Dunbar's Forgotten Tower

Very little of Bishop Elphinstone’s original Kings College quadrangle still stands in Old Aberdeen, bar the Chapel, dating from 1500.  The façade we see today was completed in 1832.  About the time of its construction, architect Alexander Fraser was dreaming up the fairytale towers of Powis Gate for his client, Leslie of Powis.  It is said Fraser was inspired by the old towers of Kings College, which were topped by lead-covered spires, and stood at either end of the south elevation, containing some of the student dormitories. 

Katherine Trail, whose father, Professor Milligan taught Biblical Criticism from 1860, recalls that the medieval student “halls” were named after planets, the south-east being ‘Jupiter’ or ‘Jove’s’ Tower.  The sometime Jupiter tower was originally called the Ivy Tower, and is now the only other survivor from the sixteenth century. 

Jove's Tower to the right - Parson Gordon's Map 1661

Hidden around the back of the current Divinity and Moral Philosophy classrooms, the tower is a four-storey, rubble-built circular structure with a conical roof. Elphinstone’s successor, William Dunbar had it built in 1525, thus it is also known as Dunbar’s Tower.  The leaden spire was destroyed in a storm in 1715, resulting in the change to the roof. 

Kings escaped much damage during the Reformation due to the bravery of Principal Alexander Anderson, who armed the students against a mob of “reformers” intent on sacking the Catholic university.   Thus much of the changes to the College were due to the need to modernise and expand.  Dr William Guild, Principal from 1640, had no qualms about knocking down the old Snow Kirk and the ruinous Bishop’s Palace in order to provide building materials for new walls.  17 years later, Cromwell’s preferred man, John Row, replaced Guild, and constructed new residences in the “Square Tower” or Cromwell Tower as it is known today.  Dunbar’s Tower remained only because of the increased need for classrooms in the 1830s.

Slezer's Etching of Old Aberdeen

Dunbar’s Tower links with a time when all students were male, aged 14-20, and were not allowed to leave campus without the express permission of their tutors.  Expected to rise at 5am, undergraduates also had to attend several church services throughout the day as well as their lectures, all of which were conducted in Latin.  Yet the story of Sacrist Downie — which follows next time — illustrates that even in the Middle Ages, students were not adverse to mischief!        

Burn the Burkin' Hoose!

“Beware the burkers!” was a cry associated with eminent surgeons and medical students across Britain between 1810 and 1831.  To learn the human anatomy, such men had to dissect human specimens, but superstition and intolerance meant these were in short supply.  The medics paid for bodies, torn from their graves by professionals or the students themselves.  One teaching surgeon in particular, Dr Andrew Moir, would happily accompany his students on raiding excursions.

‘Clever, dirty Andrew Moir’ as he was disparagingly called by his rivals, was born in Aberdeen in 1806.  It was his dream to have his own anatomy school in order to improve the dire state of medical knowledge in Aberdeen. Due to the donations from rich supporters, Dr Moir was able to turn the dream to reality when his new school opened in 1831 on an old bleach green called ‘Hospital Row’ off St Andrew’s Street, near Woolmanhill.

Today the site of Dr Moir’s school is approximately at the corner of St Andrew’s Street and Blackfriars Street, where RGU’s property stands.  The latter was originally the Demonstration School, built around 1906.

An inquisitive dog proved the surgeon’s undoing as it dug in the school’s back yard a month into its existence.  Apprentices from the nearby tannery found the mongrel pulling at a bone, and immediately declared that it was human.  The cry went up ‘Burn the Burkin’ Hoose!’ and the quickly assembled crowd burst into the middle of a dissection lesson.  The students and Dr Moir were chased into another room, which they locked behind them and then escaped by the rear exit.

The angry citizens turned their attentions to the building; with sheer force of numbers, they literally tore the school apart.  It is said that in only four hours, Dr Moir’s dreams went up in smoke, the hated ‘Burkin’ Hoose’ now a raging inferno.  He and his supporters criticised the police and the local militia for standing by and allowing the mob to run amok, but there was little sympathy outside the medical profession for his predicament.

