Jonathon Louis talks about ‘Opportunities for natural flood management in the Esk River catchments

Jonathon’s talk was presented via Zoom on 21 November 2024

Jonathan is a Co-Director of the Forth Rivers Trust and has worked
with the Trust to improve rivers around the Forth for 11 years. His
background is in Sustainable Environmental Management and Countryside
Management. As Co-Director, Jonathan helps lead the Trust’s work
whilst supporting project development, funding and stakeholder
relationships.

His talk explores the opportunities for nature-based solutions
within the Esk catchment, how this could aid biodiversity and make the
catchment and communities more resilient to climate change. He
highlights examples of work carried out elsewhere that could be
delivered within the Esk catchment whilst outlining opportunities to
work in partnership for a more resilient and biodiverse Esk catchment.

The talk can be seen here.

James Simpson talks about Mavisbank House and the Villas of the Esk

A video recording of James Simpson’s talk to the Esk Valley Trust on 3 October 2024 is now available to see.

James is a very well-known architect who has helped with restoration projects at many of the ‘Villas of the Esk’.

He is a leading advocate for the architectural heritage of the Esk valleys. His talk uses the concept of the ‘Villa’ (as envisaged by Sir John Clerk in ‘The Country Seat’) to reflect on Mavisbank House and other major Villas in the Esk Valleys.

The talk was the opening event of the 2024 Midlothian Outdoor Festival.

To see the talk just click here.

Artists & Photographers along the River Esk

The Esk valleys have a rich artistic heritage. In October 2021 Joanna Soden, a former Collections Curator at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, gave this fascinating introduction to some elements of that heritage.

Tackling Pollution in the Esk Rivers

This talk was presented to the Esk Valley Trust in June 2021. It lays out the background behind plans to manage the pollution of the river North Esk from the outflow of mine water at Junkies Adit in Dalkeith.

Sadly pollution has been a recurring feature of the Esk Rivers for many years. In recent times discharge of contaminated water from old mine workings is a big problem. In particular discharge from Junkies Adit in Dalkeith, which has links to the now closed Bilston Glen mines, is having significant impact on the health of the river.

The background to, and what is being done and planned to monitor and resolve, the problems was covered in a talk to the Esk Valley Trust on 24 June 2021.

A recording of this talk can be seen:

The talk was given by Dr Anna Griffin of the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), and her colleagues Paul Butler, SEPA Principal Hydrogeologist and Mining Sector Lead and Annette Lardeur, Principal Project Deliver Manager from the Coal Authority.

Anna has a background in ecological restoration and catchment working and has been part of a national team which co-ordinates the river basin planning process in Scotland since 2005. She develops river restoration projects and work to improve fish access on the catchment scale in partnership with others.

Paul has worked as a hydrogeologist for 30 years and has been involved in a range of coal and metal mining issues. As SEPA’s Mining Sector Lead, he is committed to working with partners to reduce the impacts of mining. He also hopes that the heat contained in the water in former mines of the Central Belt can play a key role in meeting Scotland’s future energy demands.

Annette has a civil engineering background with experience in renewable energy, river engineering/flood defence, mine water treatment and urban regeneration and has been with the Coal Authority since 2017, leading a team to deliver major new interventions and refurbish assets to prevent and alleviate the pollution from historic mine water treatment, both from legacy of coal mining and abandoned metal mines.

How the American Civil War triggered an Environmental Crisis on the North Esk

The American Civil War forced a change in materials used for paper-making in the Esk Valleys with dire consequences for the pollution of the river North Esk – and a notorious court case

Paper making on the North Esk grew from a specialised local craft already well established in the 18^th century to a globally significant industry supplying Edinburgh’s buoyant printing and publishing businesses. Until the 1860s cotton and linen rags were the main raw material for paper making, the industry had outgrown local supplies and was dependent on cotton rag from the United States. The American Civil War (1861-1865) cut off supplies. Consequently, the papermakers substituted esparto grass imported from Spain and North Africa. The processing of esparto required greater use of harsh alkali chemicals, producing toxic effluents and large quantities of organic matter all discharged into the river. Untreated sewage from the expanding towns along the river contributed to the ecological disaster. Aristocratic landowners downstream of the paper mills were incensed by the huge rafts of foam, generated by the papermaking process, drifting down the river and by the smell from untreated sewage. They did not recognise these as separate issues, instead they pursued the paper mill owners in “The 1866 North Esk Pollution Case”. A cholera pandemic had caused outbreaks in London and in Fraserburgh in the very week of the trial, yet barely merited a mention in the proceedings.

