136 An Ancient Lake-deposit in Queens Park. [Sess. 



cutting, indicating that a lake of somewhat considerable extent 

 had at one time covered the site. This portion of the Queen's 

 Park has until a comparatively recent date been in some parts 

 of a more or less marshy nature, corroborating the evidence 

 thus furnished of its much earlier condition. The questions 

 thus naturally occur to one. When did this lake probably exist ? 

 and. What was its fullest extent before it had begun to get silted 

 up and choked with decaying vegetable matter ? What follows 

 may perhaps help us to give approximate answers to these 

 questions. 



It is said that a chief reason for Queen Mary's frequent 

 absences from her Palace of Holyrood was the marshy nature 

 of the ground surrounding it, which rendered this royal 

 residence disagreeable and unhealthy. It is extremely pro- 

 bable that amongst these marshy portions would be the ground 

 now under consideration — which, indeed, in the first half of tlie 

 16 th century must have been very much of a quagmire. In 

 that most readable volume of essays by Hugh Miller entitled 

 ' Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood,' there is a paper, written 

 in 1842, on the Borough Loch, then in process of being drained 

 to form part of what is now known as the Meadows. In this 

 paper, speaking of the numerous sheets of water at an early 

 period existing in and around the city, the writer says : " The 

 records of the Medical Faculty of Edinburgh do not extend to 

 a period by any means remote. We have been informed, 

 however, by a medical friend, that among their earlier entries 

 agues and marsh fevers occur as usual diseases of the town and 

 neighbourhood." And in an earlier essay on the " geological 

 features " of the city, a beautiful word-picture is drawn, in the 

 author's well-known graphic style, of the salient points of the 

 landscape in the bronze age, with rocky ridge and alternating 

 valley and blue gleaming lake as prominent objects in the 

 scene. These lakes are enumerated — viz., the Nor' Loch of 

 what is now the Princes Street valley ; the South Loch, in the 

 valley of the Cowgate and Grassmarket ; the Borough Loch of 

 the present Meadows ; a lake at St Leonards and another at 

 the Hunter's Bog ; with the two which are still familiar to us 

 — Duddingston and the restored Dunsappie Loch. " And 

 thus," Hugh Miller concludes, " in a tract of country little 

 more than one and a half square miles in extent, at least seven 