Dr Moir was determined to continue, and almost a decade later, he was appointed the first official lecturer in anatomy at Kings College.  Sadly he died in 1844 at the age of 38, having contracted typhoid from a patient.  His gravestone, shown above, is in St Nicholas kirkyard.

The Gallows Hill

If you were standing on this anonymous hillock next to Trinity Cemetery Lodge at the foot of Errol Street about twenty years ago, you would have had a free view into Pittodrie stadium, hence the name ‘Miser’s Hillie’.  However, standing here three hundred years ago, you would have been a condemned criminal, as this was the site of the Gallows Hill from the fourteenth century until 1776.  Gallows Hill is not to be confused with Gallowgate, which led to another gibbet on the Porthill, but was reached by an old road (now Park Road) from the Justice Port at Castlegate.  Indeed, Old Aberdeen and Ruthrieston had their own gallows at Tillydrone and the Brig of Dee respectively.

Once led to the gallows, the condemned person’s view would have been of open grassland and the distant North Sea, not the cemetery, football ground and local housing as today.  Hangings always attracted a large crowd, as with the very last hanging which took place in 1776, of Alexander Morison who slew his wife with an axe.  It was a cold, stormy day, yet the people came, ghoulishly keen to observe the killer’s final moments.

The real problem with hanging was ensuring the pull of the noose broke the neck of the condemned individual otherwise they would die slowly of strangulation.  By the nineteenth century however, the ‘long drop’, between four and six feet, snapped the second or third vertebra of the spine and caused rapid brain death.  Not so for Morison, he was brought to the Gallows Hill on a cart, bound hand and foot with the rope around his neck.  City executioner Robert Welsh whipped the pony pulling the cart and Morison slowly and painfully choked to death as the cart was yanked from beneath his feet.  His body later hung in chains on the gibbet until it rotted as a warning to others.

Fifty years later the hill was partly excavated to create a gunpowder magazine for use by the King Street Militia barracks;  the soldiers made a gruesome discovery — piles of human bones, the remains of the condemned who had been buried under the hill, excluded from sacred ground because of their sins.  Stand on the Gallows Hill today just as the sun sinks below the horizon and you might imagine the sounds of the baying crowd and the executioner’s final words… ‘May God have mercy on your soul!’

The Goodly Priest Gordon

Aberdeen's Catholics did not fare very well after the Reformation; not only were all the monastic orders based in the Green and Schoolhill chased out of the city, and great vandalism was done to all Catholic churches including St. Machar's and St Nicholas, but a Trinitarian monk, Brother Francis, was murdered by the vicious mob who set fire to his church and left his beaten body to be consumed by the flames.  It was no surprise then that masses and other episcopal duties were performed out of sight of Protestants in the houses of Catholic noblemen like Thomas Menzies of Pitfodels who owned a great stone dwelling in the Castlegate.

In 1771, the Roman Church's fortunes were to change for the better - Bishop James Grant was able to persuade William Young, a staunch Catholic and local merchant to bid for the derelict property of the Smiths of Inveramsay in Justice Street, off the Castlegate.  Formerly known as Skipper Scott's Close, after a prominent sea captain who was also a Jacobite supporter and 'out' in the 'Fifteen' with the Old Pretender, James III, it had been used as a lodging house and 'gin land' by the tenants of Inveramsay Court.  Young was pleased to help, and the Bishop able to move into his new lodgings once the old property was demolished in 1774.

By the end of the 18th century, Aberdeen had already lost two bishops to old age, Bishops John Geddes and John Gordon, the latter being one of two of Bishop Geddes' nephews.  The other nephew, ordained as a priest just five years earlier, was Charles Gordon.  It was he, affectionately known by Catholic and non-Catholic alike as Priest Gordon - the first parish priest for many a long year.  He would serve as the incumbent from 1799 until his death in 1855, working until his dying day for the poor and needy of Aberdeen.

Charles Gordon, Priest of Aberdeen

Priest Gordon was what we would call 'a couthy mannie'; born near Enzie in Banffshire, he spoke the broadest Doric to all and sundry.  He loved the poor, especially children, and used his vernacular charm to great effect in securing donations from those who could afford it to pay for the building of not only a new church in what was now named Chapel Court, but later for a school and orphanage which would become the forerunner of St Peter's R C School in King Street to this very day.

