PORTOBELLO got its name from a solitary house in the FIGGATE WHINS (which see) said by a witness in the Court of Session in 1787 to have been built by his father Peter Scott, tenant of the grazings there, as a house for his shepherd and for selling ale. In 1753 it is named as Porto-Bello in an advertisement of a horse race to be run from George Hamilton's, and in 1755 a similar notice refers to him as George Hamilton, shoemaker, in Portobello House. The Statistical Account 1794 calls it Portobello Hut and derives its name from the capture of Puerto Bello in Panama by Admiral Vernon in 1739, but shows no real knowledge of why the name was given, or any awareness of Scott or Hamilton or of the (later?) yarn about a sailor who had served under Vernon. The house figures on Laurie 1763 and apparently also on Sutter 1856, but was displaced in 1862 by the new town hall of Portobello, subsequently adapted as a Baptist church. Development in Figgate began with the opening of William Jamieson's brickworks in about 1765. In 1779 Arnot calls it Brickfield or Portobello; in the Statistical Account 1794 it is the villages of Brickfield and Portobello, and by 1800 the latter name prevailed. The place grew so rapidly that it became a parliamentary burgh in 1832. PORTOBELLO ROAD (or one closely similar in alignment) is shown on Adair 1682 and probably originated along with KING'S ROAD (which see) as a way to the recognised landing place west of the mouth of the Figgate burn, although it also afforded some access to Musselburgh by a coast road along the foreshore, as shown on Adair/Cooper 1735, or (probably after erosion) along the PORTOBELLO SANDS themselves, as shown on Laurie 1763 and mentioned by Dr Alexander Carlyle in the story of his escape from Edinburgh in 1745. The existence of this route would explain why the Sands were used for a parley with Cromwell in 1650, and a review of the Jacobite army in 1745. Yet the road to Musselburgh shown on Blaeu 1654 ran more or less straight from Jocks Lodge to Magdalen Pans. It is still shown on Roy 1753, together with the new route (pointedly labelled Road to Berwick) that replaced it in about 1752, formed by upgrading the Portobello Road and linking it to the Pans by a new road through Figgate. Perhaps still notionally shown on Roy, this was to become the HIGH STREET of Portobello, so figured on Wood's Portobello 1824 but since then renamed PORTOBELLO HIGH STREET (to obviate any confusion with Edinburgh's High Street) not in 1896, when the burgh was amalgamated with the city, but 72 years later. PORTOBELLO PUBLIC PARK was once the Langlands of Easter Duddingston.