Talk:Great Fire of Edinburgh

Position of Braidwood statue

This was incorrectly reported as the westmost extent of the fire, Since a great number of buildings were lost to the south-west this is NOT the westmost point of the fire. This reference is removed because it is factually incorrect.--Stephencdickson (talk) 23:34, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

A few issues

I don't normally contribute to Wikipedia but the Great Fire of Edinburgh is a subject I'm currently researching here in Edinburgh itself, including primary source research at the National Library of Scotland.

Just a few issues I'm putting here in Talk and someone else more expert might want to put them in the article.

Paragraph two of "Sequence of Events" says that the new fire brigade arrived with "custom-built engines". At the time of this November fire they only had cast off engines donated to them by the existing insurance company firefighters, and these were generally the worst, most dilapidated machines. They only acquired engines built to Braidwood's customised requirements after this fire.

This same paragraph says that "they had difficulty locating a water supply". This is not true. There was a water well source literally right in front of Old Assembly Close where the fire broke out. In fact, it's still there. The problem wasn't water supply itself, but lack of sufficent water pressure to project water up to the upper stories where the fire was travelling between buildings. According to reports in the Caledonian Mercury (an Edinburgh newspaper of the time), most of the fire was spreading from rooftop to rooftop given a strong southwesterly wind churning up embers into the air. Corbs1417 (talk) 13:25, 14 August 2025 (UTC)