By Tom McClintock
Starting in between the tennis courts and the main children's playground, the course runs down to the large tree on the south side of the east lawn, then runs west along Melville Drive where players aim for various objects, the shoots north up the west path that connects to Middle Meadows Walk, then turns back east behind the library, crosses over the rusty-ass sorry-excuse for a kid's park, then ends back where we started. The course is a thrilling test of touch, power, and judgement as each hole plays slightly differently.
Now that we're familiar with how the course looks now, let's think about how the course looked in the past as the Meadows has changed over time. We'll also delve into the realm of possibility as we wonder what our disc golfing days might be like if certain proposed changes for the Meadows had come about.
The Good(?) Ol' Days
Ages ago, the Meadows was the site of the Borough-Loch, which as part of the greater Borough Muir. This swamped out track of land would have been super duper difficult to play frisbee on. Let's start out by saying that every square inch would be a literal water hazard. We'd be playing in water that was "used for washing animals and depositing rubbish, in spite of it being a water supply and dumping strictly forbidden." Goddam. That's a tough course. My expert suggestion would be heavy use of upside down backhands to get maximum water skippage, as well as an enormous pair of Wellies. We see below in this map from 1582 drawn by Franz Hogenberg and Georg Braun that the present day meadows didn't even fall within the city of Edinburgh.
Thus, while we'd be water logged if we played the exact course we do today, we could always modify our course to include, oh I don't know, the rest of the goddam country, since there was nothing built. On top of that, we'd be playing in baggy pantaloons, carrying swords, and engaging in duels. Hey as a matter of fact that actually sounds pretty fun.
Hope's Park
In the mid-seventeenth century the Loch was partially drained and renamed Straiton's Loch after some fat burgess. It wasn't until 1722 that someone with their act together decided to do something about this festering swamp pit, and that someone was Sir Thomas Hope. Hope drained the loch completely and improved the area over the next few decades, as seen in the inset from John Bartholomew's 1919 map of Edinburgh that included all major renovations from forever ago to then.
Hope's newly made park was named after him for a while and its improvements included the construction modern day Middle Meadow Walk, the surrounding avenue, and the planting of trees that are still there today. In addition to that, he also built a house on the Meadows. While not technically public property at this time, I doubt that this dude would have minded a group of rowdy uni students tossing a flatball across his yard. Thanks for that, Tommy boy.
It's also at this time that the modern day course could have taken some serious detours. Hope had his own vision for the Meadows that weren't so hot. When he first built the Middle Meadow Walk it was a raised causeway over what remained of the Loch. He wanted to pretty much turn this into another garden of Versailles. In fact, Hope wanted the path to be flanked by nine foot wide canals. While these were never completed, the dips in the ground next to the path are apparently the remains of the start of that project. Thank goodness that someone realized that this was a horrible idea, and would have totally chopped Ro Sham Bo's frisbee golf course in half 290 years in the future.
Ro Sham Bo, on the Archery Range, with the Lead Pipe
Luckily Hope's dreams didn't come true, but that didn't stop the Meadows from undergoing some weird renovations. The two following maps show some wild features that would have really jammed our game up.
In the first map, made by John Ainslie in 1804, we see that our present day first hole tee box was occupied by an archery range where the Royal Company of Archers practiced. How the hell are you supposed to rip backhands when you have arrows flying at you? It's tough but I think we'd manage. The second map, drawn by James Kirkwood in 1821, shows that two aboveground pipes went directly across the Meadows. According to the City of Edinburgh Recreation Department, the level of the Meadows was much lower than at present. These pipes "passed over on a covered conduit with a dry arch under its deepest part." I'm betting that these arches would provide some perfect opportunities to weave some sick IO throws, and I think that if these pipes still existed then the only way for a disc to cross the pipes would be with a mandatory overhead over the raised conduits.
The Meadows As We Know It, Thankfully
After the land was filled in, the Meadows has pretty much remained the same. Aside from some different path patterns, as we saw in Ainslie's 1804 map, really not much has changed. From 1849 to 1853 the west side of the park was used as a 'sheep ree', and the enclosed animals were regularly allowed out to mow the grass for us. This would have probably been the toughest time for us to play, since aside from dodging poo and trying to not hit the livestock with our pulls, for the most part our present course would not overlap the animal pens. At least the vet players would be hanging out with the team more often.
It's important to note that we really dodged a bullet in the 60's, when a proposed flyover motorway was about to be built over the Meadows, until the plan was shot down by the public. Imagine, playing frisbee golf underneath a freaking highway. I don't know a much better way to feel really sketchy while throwing a disc, so I'm very happy that didn't happen.
Whatever happens the Meadows in the future, I'm sure we can all agree that it will be the home turf of Ro Sham Bo. It may be a little muddy at times and it may get crowded when it's nice, but it's our fields, much like it was theirs then.
Sources:
Friends of the Meadows and the Bruntsfield Links, http://www.fombl.org.uk/hist.html
The National Library of Scotland, http://maps.nls.uk/towns/index.html#edinburgh-city
No comments:
Post a Comment