West Bow

The Grassmarket is a historic market place and an event space in the Old Town of Edinburgh, Scotland. In relation to the rest of the city it lies in a hollow, well below surrounding ground levels.

The Grassmarket is located directly below Edinburgh Castle and forms part of one of the main east-west vehicle arteries through the city centre. It adjoins the Cowgate and Candlemaker Row at the east end, the West Bow (the lower end of Victoria Street) in the north-east corner, King's Stables Road to the north west and the West Port to the west. Leading off from the south-west corner is the Vennel, on the east side of which can still be seen some of the best surviving parts of the Flodden and Telfer town walls.

The view to the north, dominated by the castle, has long been a favourite subject of painters and photographers, making it one of the iconic views of the city.

First mentioned in the Registrum Magni Sigilii Regum Scotorum (1363) as "the street called Newbygging [new buildings] under the castle", the Grassmarket was, from 1477, one of Edinburgh's main market places, a part of which was given over to the sale of horse and cattle (the name apparently deriving from livestock grazing in pens beyond its western end).

Daniel Defoe, who visited Edinburgh in the 1720s, reports the place being used for two open air markets: the "Grass-market" and the "Horse-market". Of the West Bow at the north-east corner, considerably altered in the Victorian period, he wrote, "This street, which is called the Bow, is generally full of wholesale traders, and those very considerable dealers in iron, pitch, tar, oil, hemp, flax, linseed, painters' colours, dyers, drugs and woods, and such like heavy goods, and supplies country shopkeepers, as our wholesale dealers in England do. And here I may say, is a visible face of trade; most of them have also warehouses in Leith, where they lay up the heavier goods, and bring them hither, or sell them by patterns and samples, as they have occasion."

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