In 1803, having raised quarter of the money from his congregation, and the rest from his noble friends whom he believed 'The Blessed Virgin had laid it on their herts to gie to the chapel,' Priest Gordon had his prayers answered - High Mass was celebrated in the city for the first time since the Reformation.  A victory over prejudice and bigotry for this couthy mannie!

Replica of 'Our Lady of Good Success' - in St Peter's Chapel

Interior of St Peter's, Chapel Court

Chapel Court

Professor of Divinity, William Clark wrote a fine biography of Priest Gordon, demonstrating that although he loved his fellow man and woman, he did not suffer the reformers gladly!  Prof Clark recalls as a student listening to Fr Gordon denounce the Protestant leading lights of the Reformation:

Martin Luther and John Knox were held up to universal execration in the most delightful broad Scotch and with a vehemence that might have satisfied the Grand Inquisitor. Occasionally these attacks produced bursts of merriment from his protestant hearers, and, if these became audible—which they sometimes did—the author was ejected by the sexton. 

Priest Gordon did not stop short of criticising the dead, he went for the living too!  He was often heard to be sparring verbally with Church of Scotland minister, Dr William Kidd, incumbent of the old Gilcomston Church in Summer Street (now empty, was the former Denburn CofS).  Local Catholic historian, Monsignor Sandy MacWilliam reports:

Once they were discussing the doctrine of Purgatory. Dr. Kidd declared it preposterous, a mere figment of the ecclesiastical imagination, having no place in scripture and so on—’Weel’, said the priest, ‘a’ I hiv tae say, Doctor is that we can gang farrer and fare waur!’

But the 'crowning act of his life' according to Monsignor MacWilliam, was the school.  Priest Gordon took on the challenge of education in 1831 after the death of James Barclay, one of his congregation, who had been teaching Catholic children in a small school in Longacre, on the ancient lands of the Greyfriars.  The school, which had two wings added to the original plan to serve as an orphanage, was again funded by the most generous donations of friends and parishioners alike.

Exterior, Original St Peter's School, Constitution Street

Priest Gordon lived at the school as he got older, but still worked on with a powerful spirit which inspired such confidence in the serving bishop, that they left him to it, perhaps a little feart that his vitriolic rhetoric reserved for Tyndale and Zwingli might easily by turned on them at a moment's notice!  Bishop Kyle finally persuaded Father Charles to retire in 1854, but that was the end, unable to work for his parish, he gave up the ghost - the beloved Priest was dead by 1855.

Charles Gordon was 84 years old at his death!  Yet his work was his testament, he never boasted of his achievements, they spoke volumes for this country priest.  His funeral procession was said to stretch from Justice Street all the way to the Snow Kirkyard in Old Aberdeen, and  people were still joining it as he was laid in the same grave as his brother and uncle who had passed away sixty years before.  What a triumph that this kindly soul whose faith was of the most practical kind, that he should be buried in what had been Bishop Elphinstone's parish church, St Mary ad Nives, built in 1498 for the ordinary folk of his new university town.  Like him, Elphinstone was a man away ahead of his time, offering medicine as a subject alongside the traditional vocations of law and divinity before any other university in Scotland, and full of encouragement for learning and development.  Although the reformers Priest Gordon despised had enticed the politic Dr William Guild into destroying the Snow Kirk to show his 'support' for the Covenant, the Catholics of the city eventually had the ruin reconsecrated as a cemetery for their own.

Tomb of Priest Gordon, Bishops John Grant and John Geddes et al

Priest Gordon and his family have the tabletop tomb in the centre of the Snow Kirkyard, and below them, the ancient grave of Sir Gilbert Menzies of Pitfodels, whose family had continued to support the work of their outlawed church long after the Reformation.  The last of their line, John of Pitfodels, gave his house to be used as a Catholic Seminary.  Priest Gordon aided John Menzies in converting the house for its new purpose from 1827 - we know it today as Blairs, in use from the mid-19th century until 1984.

Detail of Latin inscription on Charles Gordon's gravestone

Priest Gordon has a better monument - the modern day descendant of his school in King Street, where stands his statue in the garden.  He is dressed in his priestly robes, his hands together in an attitude of prayer.  I'd like to think he was ever thanking the Almighty and the Blessed Virgin for that couthy, kindly charm of his which inspired so many to fund his charitable works.

