Annotation:North Loch (The)
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NORTH LOCH, THE. AKA and see "Go About Your Business," "Gin I Had a Bonnie Lass/Gin I Had a Bonnie Lassie," ""If I Had a Bonny Lass"." Scottish, Reel. G Mixolydian. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. John Glen (1891) finds the earliest appearance of the tune in print in Robert Bremner's 1757 collection.
According to Wikipedia [1], "The Nor Loch, also known as the Nor' Loch and the North Loch, was a loch formerly in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the area now occupied by Princes Street Gardens, which lies between the Royal Mile and Princes Street." Throughout the middle ages the marshy lake became more and more polluted, until parts of it began to be filled in the 18th century for construction of the North Bridge. The remainder had been drained by 1820.
Robert Chambers, in his Traditions of Edinburgh (1847, pp. 109-111) mentions several incidents involving Nor' Loch:
MEMORIALS OF THE NOR' LOCH.
He who now sees the wide hollow space between the Old and New Towns, occupied by beautiful gardens, having their continuity only somewhat curiously broken up by a transverse earthen mound and a line of railway, must be at a loss to realize the idea of the same space presenting in former times a lake, which was regarded as a portion of the physical defences of the city. Yet many, in common with myself, must remember the by no means distant time when the remains of this sheet of water, consisting of a few pools, served as excellent sliding and skating-ground in winter, while their neglected grass-green precincts too frequently formed an arena whereon the high and mighty quarrels of Old and New Town cowlies [etymology of the work unknown] were brought to a lapidarian arbitration.
The lake, if after all appears, was artificial being fed by springs under the Castle rock, and retained by a dam at the foot of Halkerston's Wynd; which dam was a passable way from the city to the fields of the north. Bower, the continuator of Fordun, speaks of a tournament held on the ground, 'ubi nunc est lacus', in 1396, by order of the queen [of Robert III], at which her eldest son, Prince David, then in his twentieth year, presided. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a ford upon the North Loch is mentioned. Archbishop Beatoun escaped across that ford in 1517, when flying from the unlucky street skirmish called 'Cleanse the Causeway'. In those early times, the town corporation kept ducks and swans upon the loch for ornament's sake, and various acts occur in their register for preserving those birds. An act, passed in council between the years 1589 and 1594, ordained 'a boll of oats to be brought for feeding the swans in the North Loch;' and a person was unlawed at the same time for shooting a swan in the said loch, and obliged to find another in its place. The lake seems to have been a favourite scene for boating. Various houses in the neighbourhood had servitudes of the use of a boat upon it; and these, in later times, used to be employed to no little purposes, as witness the following passage in Calderwood's Manuscript History, under the date 1594:--'James Gray, brother to the Master of Gray, ravished a gentlewoman, apparent heire of her father, John Carnegie; but [she] was rendered again, at command of the counsel, to her father. She was again ravished [June 1594] by the said James out of Robert Gowses house in Edinburgh, where she and her father remained for the time; was hailed down a close to the North Loch, and conveyed over in a boat, where there were about ten or twelve men on the other side to receive her. They set her upon a man's saddle, and conveyed her away, her hair hanging about her face. The Lord Hume keept the High Street with armed men till the fact was accomplished.'
The said Lord Hume having, just the month before, abjured the Catholic and adopted the Protestant faith, publicly on his knees in the High Church, and being moreover, at this time a prime favourite and counsellor of the king!
The North Loch was the place in which our poius ancestors used to dip and drown offenders against morality, especailly of the female sex. The Referomers, therefore, conceived that they had not only done a very proper, but also a very witty thing, when they threw into this lake, in 1558, the statue of St. Giles, which formerly adorned their High Church, and which they had contrived to abstract.
It was also the frequent scene of suicide, and on this point one or two droll anecdotes are related. A man was deliberately proceeding to drown himself in the North Loch, when a crowd of townspeople rushed down to the waterside, venting cries of horror and alarm at the specatcle, yet without actually venturing into the water to prevent him from accomplishing the rash act. Hearing the tumult, the father of the late Lord Henderland threw up his window in James's Court, and leaning out, cried down the brae to the people, 'What's all the noise about? Can't ye e'en let the honest man gang to the de'il his ain gate?' Whereupon the honest man quietly walked out of the loch, to the no small amusement of his lately appalled neighbours. It is also said that a poor woman, having resolved to put an end to her existance, wade a considerable way into the water, designing to take the fatal plunge when she should reach a place where the lake was sufficiently deep. Before she could satisfy herself on that point, her hoop caught the water, and lifted her off her feet. At the same time the wind caught her figure, and blew her, whether she would or not, into the centre of the pool, as if she had been sailing upon an inverted tub. She now became alarmed, screamed for help, and waved her arms distractedly; all of which signs brought a crowd to the shore she had just left, who were unable, however, to render her any assistance, before she had landed on the other side--fairly cured, it appeared, of all desire of quitting the uneasy coil of mortal life.
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: Bremner (Scots Reels), c. 1757; p. 44.
Recorded sources: