South Leith was larger and was controlled by the lairds of Restalrig: It was based on trade and had many merchants’ houses and warehouses. This was where ships offloaded their cargoes at The Shore where they were collected by Edinburgh merchants. Leithers were explicitly forbidden by statute to participate directly in the trade at the port, to ensure that landed goods were not sold elsewhere.
It was effectively a fishing village consisting of one street, now Sandport Street and Quayside Lane.
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The early period Settlement of the region For the first settlers of Scotland, arriving at the onset of the postglacial period as early as bc , the best access to the interior was provided by estuaries and rivers, with the Forth being among the most important. In the Iron Age , which in Scotland began about bc, hill forts proliferated in the Lothians —the area in the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh—and the Borders , to the south.
Excavations beginning in the late s within Edinburgh Castle have proved what was long suspected—that the Castle Rock has been occupied since about bc. Holyrood Park, Blackford Hill, and Craiglockhart Hill all show signs of occupation in the late 1st millennium bc. Strategic importance The Romans saw strategic rather than defensive value in the Edinburgh plain between the Pentland Hills and the Forth. The find in the late s of a sculpture of a lioness, dating from the 2nd or 3rd century ad, in the River Almond in Cramond underscores the importance of the site for the Romans.
The road, with major forts at Dalkeith and Inveresk on the southeastern approaches to the present city, cut through what is now the Meadows district of Edinburgh and guarded access to the Carse of Stirling valley of the River Forth and the approach to the west and north. The Votadini, the dominant Celtic tribe of the Lothians, with whom Rome had a relatively stable relationship, were the group most likely to have occupied the Castle Rock site. The Votadini capital was on Traprain Law, a cone-shaped hill law some 20 miles 30 km east of the modern city, but it appears that about ad , after the Roman withdrawal from Britain, the capital was moved to the site of the present castle.
A Welsh poem composed about ad describes how a band of the Gododdin as the Votadini were known in Welsh , from around a place called Din Eidyn, attacked an Anglian force at Catterick in Yorkshire and was annihilated. Although the Castle Rock site has been continuously occupied for at least 3, years, little is known of the town itself before the 11th or 12th century.