Priest Gordon's Statue, outside St Peter's RC School, King Street

The Bridge That Flitted

It's hard to believe that 150 years ago there was no Rosemount Viaduct, and the famous trio of buildings, Education, Salvation and Damnation, aka the Central Library, St Mark's Church and His Majesty's Theatre, had not even been thought of.  The much-maligned Union Terrace Gardens had not even been planted out!  The west bank of the Denburn Valley was a wooded slope nicknamed the Corbie Haugh after the abundance of crows, rooks and other corvid species which nested there.  Centuries further back, visiting merchants and traders left their horses and ponies to graze in the Corbie Haugh, content in the knowledge that the Blackfriars of Schoolhill had a grand view of the copse and any attempt to interfere with these beasts could be swiftly dealt with.

Fast forward to early Victorian Aberdeen - the east bank of the river is dominated by the community of Mutton Brae.  A tiny hamlet with its own internal streets, shops and access to the 'Cathedral of the Disruption', i.e. the Triple Kirks, Mutton Brae was the home of Mary Slessor, who would eventually become the beloved surrogate mother to many poor foreign orphans when she went to Calabar as a Christian missionary.  Mary recalled her life in the shadow of the great kirk and the swift-flowing Denburn; still in the open, the river was prone to spring floods, and had in its time destroyed Andrew Jameson's double-arch bridge and the old Spa Well in its fury.  The banks of the Denburn were used by the folk of Mutton Brae, Denburn Terrace and Black's Buildings as bleach greens.  The drying poles were sometimes pulled down by the force of the flooding water on what Mary described as 'fast days'.

1867 OS Map - copyright National Library of Scotland

To access the bleach greens, the folk would cross the Mutton Brae footbridge down into the valley.  This is the bridge we concern ourselves with today - before the new Rosemount Viaduct was built, and even before Rosemount Place was laid out, the crossing over the railway was via this little bridge.  Stone arches decorated with intricate wrought iron trellis panels carried the walkway down into the valley, but not over the river, there was another footbridge nearer the new Union Bridge for that purpose.

the Old Mutton Brae footbridge - with Black's Buildings and Woolmanhill behind -
image copyright Ron Winram/ Andrew Cluer (Walkin' the Mat)

The bleach green would have been a site for work and gossip - the local wifies catching up with their neighbours' doings and casting aspersions on the cleanliness of folk's washing!  The bairns meanwhile could play in the wide open space, perhaps paddle at the edge of the river on a slow day, and enjoy a cup of fresh mineral water from the Corbie Well.  This other lost inhabitant of the Denburn Valley stood near to its present site, the remains of which are hidden by a council planter at the foot of the garden steps below HMT today.  The well was decorated with other reminders from Aberdeen's past, a lampost from the old Bow Brig of 1747; a weather vane and fragment of the great bell 'Auld Lowrie' from St Nicholas Kirk, both of which were casualties of the spire crashing to the ground in the fire of 1874.  It had a lion's head over the tap and a bowl to catch the water.  Two iron cups were suspended from chains attached to the top of the well house.

Copyright unknown but acknowledged to the original bearer

In those days, Skene Street and Skene Terrace terminated at Black's Buildings, nearest Schoolhill, and the street layout looked entirely different.  There were still tenements and shops all along Blackfriars Street, which would later be swept away when the new Cowdray Hall and War Memorial were built.  The council, never happy unless aping their grander neighbours in Edinburgh or Glasgow, decided to capitalise on the railway and build a more suitable viaduct.  With the new road, completed in 1883, they could create a new public library to satisfy the city's educational and literary needs.  The central library, originally a symmetrical construction was completed with a huge injection of cash from the famous Scots philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, in 1892, the same year that St. Mark's church was completed, being the congregation from the south part of the once single St Nicholas parish.  It was 1907 before the theatre came along and added to the now well-known trio on the viaduct.

