Jeanie Deans

The name "Jeanie Deans" was given to several pubs, ships, railway locomotives, an opera, a play, a poem, a song, a hybrid rose, an antipodean potato, and a geriatric unit in a hospital.

[1] By a series of improbable adventures, involving the true abductors of her sister's baby son, she finds George Staunton alias Robertson who had fathered the child.

Thereafter she travels on by coach and on reaching London she seeks out the Duke of Argyll who takes her to meet Queen Caroline at Richmond Lodge.

[2] The Queen promises to intercede with King George II, and she ensures that her sister is granted a pardon, on pain of being banished from Scotland for fourteen years.

As Lady Staunton, Effie takes her place in London society but eventually retires to a French convent, much to her sister's disappointment at her relinquishing her father's religion.

Sir Walter Scott erected a monument at Helen Walker's grave in the parish of Irongray, about six miles from Dumfries.

Here he rented a small lonely house, about half a mile distant from the nearest point of the city, but the site of which, with all the adjacent ground, is now occupied by the buildings which form the south-eastern suburb.

"[9] St. Leonard's Crags itself is a few hundred metres to the north of the would-be Jeanie Deans Cottage and is now occupied by the building which was the James Clark School (now converted to flats).

Plaque above Jeanie Deans Tryst pub, St Leonards, Edinburgh.
A 19th century photo of the cottage – all that remains today is part of the back wall
Jeanie Deans Tryste pub, Edinburgh.
Scott Monument