Ill Met By Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (2014)
“Today the foreground of the view is covered by buildings that stretch, intermingled with parks, gardens and playing-fields, all the way to the Firth. At the time of Waterloo, however, only the beginnings of Edinburgh’s New Town had been built, and a gazer from the Rock would soon have overlooked them. The open Lothian countryside stretched down to Cramond and the sea. It was on the Rock in that year that the young George Borrow, author of Lavengro and The Bible in Spain, came one day on a lad a... few years older than himself, perched on a promontory and gazing into that watery distance: `A lad of some fifteen years; he is bare-headed, and his red uncombed hair stands on end like a hedgehog’s bristles; his frame is lithy, like that of an antelope, but he has prodigous breadth of chest; he wears a military undress, that of the regiment, even of a drummer, for it is Wild Davy, whom a month before I had seen enlisted on Leith Links to serve King George with drum and drumstick as long as his services were required, and who, ere a week had elapsed, had smitten with his fist Drum-Major Elzigood who, incensed at his own inaptitude, had threatened him with his cane.’ Wild Davy was David Haggart, who was to be hanged a few hundred yards from that Rock eight years later.MoreLess
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