The legal case was prosecuted on the basis of nuisance under the law of property and eminent scientific witnesses testified on water chemistry and the capacity of rivers to purify discharges. Pleas were made on the basis that the economic benefits of industry outweighed environmental damage. The judge directed the jury to the narrowest interpretation of nuisance under the law of property. The judgement went in favour of the landowners, yet the consequences for the mill owners were limited. The Duke of Buccleuch had invested heavily in mining, railways and the new port of Granton as well as his extensive inherited agricultural holdings. His economic and political interests were enmeshed with the papermaking industry of the valley and the risk from the strict enforcement of environmental controls on his own investments may well also have inhibited full enforcement of the terms of the judgement.

The issues from 170 years ago have never gone away. A letter to the Scotsman in 1874 from the Provost of Musselburgh, which is a masterpiece of polemic, excoriated the upstream paper mill owners for their plan to dump their effluents on the seashore of Musselburgh via a sewer to be laid along the valley from Penicuik. Almost 150 years later on the Esk in July this year there was a major pollution incident caused by flooding of an abandoned coal mine, spilling contaminated water into the stream, and at the same time untreated sewage is also discharged into the river in ‘exceptional circumstances’ every other week.

It is clear that all the parties to the pollution of the river were, at worst, guilty of pursuing their “enlightened” self-interest. In the mid-19th century the belief in progress and the power of science to find a solution to every technical problem was pervasive and there was weighty evidence to support this conviction. For example, landowners and farmers in the Lothians had been early and enthusiastic adopters of the science of soil and plant nutrition. Between 1840 and 1855 the research findings of Justus Liebig had been taken up by British scientists and widely propagated to the landowning interests of the country. This led to a boom in the exploitation and rapid depletion of guano from remote Pacific and South Atlantic islands, then the development of a chemical industry producing phosphate from mineral sources. The nexus to Liebig can be traced further into the 20th century. August Hoffman, a star witness in the 1866 case and Liebig’s protégé, was appointed to a prestigious position in the School of Chemistry on his recommendation. Fritz Haber, Hoffman’s doctoral student developed a catalytic process for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. This process underpins the modern global fertilizer industry. The scientific witnesses called in the 1866 trial were almost exclusively adherents of Liebig. The 8^th Duke of Argyll gave an address to the British Association on his inauguration as president in 1855. Those in attendance included: Sir Roderick Murchison, Sir David Brewster, Dr Lyon Playfair, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, John Tyndall (a pioneer in the science of climate change), Hugh Miller, Michael Faraday, Adam Sedgwick, Justus Liebig and several key witnesses in the 1866 North Esk case: William Allen Miller, Frederick Penny, and Edward Frankland. The duke’s speech surveyed the progress of the sciences since the previous meeting in Glasgow of the British Association in 1840. This covered a remarkable fifteen years of advances in many fields of science. Yet the insights of science seem impotent to effect changes in human behaviour where the beneficiary is the common good rather than the individual. If that was true in 1866, then it seems even more entrenched as a fact now. Perhaps there is a lesson for us all in the irony that the Duke of Buccleuch as an improving landowner and investor in the industrial development of the Lothians also suffered from the unintended consequences of economic growth. However, his biggest complaint in the trial was, according to the testimony of his head gardener, that His Grace’s peaches were blighted by contaminated water from the river. This may have influenced the jury more than all of the distinguished scientific witnesses.

Rennie Frazer; Autumn 2020

A Nature-Based Catchment Action Plan for the Lothian Esks for the next half century

Many stories here look back to past events, past people. Here Roger Crofts gives some thought to the future – what might be done in the Esk Valleys to improve them for future generations.

The Esk catchment needs nature-based action plan to provide a forward looking, multi objective approach to delivering government targets and as a scale up from previous catchment action plans.

The proposal would be developed in the context of SEPA’s River Basin Management Plan for Scotland 2021-27and linked to Scottish Government forestry, biodiversity, and climate change action.

