Mortonhall Hostel

The estate before the camp

The Trotter family left Mortonhall House in 1939 and the estate was taken over for military use. A local history compilation records an earlier army camp in the grounds during the First World War, occupied by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and notes the family’s long association with the army as a likely reason for the estate being made available. The same notes estimate roughly two hundred structures in the Second World War camp, accommodating some sixteen officers, forty warrant officers and sergeants and 460 other ranks. These are the compiler’s figures rather than a surviving return, and no comparable count exists for the later Ukrainian occupation.

The camp’s siting followed a wartime convention: woodland cover was used to disguise camps from the air, and the shelter belt that hid the huts is where their remains were later found. Mortonhall House itself took a separate course after the war, leased to Edinburgh University in 1949 for scientists of the Agricultural Research Council’s Unit of Animal Genetics and their families. The manor and the camp were two distinct communities on one estate.

From tents to permanent huts

The excavators of Mortonhall distinguish an earlier First World War army camp from the remains of its Second World War successor. Their research places the 16th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry in tents here from July 1940, with permanent accommodation built from the middle of 1942. The battalion left on Christmas Day 1942 and the published excavation summary records later use by the Royal Signal Corps. Excavation found concrete bases consistent with standard Nissen huts, alongside evidence for buildings made with brick and asbestos, so the estate contained more than a single uniform type of temporary shelter.

The 2010 excavation, carried out ahead of the Edinburgh drinking water pipeline, opened three hut bases and two building complexes and traced part of the camp road and several drainage systems. A metal detector survey on the pipeline route recovered a large quantity of cartridge casings in one stretch, taken to suggest a live firing range associated with the camp. Finds included ink, milk and sauce bottles and a stainless steel knife blade, the ordinary debris of people living in huts.

The Ukrainian camp in the wooded valley

Boris Balinsky’s 1988 memoir describes a camp about a kilometre from the Mortonhall manor house, in a wooded valley on the estate. He identifies its inhabitants as Ukrainians and describes numerous semicylindrical corrugated-iron huts. His distinction between the manor residents and the camp is central to understanding the place: this was a separate settlement of huts within the grounds. Kormylo’s directory independently lists Mortonhall as number four among the hostels which held significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians, while cautioning that his list may not be complete.

Two independent records agree on who lived there. The archaeological record compiled from John Guy’s 1997 survey states that in the immediate postwar period the camp became a displaced persons centre, and the local notes describe remnants of a postwar camp for displaced people from Eastern Europe, including Ukrainians and Poles. Neither gives a population, an operator or a date of arrival.

A choir and an invitation

Balinsky recalled the manor residents being invited to a celebration at the Ukrainian camp. They went together and found a stage and seating in an open space between the huts. Choral singing formed the part of the event he described. The recollection preserves an encounter between two groups living on the same estate and gives the camp a social life beyond the bare outline of its buildings.

Mortonhall in the 1948 records

The estate’s wartime and postwar uses overlapped in the surviving paperwork. In his survey of 27–29 April 1948, J. C. Milner listed nine prisoners of war at Mortonhall as part of the Deer Park administration. The report names the place but does not plot their accommodation within the estate. Later archaeologists questioned earlier claims that the excavated camp had been a POW camp. These sources describe different levels of detail: the contemporary record establishes POWs at Mortonhall, while the excavated structures and Ukrainian memoir concern the physical settlement.

What remains of the camp

The 2013 archaeological study found that the camp was being reduced in size by the 1950s, and the excavation summary dates its final dismantling to about 1950; the exact closure of the Ukrainian accommodation is not established. A 1997 survey recorded broken concrete hut bases along a field wall east of the former Princess Margaret Rose Hospital. The field lies off Mounthooly Loan, and a 2023 walking tour entry directs visitors through a gate opposite King Malcolm Close to the low remains along the tree line.

Richard Webb’s 2023 photograph shows the grassy field and wooded margin at the recorded site. The standing huts have disappeared from this view, leaving the landscape, the buried foundations and the overgrown hut bases to carry the camp’s history.