“As St. Mary’s Street, which lies in a line with this wynd, is in a direct line also from the Pleasance, to render the whole thoroughfare more completely available, it was deemed necessary by the Improvement Trustees to make alterations in Leith Wynd, by forming Jeffrey Street, which takes a semi-circular sweep, from the head of the Canongate behind John Knox’s house and church, onwards to the southern end of the North Bridge. Thus the whole of the west side of Leith Wynd and its south end have disappeared in these operations. One large tenement of great antiquity, and known as the “Happy Land,” long the haunt of the most lawless characters, has disappeared, and near its site stands one of the fine and spacious school houses erected for the School Board.
At the foot of Leith Wynd, on the west side, there was founded on the 5th of March, 1462, by royal charter, the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity, by Mary, Queen of Scotland, daughter of Arnold Duke of Gueldres, grand-daughter of John Duke of Burgundy, and widow of James II., slain about two years before by the bursting of a cannon at Roxburgh. Her great firmness on that disastrous occasion, and during the few remaining years of her own life, proves her to have been a princess of no ordinary strength of mind. She took an active part in governing the stormy kingdom of her son, and died in 1463. Her early death may account for the nave never being built, though it was not unusual for devout persons in that age of church building, to erect as much as they could finish, and leave to the devotion of posterity the completion of the rest. Pitscottie tells us that she “was buried in the Trinitie College, quhilk she built hirself.” Her grave was violated at the Reformation.”
References
James McLevy 