By the start of 1890, Mutton Brae had been swept away in the name of progress, and along with it, the need for the little footbridge, as the new Rosemount Viaduct was connected to the new pleasure gardens of Union Terrace by a grand granite staircase.  The memories of the medieval valley were fading, and so the powers that be decided the footbridge was redundant, and by some strange miracle was transported - in a much shortened form - to Duthie Park and there it remains today as a bridge over the ornamental ponds.

High and Dry - no water flows under this bridge!

The Mutton Brae Bridge is still a stunning little feature, but the old ponds leave it high and dry, a monument to obsolescence.  Despite the fact of being 'flitted' and thus saved, the bridge looks bereft of purpose, and will continue to do so if the council do not spend some of their recent lottery grant on restoring the ponds in the park.  Miss Elizabeth Crombie Duthie would be horrified to know her gift of a green space to the city in memory of the male members of her family slain in conflict was so run down and depressed.  Even the tarmac on the pathways is cracked and neglected.  So, waken up people! Fix this park before you lose it too and someone takes a bucket of concrete to it!  This isn't so much the story of a bridge that flitted, but a reminder that maintenance of the remainders of our heritage is an on-going commitment, not something you do once and forget it.

Still in fine fettle, just a mite shorter than it used to be!!

Spare a thought for the Mutton Brae Bridge and its other architectural companions in Duthie Park, including the McGrigor monument (originally in Marischal College Quad), the Carden Haugh cistern house (from Carden House) and the Taylor drinking trough and fountain near the Winter Gardens (originally at the junction of Clifton Road and Great Northern Road), which have been 'flitted' from their original positions and detached from their original contexts.  We need to know where we come from, or how can we know where we're going?

Ghosts of Castle Street #1: The Lost Street

As promised, a spooky tale to rival Downie's ghost!

If you had stood at the junction of Marischal and Castle Streets in the 1530s, you would not have been able to proceed to the harbour, as Marischal Street did not exist!  George Keith, 5th Earl Marischal and founder of Marischal College was busy sizing up the plot next to Pitfodels' Lodging for his new townhouse.  The Lairds of Pitfodels were the Menzies family, a very prominent and influential clan from the 15th century up to the Jacobite Rebellion and after.  One Gilbert Menzies is buried in the Snow Kirkyard just off College Bounds in Old Aberdeen which was disparagingly known as the Papists' Burial Ground after the Reformation.  The Menzies were Roman Catholic, and their old home at Blairs near Maryculter became a Catholic seminary which lasted until the 1980s.

Pitfodels Lodging in Castle Street was one of the earliest stone dwellinghouses in the Aberdeen of the Middle Ages.  According to Edward Meldrum (Aberdeen trained architect, historian and all-round quite interesting fellow), it was William Jameson, master mason, the granddad of our favourite portrait painter, George Jameson - who rescued the Spa Well in an earlier post - who built a stone townhouse for the Menzies in 1535 to replace a wooden one burned down five years' previously.  It had a long back garden, like many of its neighbouring houses, stretching down to the quay.  Later, the Jacobite John Menzies had a back 'hoose' extension added in 1740.  The 'court' which was accessed from the archway or close on Castle Street was called Victoria Court by the 1860s and still exists today.

All trace of the Menzies' townhouse has gone today and was replaced in 1801 by the Union Bank.  Remodelled again in the twentieth century after almost two hundred years as a bank, it is now the Court Annexe, formed to relieve some of the pressure on the Sheriff Court across the road.  However, those who worked in the bank soon discovered that the former occupants may not have entirely quit the building.

Reading Graeme Milne's fascinating collection of ghostly experiences, The Haunted North, I soon discovered that in the depths of the bank - where Pitfodels Lodging had stood - and another mysterious building Milne mentions was a bank also, contained a lost street which generated some disturbing experiences!

Milne's interviewees described a 'road' in the basement of the bank, an old stone walkway of cassies which appeared to lead downwards to the quay.  Beside this 'road' were several 'cells' with big wooden doors inset with barred windows.  Milne himself had a fearful experience having found another part of the 'road' under a building off Victoria Court - I think this was the 1740 'back hoose' built by John Adam, though Milne doesn't say that.  I quote here from The Haunted North, Milne is talking about being in the basement where this road was found along with a council factor:

"I became aware of a shadow detaching itself from the dark.  Nick with his back to it remained unaware while I stared in fright over his shoulder ... the shadow in possession of  both arms and legs moved swiftly towards us and I inwardly cringed, screwing up my eyes as if in anticipation of a blow.  The blow never came and when I opened my eyes a second later, the figure had gone..."

