Where is the house of Shaws?

[regshoe]

It's been a while since I've done any of this figuring-out-canon-details meta, and writing this reminded me how much fun it can be :)

Anyway: where is the house of Shaws?

The first thing we hear about the location of the house of Shaws is that it's 'not far from Cramond'. In chapter 2 David walks along the Glasgow road west of Edinburgh and enters Cramond parish; the description of his journey after this point is not very geographically detailed, but it is long enough to make clear that he travels some distance before reaching the house. When he does get there, the surroundings are described thus:

...a great bulk of building standing very bare upon a green in the bottom of the next valley. The country was pleasant round about, running in low hills, pleasantly watered and wooded, and the crops, to my eyes, wonderfully good... all set with hawthorn bushes full of flowers; the fields dotted with sheep; a fine flight of rooks in the sky; and every sign of a kind soil and climate...

Importantly, there's no mention of the sea; Cramond itself is right on the coast, so we're not very near the village. Again, in chapter 5 David wants to go to Queensferry because 'I wished for a nearer view of the sea and ships' (than he got from the hill above Edinburgh at the beginning of chapter 2, the only time the sea has been mentioned thus far).

Here is the area in question:

• In a rough map of Cramond parish from 1794
• On the Roy Military Survey map of the 1750s
• On the earliest large-scale Ordnance Survey map, from the 1850s

I haven't been able to determine the exact historical extent of Cramond parish, but the 1794 map suggests that at least most of it is east of the River Almond (with a little bit west of the river to the north—too near the sea for Shaws, probably). The 'road to Stirling' in the 1794 map is the Glasgow road.

The route between Shaws and Queensferry, taken in chapter 5 and back again in chapter 29, is again not described in detail, but we do get the information that a northwest wind is blowing 'nearly in our faces'. Queensferry is on a bearing of approximately 280º from Cramond village, i.e. much closer to due west than northwest: more evidence that Shaws is south/inland from Cramond.

Now, because we're almost certainly east of the river, the characters would have to cross it to get to Queensferry, and the obvious place to do this is Cramond Bridge at NT1796475497. Queensferry is on a bearing of about 300º from the bridge, much closer to northwest, and the road runs pretty much directly there, so I think this is the route taken. The river bends upstream of the bridge to run west-east, but I don't think we can be very much further west than the bridge, as the route to Queensferry would then become too long (a bit more than three miles from the bridge) and circuitous (no longer consistently close to northwest, or at all if they crossed by a different bridge further west).

Finally, in chapter 30 David and Alan head towards Edinburgh from Shaws via 'the by-way over Corstorphine Hill'.

Putting all these clues together, the house of Shaws is:

• Near Cramond
• Not very near the sea
• An appreciable distance away from the Glasgow road
• East of the River Almond
• Not very far west of Cramond Bridge
• West of Corstorphine Hill

This confines us to a fairly small area, and here is my very approximate drawing of it:





Most of this area now is modern housing estates, with a sizeable chunk being golf courses and then a smaller area covered by the Cammo Estate Local Nature Reserve, an eighteenth-century park (of which I may say more in a later post, as Cammo is possibly, among specific real houses, the most comparable to the house of Shaws).

One more point is worth mentioning. In the suburb of Clermiston, just west of Corstorphine Hill, is a cluster of streets named after characters and locations from Kidnapped. There's Essendean Place and Essendean Terrace, Hoseason Gardens, Ransome Gardens, Glenure Loan, Torrance Park and—my personal favourite—Alan Breck Gardens.* Imagine living on Alan Breck Gardens. I can't find any information about the rationale behind this—searching the street names just brings up property listings and so on—but this area is within my rough boundary for where Shaws could be: might it be that whoever was responsible for these names was acting on the belief that this is where the house stood??? Possibly, but I think the proximity to Corstorphine Hill (known as a significant place for the book; the statue is there, after all!) is probably more important.


*I discovered this early in my Kidnapped fannish life when, not knowing whether Essendean was a real place or not, I searched for it on Open Street Map and this was the only result.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I love this! I really appreciated the post about Crammond House, also. Seems like there's bits and pieces of a bunch of things.

