Leith Links
The west section of the park contains children's play areas, football pitches and, in the north-west corner, and tennis and petanque courts.
[2] The Edinburgh Mela (since 2010) is held on the Links in late August Historically the park contained a Victorian bandstand, a pond for model yachts, and was used for annual events such as pageants.
During the Scottish Reformation, on 25 July 1559, the Protestant Lords of the Congregation made a truce with the Catholic Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, at the Links, who agreed to vacate Holyroodhouse and leave Edinburgh.
[5] The same Alexander Elphinstone, who had riches but no employment, appears in a more dramatic event on 23 December 1729 when he challenged Lt Swift of Lord Cardigan's Regiment to a duel (with swords) on Leith Links.
The game resulted in the construction of Golfers Land on the Royal Mile by the Duke's partner, the Edinburgh cobbler John Paterson.
That to the extreme west, in the triangle of land isolated by Wellington Place, was surmised to be burial pits from an outbreak of the plague which affected Leith in the middle of the 17th century.
The historian Christopher Smout believes that the 1645 epidemic, which occurred at a time when warring armies were on the march, probably resulted from the spread of typhus.
[13] It may have been carried north by Scottish soldiers present at the Siege of Newcastle where plague was reported after the town's surrender to General Leslie on 19 October 1644.
[14]: 9 The records of South Leith Parish Church reveal that the first cases of "the pest" appeared in Yardheads in April 1645 and that the outbreak reached its height that summer.
[15] David Alderstone, member of the Kirk Session and the town's Water Bailie, left a unique, detailed record of the epidemic.
[14]: 14 An entry for 17 July, when it was "ordained to provyd some wemen to help to fill ye cairts [of muck and refuse]" suggests there was a shortage of able-bodied men for cleansing the town.
The huts were cleaned by "foul clengeris" who wore a distinctive uniform described as "ane joupe [coat] of blak with a St. Andrew's Cross of quhyte clayth sewit about with the sam for designing and knawing of thame be utheris".
After the outbreak had abated Aldinstone, a fortunate survivor, reported to the Session on 3 February 1646 that the number of fatalities for South Leith amounted to 2,421 (out of an estimated population in excess of 4,000), for Restalrig 160 and Craigend (i.e. Calton) 155, making a total of 2,736 for the whole parish.
[14]: 20–21 During works in the playground of St Mary's RC Primary School (on the north edge of Leith Links) the remains of 79 bodies were found, thought to be victims of the plague.
These houses, as well as both the eastern and western sections of the Links, feature prominently in the Leith-based political crime novel - Kertamen by Mauro Martone.
The industrial hinterland here originally held ropeworks and cooperages but for most of the 20th century operated as a bottling plant for United Distillers until they vacated the site around 2005.