Milne was never able to determine what the entity had been, or the identity of the 'road', so this being a sterling QI-type fact, I decided to look further into it.

Aberdeen's earliest map is that of 1661, drawn up by Parson James Gordon of Rothiemay.  Pitfodels' Lodging was marked as no. 7 on the map, and a close look shows it was a tall building as described.  The long 'backlands' stretch downwards on the slope bounded by Shore Brae to the west and Futty Wynd to the east (sans Marischal Street at this point).  Gordon has illustrated the gardens in green and drawn trees to represent the contents, however, there is nothing to say there was not an earlier path in centuries before - Castlegate did not become the favoured site of population in Aberdeen until the 14th century, most of the action taking place in the Green on the banks of the Denburn from the days of King William's palace there in the 12th century.

Parson Gordon's Map of Aberdeen 1661 - from NLS Maps website

Speculating further, one of the poor bank employees who had been rooted to the spot in terror on the old 'road' in the bank's basement, had been teased by her colleagues that this was the road to the gallows in front of the Townhouse, or from the Tolbooth to prison ships bound for Australia.  Both of these are spurious because the sites of execution before the Castlegate where on the Heading and Gallow Hills.  Gallowshill, an anonymous grassy mound next to the Trinity Cemetery lodge, was in use until 1776, so there was no need for a road down to the harbour at all.  Condemned criminals were transported from the Tolbooth (in Castlegate in one form or another from 1394) either to the gallows via the Gallowgate of course, or through the Justice Port to the heading hill, now where the old Hanover Street School stands.

Earlier places of punishment seem to be situated around the early tolbooth, down at Regent Quay from 1191; a ducking stool is recorded for punishing "gossips" and "scolds" (nagging wifies!), but why require a road up to the town? Possibly it was just a transport road for taking goods up from ships, however, they could have easily come up Shore Brae and the Shiprow.  The back yard of either the Earl Marischal's house or Pitfodels' Lodging is where the 'maiden' or guillotine was kept when not in use, and then wheeled up to Heading Hill by those assigned to do so.  Maybe this is the purpose of the road?  If so, it would make some sense of malevolent spirits being there!

Alexander Milne - Map of Aberdeen c. 1789

Looking at the later map when John Menzies' new extension is built we can see a long sliver of space which may be this cobbled lane.  I would like to think so!  The house was meant to be three stories tall, so either the building of Marischal Street (1767) resulted in alot of these backlands being built over, which resulted in the cobbled street ending up in the basement of the bank in 1801, or Victoria Court was built over and raised up by the 1860s.  There is no way of telling unless someone goes and digs up the new holding cells in the court annexe basement!  I wonder if they did, could a geophysical survey instrument pick up the 'road' and its route?

My conclusion, a cobbled street sounds like something from the later 18th century, especially if they are granite 'setts' or cassies, as commercial granite workings don't date much before that.  So when Pitfodels Lodging was originally built in 1535, there may have been a courtyard of sandstone.  The 1740 extension must have built on top of that, and it is a sandstone causeway on which the 'maiden' was wheeled that appears in the 19th century building's basement. OR the narrow closey apparently shown on Alexander Milne's 1789 map, is a granite causeway used for transporting regular goods up from the harbour.  By the time Victoria Court is built, the 'road' disappears.

1867 OS Map - from NLS Maps collection -
note Victoria Court entirely enclosed

I would like to think the disturbances and sightings relate to the victims of the Maiden, and are even earlier than the mysterious 'road' or causeway under the Court Annexe.  If so, perhaps their spirit activities have now diminished in the face of the anxieties and sometimes arrogance of the criminals who sit in the locus of those old cells today.  Whatever the case, history is always under your feet, so watch yourself!

Coming soon...

QI facts to appear here soon

• the story of Rowies
• Coney or Cunningar Hill
• Ghosts of Castle Street

Meanwhile - check out Hidden Aberdeen Tours