MERCHISTON TOWER
Merchiston Tower is the ancestral home of the Merchiston Napiers. The most famous Laird of Merchiston was John Napier, who among other things was an accomplised mathematician. He will be remembered for inventing logarithms. From the middle of the 17th Century the Tower was owned by the Lowis family for a period of about 100 years. Thereafter the Tower came back into the possession of the Napier family, but gradually the estate lands were sold off and eventually the Tower became a boys' school. The family sold the Tower to the school who in turn moved out in the early 1930s.
The Tower was subsequently bought by Edinburgh Council and, after extensive restoration work which has removed all the additional buildings which were attached around it over the years, it is now the centrepiece of the Merchiston Campus of Napier University. The building stands in the middle of what was the Merchiston estate, an area of approximately one square mile, which became a suburb of Edinburgh in the nineteenth century. Today, the writers J K Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith and Ian Rankin all own homes in Merchiston.
LAURISTON CASTLE
Sir Archibald Napier, the father of John (of Logarithms), built the original castle for the first son of his second marriage, who was also called Archibald. The castle overlooks the shores of the Forth estuary, north-west of central Edinburgh. It has been added to and restored over the years (most notably in the early 19th Century) but there is enough left of the original building to give an idea of what it must have looked like when the Napiers lived here.
KILMAHEW CASTLE
Kilmahew Castle is still standing, but it is in a sadly ruinous state. It was the home of the Kilmahew Napiers for 18 generations until 1820. The estate had to be sold at that time to pay off the gambling debts of the last Laird.
Dr. Patrick Napier of Virginia, who is the progenitor of the majority of Napiers in the USA, has been shown to be a descendant of the Kilmahew Napiers.
© Charlie Napier,
Morningside, Edinburgh, Scotland.