Why is this needed?

Flood Risk Management Schemes have a single, albeit laudable, objective but river catchments contain a variety of land, land uses, soil types, water movements, biodiversity and amenity that interlink. At present all of these are the subject of different Scottish Government policies and programmes. However, the recent work on the Eddleston Water and at a smaller scale on the Brunstane Burn in Edinburgh (there are also examples in England) have demonstrated that naturalising river courses within a catchment context can bring significant multiple benefits to, for example, soil retention, biodiversity gain and water management.

Critical observation of management of land and water courses in the Esks catchment shows that there are many interventions which mean that the system is no longer operating naturally. Overgrazing is prevalent in the upper reaches, largely from sheep grazing, exacerbated by new track construction and intensive recreational activity. There is relatively little native tree planting compared with larger areas of non-native monoculture plantings. Water supply schemes are still active to serve adjacent populations and those provided for redundant industrial activity mean that channels are canalized, weirs retained, and small reservoirs retained for little or no purpose. And new infrastructure development, especially housing, is resulting in sealing of previously permeable surfaces. These factors increase the rate of run off from the land and through the river system to the Firth of Forth.

What type of Nature Based Solutions are possible?

Taking the internationally accepted definition of Nature-Based Solutions as approved by the 1200 member International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) “actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems, that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits”, there are many possibilities in the Esks catchment:

• Restoring grasslands and peatlands
• Planting native trees
• Blocking agricultural drains
• Opening up floodplains
• Building water retention ponds
• Reintroducing the European beaver
• Restoring river channels
• Reducing hard surfaces in new infrastructure development.

What are the expected benefits of adopting a nature-based approach?

An Action plan, implemented over time measured in decades, would have the following expected benefits:

• Reduction in flood risk
• Improvement in biodiversity
• Improvement in landscape amenity
• Reduction in Greenhouse Gas emissions
• Improvement in human health and wellbeing.

Isn’t that something to aim for?

Roger Crofts; Spring 2022

Fisherrow – a wee bit of its story

Simon Fairnie is the son of a fishing family whose ancestry can be traced back to the early 1700’s. In this recorded talk he introduces some of the stories of Fisherrow through the eyes of his own and his family’s association with this place.

Simon  was born and brought up in Fisherrow where he has lived all his life. He has an intimate knowledge of Fisherrow and its fishing connections and is always pleased to be asked to speak about his rich heritage. His special interest is ensuring that the history of Fisherrow and its people is preserved and recorded. Simon is currently Treasurer of Musselburgh Museum and Heritage Group and Co-ordinator of Musselburgh Museum.

This is a recording of a talk that Simon gave to the Esk Valley Trust in October 2021:

Arniston House and the origins of Ordnance Survey maps

It could be considered that the origins of Ordnance Survey maps that we love and rely on, can be traced to Arniston House and the Dundas family.

It could be considered that the origins of Ordnance Survey maps that we love and rely on, can be traced to Arniston House and the Dundas family.

The age of the Scottish Enlightenment was the late 1600’s and early 1700’s.  During this time the rich and educated took a keen interest in everything scientific.  They craved accuracy in everything they did and spent a lot of money investing in new scientific instruments.  Maps were destined to be based on real measurements rather than panoramic sketches.

In 1712 Robert Dundas of Arniston, age 27, a lawyer and Solicitor General for Scotland, married Elizabeth Watson.  At the time of their marriage, both Elizabeth’s parents were dead.  Her youngest brother, David Watson, was only 8, and came to stay with them at Arniston.  Robert Dundas took a keen interest in geography and amassed a large collection of maps, globes and surveying instruments. Young David was also fascinated by this collection and learned how to use them to make his own maps.

A few years later in his late teens, David Watson joined the British army, spending most of the next twenty years on the continent much of the time as an engineer for the board of Ordnance.  After leaving the army, Robert Dundas helped David, now in his early thirties, move to the Board of Ordnance in London.  This had a small section devoted to map making.

Shortly before the battle of Culloden, Hanoverian commanders complained that their maps of the northwest highlands were useless – features, roads and names were often wrong or non-existent.  This was one of the reasons they took two months after Culloden trying to catch up with Bonnie Prince Charlie and Lord Lovett.  In 1747, a year after the battle of Culloden, David Watson persuaded the Duke of Cumberland that their maps of the Highlands were not fit for purpose.

