Hello, my name is Anna Dowling-Clarke. I am the founder of WHIPS: Women Hidden in Plain Sight, a platform dedicated to uncovering the often-overlooked history of women. To celebrate Women's History Month 2026, I partnered with The Cockburn Association to write this walking tour, In Their Footsteps: The Women Behind Edinburgh's Built Heritage. I led a total of three guided walks during the month of March and to ensure that others did not miss out, The Cockburn Association and I have put together this alternative tour format for you to do any time and in any way that suits you.

The tour will focus on five sites across the Old Town connected to the association's history: buildings it has fought for, helped preserve and in one case mourned the loss of. At each stop, we will focus on the women who were always there: the women who funded the buildings, lived and worked in them or fought for their preservation. It will also trace the stories of the women who shaped The Cockburn Association itself. It feels particularly fitting that the association today is led predominantly by women, with its Chair, Director, Development and Outreach Manager and voluntary archivists among them, continuing a tradition of female dedication to Edinburgh's built heritage that this tour sets out to celebrate.

In terms of health and safety, you will be walking the old streets of Edinburgh's Old Town so I recommend navigating the streets and crossings carefully.

So, without further ado, let's set the scene.

In January 1919, a woman named Miss Rosaline Masson sat down and wrote a letter. She was one of Edinburgh's most famous authors: a novelist, a biographer, a historian whose books were reviewed in the finest literary journals of the day. The daughter of Emily Rosaline Orme, an active campaigner for women's suffrage, Rosaline had grown up in a household where women's voices and women's rights were taken seriously.

The letter she wrote in 1919 was not to a publisher, or an editor, or a literary society. It was to The Cockburn Association, which had been campaigning at this point for forty-four years. She wrote to ask, very politely, whether women might be permitted to become council members.

Indeed, the association had two years earlier admitted their first female officeholder. Louisa Hope Stevenson took on the role of joint Honorary Secretary alongside her brother. In 1918 the association had then agreed that it would be favourable to invite women to become council members. But then nothing happened. It was not until they received Miss Masson's letter that they were reminded of their own resolution. Even then, the wheels turned slowly. It took a further eleven months before the first four women council members were formally endorsed.

They were Miss Masson herself. Lady Harriet Findlay of Aberdour, daughter of a banker, wife of the proprietor of The Scotsman, a political activist who would go on to become a Justice of the Peace, chair the management board of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary during the Depression, and serve as the first woman president of the Scottish Unionist Association. The third was Mrs Ella Millar, daughter of a Lord Provost, who became the first woman councillor in a Scottish city the same year she became a council member of the Cockburn Association and who, four years later, would become the first woman bailie in a Scottish city. And the fourth was Miss M.R. Macleod, of whom, frustratingly, very little survives in the historical record.

Since their admittance, The Cockburn Association has had many other inspirational women join as council members and in other positions. Although this tour will acknowledge some of them, it will also discuss women who came from much earlier - women who built and funded and inhabited this city long before any association existed to preserve it. Their connection to these sites is one of the reasons why these buildings matter, and their stories are not so well known in the main historical narrative of Edinburgh.

This tour is going to ask you to think about why that is.

We often talk about heritage as though it is simply there, fixed and settled, waiting to be discovered. A building stands. A plaque names someone. A guidebook tells you what happened. But heritage is not a passive inheritance. It is an active, ongoing series of choices about what to preserve and what to demolish, whose name to put on the wall and whose to leave off, which stories to tell in the interpretation panel and which to omit. Those choices are made by people, operating within systems, reflecting the assumptions of their time. And they accumulate, over decades, over centuries, into something that feels so natural and settled that we stop recognising it as a choice at all. We call it history.

What this tour asks is that you hold that word - choice - in your mind as you walk. As we walk through the Old Town, we are going to look beyond the main historical narrative of Edinburgh and focus on those often left out. I don't attempt to replace the current history of the city but to point out that a gap exists and to encourage that this gap is filled by asking a series of questions: Why was this building preserved and not that one? Why is this name on the wall and not that one? Who decided, and what did they assume, without thinking, about whose lives counted as history?

Today we will visit five sites across Edinburgh's Old Town, buildings The Cockburn Association has preserved, fought for, or mourned the loss of. At each one, we will ask which women were here.

By the end of this tour, I hope that question has become instinctive, not just for the buildings we visit today, but for every museum, every cathedral, every historic house you walk into. The built environment of this city is full of women's lives. Some survive because the buildings survived. Others survive despite the buildings being lost, because someone chose to keep looking.

And on that note, we are going to start looking now. Make sure you are standing on the Edinburgh Castle Esplanade looking at the castle and head to the next section.