west end of the Nor' Loch, and the pastures on the braes of St. Leonard's, under the shadow of Arthur's Seat.
Down almost to the time when it was enclosed by the "Flodden Wall," it was suburban, nay, rural quarters, that smelt of "Flora and the country green."
It was the first ring of the city's growth formed after the old boundary, marked by the earlier bulwark of 1450, became too narrow to contain it.
A stretch of the imagination is required, says Sir Daniel Wilson, writing in 1848, " to conceive the crowded steep" - rising from the gulley of the Cowgate and surmounted by the Town Wall built by James II. of Scots - "which has rung for centuries with the busy sounds of life and industry, a rugged slope, unoccupied, save by brushwood and flowering shrubs."
How much more difficult now, when the space between the High Street and the Cowgate is a peopled area whose outer boundary is four or five miles away