This was the trigger for a national military map, initially of Scotland and later of England’s south coast. This is how it came about and another famous name creeps into the story.

William Roy, age 21, and his father worked as factors on an estate near Carluke.  William had no training in maths. The estate they worked on had originally been owned by Robert Dundas’s second wife’s father. The new landowners at Carluke decided they needed a detailed map of their estate.  Possibly at a family lunch when the Dundases visited Hallcraig, David Watson was introduced to the enthusiastic young William Roy then aged just 21.  David, working as he was for the Board of Ordnance, (and, remember, stepson of Robert Dundas of Arniston), employed William Roy.  He was given the job of mapping the Highlands of Scotland and later the Scottish Lowlands.  On completion four years later, he moved to London and moved onto mapping the coastal regions of the south of England.  Within seven years of his death, his successor, Charles Lennox, persuaded King George the 3^rd to fund mapping of the nation using the new triangulation system.  This is the beginnings of Ordnance mapping as we now know it.

So in summary, Robert Dundas of Arniston’s interest in maps and surveying instruments rubbed off on his young stepbrother who later employed William Roy.  He created the most accurate and detailed maps ever seen of much of Britain.  It was the vision of David Watson to produce a map of the country that eventually came to be at the hands of William Lennox starting in 1791.

A footnote on Board of Ordnance mapping

When William Roy created his maps of the Scottish Highlands they used a chain to measure straight lines.  At a corner in a track he recorded the angle to the next straight line.  This meant that measurement errors gradually increased.  By the time he reached the lowlands the error had reached something in the order of 20 miles.  The triangulation method that was introduced 30 years later, meant the for the most part, that errors tended to cancel.

In 1784 William Roy laid down the trigonometrical baseline (5.2 miles) on Hownslow Heath   (now the edge of Heathrow Airport) initially using wooden rods and later glass rods which were less affected by temperature and moisture.  This was used to create a triangulated map between Greenwich and the Paris Observatory.  This would allow the map makers to provide sailors with significantly more accurate charts.  The baseline was re-surveyed by Charles Lennox in preparation for creating the first Board of Ordnance maps.

When the full triangulation of Britain was started, the original baseline was used as the starting point.  In 1794, a second baseline of 7 miles was accurately measured on Salisbury Plain by Mudge & Dalby to check the accuracy of the first stage of triangulation.  Measurement of the new baseline confirmed their triangulation to have been “very accurate”.  In general, any triangulation errors tend to cancel themselves out whereas with the original end to end measurements plus measurements of angles (Roy’s original technique) the errors tend to be cumulative.  While Roy and later Mudge & Dalby measured very large triangles, a separate team of surveyors, created smaller triangles and noted the small detail topography producing useful maps as we now know them.  On the triangulation survey, the surveyors marked their theodolite points with a small pile of stones (cairns) which they asked the locals not to disturb.  This original triangulation survey remained the basis for all OS mapping until the 1935 when the small cairns began to be replaced by the modern concrete obelisks.

Ian Brown

Dutchman’s Creek – the story of a cottage on the South Esk

With thanks to Inez Visser of Musselburgh, we are pleased to share the wonderful story of her grandfather, who lived in the 1950s in a former coachman’s cottage on the Dalhousie Estate in the Cockpen area.

With thanks to Inez Visser of Musselburgh, we are pleased to share the wonderful story of her grandfather, who lived in the 1950s in a former coachman’s cottage on the Dalhousie Estate in the Cockpen area.

You can read 3 newspaper clippings that help to tell the story here:

“That’s where the captain drops anchor” 1955

“It’s rather quiet around Cockpen”

“A dream is shattered” 1957

Biography of Capt. Jan Eltjes Visser and Jane Anne Pennet of “Dutchman’s Creek”, located  on the South Esk next to old Cockpen Church  

Captain Jan Etjes Visser was born on the small Dutch Friesian island of Schiermonikoog in 1892.  Although a tiny island the size of Eigg it had a small nautical college and by the start of the First World War Jan Eltjes already had his Third Officer’s ticket.  In 1915 he was Third Officer on board the SS Katwijk, which was torpedoed; fortunately the crew survived as they were able to seek safety on board the light ship Noord Hinder.