[regshoe]

Thank you :D Yes, I don't think Shaws is a fictionalised specific real house, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the general appearance of real big houses in that area can tell us something about what Shaws might be like. I might do a bit more research on specific houses and make another post about them at some point.

[garonne]

This is so interesting! I am quite convinced by your reasoning as you zoom in on that little area.

Imagine living on Alan Breck Gardens.

Haha, that would very cool.

[regshoe]

Thank you—it was fun going through the details and working it out :D

[garonne]

What do you think about Illieston House as a model for Shaws?

I was going through this booklet

https://www.westlothian.gov.uk/media/53907/Country-Houses-Booklet-Summer-2022/pdf/Country_Houses.pdf

and my eye was immediately caught by the square stair-tower!

I like it a lot (I mean, not necessarily as inspiration for RLS, but in any case as something that fits my own mental image of the house very well.)

[regshoe]

Oh, nice, I do like that tower :D I hadn't searched that far out yet—of course it's too far west, but you wouldn't expect to get one that looks right and is in the right location if it's not based on a specific real house.

What I'm struggling with is the statement that Shaws is five storeys high, excluding attics and the tower. That seems very tall for this sort of house!—the closest I can find in that booklet is Bridgecastle House, at four storeys for the main house and five for the tower. (Bridgecastle House also 'appeared to become a roofless ruin during most of the 18th century', ooh... But it's also even more in the wrong place, beyond Linlithgow...)

[garonne]

Yeah, I admit that when I'm picturing Shaws, I don't picture it as "five storeys + attics" high, but only three or four. That's just so tall!

(Actually, I had a little poke around on the internet, just to find an example of what that would even look like, and could not find any examples of five-storeyed 18th-century houses in Scotland at all. Though no doubt there are some somewhere...)

[regshoe]

Oh wow, even more unlikely XD The thing is, it doesn't sound like Davie is exaggerating or mistaken when he says it's five storeys high. Hmm, that line is in the passage where he climbs the tower, so it might be that 'five storeys' refers to the tower—but from context, no, I think he does mean the main house ('not counting lofts' wouldn't make sense for the tower, which is unfinished/ruined at the top).

Nor does it make much sense from a Doylist perspective: if RLS was deliberately exaggerating the size of Shaws beyond what was realistic, the obvious reason would be to emphasise how important the Balfours of Shaws are, and I don't think they are that important (they're landed gentry but not titled aristocracy; Alexander's disappearance was a local scandal but not apparently a national one).

...On the other hand, the houses in Edinburgh at this period were famous for being very tall, well beyond five storeys. I just checked my photo of the house in the Grassmarket from FotH, and it is exactly five storeys plus attics and a tower! And RLS was from Edinburgh, so he was probably more familiar with houses like that than with country houses; perhaps he was thinking 'like that, but in the country' and not appreciating how unlikely that was?

[luzula]

Very cool! I like your detective work. And comparing the old and the modern map reminds me of similar places in Sweden on the outskirts of cities, where modern housing has replaced the old agricultural or wooded landscape. : (

Cramond Bridge at NT1796475497
Is this some British way of giving a location?

[regshoe]

Thank you :) Yeah, I do a lot of comparing old and modern maps for work, and it really is striking just how much less land cities used to cover.

Is this some British way of giving a location?

Yes, sorry, I could have explained that!—it's the National Grid system. (Basically, the two letters specify a 100x100km square, then the digits are east/west and north/south coordinates within that square). The NLS map viewer that I linked for the Ordnance Survey map shows the grid reference in the bottom right-hand corner as you mouse over the map, or you can look them up directly on this website.

[luzula]

it's the National Grid system
Ah, I see! I've never seen a system like that which is given in just one number, instead of two (for east/west and north/south). But I suppose it's just a different way of organizing the information.

[regshoe]

It is two numbers really! I could write it as NT 17964 75497—the first five digits are east/west, the second five are north/south—I'm just used to entering grid references in systems that don't like spaces, so I leave them out.

[starshipfox]

I can't believe that I have been to Clermiston multiple times but never knew about the street names! I would've gone to Alan Breck Gardens, had I known ;)

This is great research, thank you for sharing.

[regshoe]

Thank you! Ah, you'll just have to go there if and when you're ever in the area again :D