coal, which was found in abundance near the sea, thus creating a trade with the capital and causing the building of Joppa and a large extension of Easter Duddingston. Along the shore from Joppa to Musselburgh several salt pans produced a large quantity of salt for home and foreign consumption.
It took a long time, however, to bring about these changes. From the twelfth century, when first any authentic record of the parish is to be found, till 1755 is a long period of time, full no doubt of stirring events and progress of a kind, but not very productive of either social or physical improvement.
Previous to the former period we have reason to believe that the greater part of the parish was covered with wood, affording cover for game of all kinds. Even at a much later period, in the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh, the Forest of Drumselch, and the Burgh Moor or "Myre,” were in a condition of primitive wildness, "full of aged oaks,” "as well as of hartis, hynds, toddis, and sic like manner of bestis,” including the wild boar, the fox, the badger, and the otter, not to speak of whole colonies of rabbits and hares in the open sandy knolls near the shore, where the Figgate flowed limpid and clear into the sea.
That the forest at one time extended down to the margin of the sea appears from the fact that the trunks of large oak trees have frequently been found not only in abundance in the vicinity of Duddingston Loch, in the old peat moss of Cambrune or Cameron, but imbedded in the clay of the Figgate Burn at Portobello. Here at one time there was a considerable estuary, which in process of time came to be silted up with drift sand from the beach, leaving only a narrow channel for the stream. The Forest of Drumselch, or the King’s Forest as it was sometimes called, no doubt included the Forest of Figgate. In the Charter granted by King David I. in 1128, for the erection of the Monastery of the Holy Cross - or Holyrood — the monks acquired the privilege of sending thither their hogs to feed; and at a later time Sir William Wallace is said to have found shelter with two hundred of his followers at the Figgate whins, described as "formerly a forest,” preparatory to the successful raid made by him in 1297 on the North of England. Whether the same liberty, as was allowed in 1500 by the Magistrates of Edinburgh, to cut down the timber on the Burgh Moor for building purposes, was allowed in Duddingston we cannot say; but it seems clear that by that time, in the parish of