Jan Eltjes married Ida Klazina Teensma also of Schiermonikoog in 1918 and together they had four sons.  He continued with his nautical studies, returning to the island college to study and be assessed for each grade and by the time of the Second World War he was Captain of the SS Reggestroom of the Holland West Africa Line.  In May 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and his ship, like many others, was cordoned off on the North Coast of France.  Capt. Visser then navigated Reggestroom  bit by bit back to Bordeaux.  By June in the ensuing crisis at the invasion of France he was commanded to take 400 refugees to England and on route while docked at Le Verdon another 100 refugees were boarded.  They survived an aerial attack in Le Verdon and a couple of days later arrived safely in Falmouth where their ‘cargo’ of refugees of many European nationalities were discharged.

Documents of the ensuing war years are not in the family records but it seems that SS Reggestroom assigned to a British flag rather than be surrendered to the Nazis.  Capt. Visser’s eldest son died tragically in 1939 in a ship’s fire on board the MS Jagersfontein and in 1943 his wife Ida Klazina died; his surviving three sons were looked after by family members in the Netherlands during the final years of the war.   In April 1944 and now residing in Edinburgh, Capt. Visser married Jane Anne Pennet,  she is recorded as  having the catering licence for Nicholson’s restaurant and in June 1945 she and her new Dutch husband bought Nicholson’s restaurant for £1000.

Not much is known of Jane Anne Pennet, she was from Mull and a native Gaelic speaker and had two brothers and sister.  Her brother Louis Pennet was station manager of Queen Street Station, Glasgow up to the early 1960’s.   There is no documentary evidence tying up the time that she sold the restaurant but by the time her step son, Jeppe Ino,  married in 1951 she owned a guest house in East Hermitage Place, Leith.

After the war Capt. Visser continued to skipper ships of the HWAL, meanwhile his youngest son, Jeppe Ino, was brought to Edinburgh to study at the Leith Nautical College.  By the early 1950’s Capt. Visser was given the prestigious contract of sourcing a small vessel to be recommissioned as a presidential yacht for the then President of Liberia, William Tubman.  Capt. Visser was, for a short while, skipper of the vessel renamed “ MY President James Roye”  but the onset of a heart condition in 1952 forced early retirement.

At this point the couple bought the small piece of land and the derelict cottage on the Dalhousie Estate on the South Shore of the river as it passes the castle and they set about restoring the cottage and reinvigorating the garden.  They called their new home “Dutchman’s Creek” and on June 11, 1955 a centre piece article was written about them in the People’s Journal.  Just two years later their idyllic life started to fall apart quite literally as the cottage was undermined by blasting which shook huge cracks into the walls.

Capt. Visser died in May 1958.  The land was bought by the National Coal Board, the cottage was demolished and the NCB used the land as a mine bing.  Jane Anne Pennet returned to East Hermitage Place, Leith and died in 1963.

For many years the remains of Dutchman’s Creek sat low next to the huge smouldering pile of coal slag but now the land has recovered with natural reseeded woodland and is a woodland gem which can be walked through.

Biography compiled by Inez Visser, granddaughter of Capt. Jan Eltjes Visser and step granddaughter of Jane Anne Pennet  (20/11/2020)

Pollution on the Esks: a story over 200 years

Countless letters to newspapers, initiatives, court cases, commissions and proposals for sewers have been put forward in that time.

The history of Esk pollution goes back nearly 200 years. Countless letters to newspapers, initiatives, court cases, commissions and proposals for sewers have been put forward in that time, yet incidents like that recent report are their legacy.

The 1866 North Esk Pollution case – brought by the Duke of Buccleuch, Viscount Melville, and Drummond of Hawthornden against six paper mill owners – accused the mill owners of being the primary source of pollution. But the evidence led in the case made it clear that coal mining (largely owned and financed by the heritable landowners) and domestic sewage were at least equal as sources of nuisance.

It may seem incredible that pollution of the Esk received almost as much notice at the 1866 meeting of The British Association for the Advancement of Science as Darwin’s recently published Origin of Species.

In the below document are two articles from 1931, which resonate with these still unresolved issues.

North Esk pollution in 1931