It was a clear case of big wallet-little wallet, & despite Riddell winning land tenure at the first court case a second hearing at the Scottish Supreme Court, after huge swathes of donations & the masonic shakings of greas’d up palms, changed the verdict. Then the Salvesons turn up with loads of cash, buy loads of land in the locality, & despicably turf him & his family out of livelihood & home. So just as the farm began life in human tyranny, so thus it endeth.Īndrew Riddell was a tenant farmer of Peaston, as were father & father’s father, etc.

The place has a long history, with the land being acquired by Baron Nicholas Thompson in 1172, where he built a small farm and enslaved locals from the neighbouring villages as farmhands. This is a hamlet in upheaval – the cottages are being renovated & looking great as the two before-after photos show. Now this place is notorious is local folklore.

So, after a couple of right angle turns, passing some pretty bungalows & their gardens, you & your party will finally come to the main road & Peaston itself. It’s a short, uncomplicated, linear, walk is this one – rather like the very first Walking East Lothian post at Fa’side Castle – but you can go there & back, remember, & grab a whiskey cocktail too, remember! You’ll see the gate to a farm track which you’ll hop over & head towards the fields, the distant Lammermuirs crowning the scene, while to the right the plains of Lothian sweep all the way to the capital & the Pentland’s massif,Īs you follow the track you’ll realise that Peaston is indeed one of the most pleasant plateaus in the county, whose delightful agricultural setting serves as a suitable tonic to the stresses & vigours of modernity. From the distillery simply walk up the hill by all the lovely old cottages until you reach a farm complex on the right. It has a great visitors’ recently renovated & & a fine place to buy refreshments before, or after, this walk.Īs for the walk itself its very simple. What a hidden jewel is this Victorian distillery, the Lowland Home of Johnnie Walker where its Edinburgh malt is distill’d. Its free, but the whiskey cocktails aren’t. This walk begins by parking the car at the Glenkinchie Distillery visitor’s centre. This won’t be the last post, btw, I do head back to God’s country / the Shire, etc from time to time & so Walking East Lothian shall continue, for now, but with a certain sense of sporadicness. The photos for this post were taken ages ago, actually, but here I am finally writing the words. It has been a while since I posted one of these walks – the whole summer in fact – down having relocated to the isle Arran for a while to spend a season or three researching its antiquities.

Lore of runix