Picturesque old mill hamlet in the city.
Millers worked the Water of Leith in Dean Village for more than 800 years, with up to eleven mills in the gorge. Edinburgh’s bakers’ guild, the Incorporation of Baxters, built its tolbooth, or meeting house, here around 1675. By about 1960 the village had hit a low point, and from the 1970s its mills and warehouses were turned into homes. Look out for Well Court, a courtyard of model workers’ flats with a clock tower, built in the 1880s by John Ritchie Findlay, owner of The Scotsman. Thomas Telford’s Dean Bridge, opened in 1833, crosses the gorge 106 feet above the water, and the Water of Leith Walkway follows the river towards Stockbridge and on to Leith.
