Many Edinburgh residents only discover the Dean Village by reading guide books or by taking an escorted tour with visiting friends. It was in 1960 still regarded by many as a slum, so hidden away in its steep narrow valley in the center of the city that it could be overlooked. No buses, nor even tourist buses could get down to the old mill by the stream ‘where we used to sit and dream Nellie Dean’. R L Stevenson located his romantic novel Catriona in the Dean Village at a time when the Water of Leith drove mills along the length of its run to the Port of Leith. Admittedly the skin works, tucked discretely into vine covered stone buildings lent a certain odour to the air on Mondays when the lime pits were emptied of the slaughterhouse sheep pelts soaked there. The village supported 2 small shops and a third rather large licensed grocer. Since we are dealing with the affairs of sixty years ago, it is safe to reveal that this latter shop had a back room into which men working in the skin works would slip silently and probably illegally for a quick dram. No words were spoken and accounts were settled unseen & unheard.
The site in Dean Village was originally intended for the employees of “The Scotsman” Newspaper. The Finlay family, proprietors until very recently, established the Well Court as a model community with a community hall, complete with a tall battlemented clock tower capped with an angular copper dome.