Pentland

The Pentland Hills surround Edinburgh, but the parish of Pentland, which lay between Straiton and Roslin, no longer exists. Adam of Pentland was a monk of the Abbey of Holyrood around 1298. Ralph de Penteland was sent to Montrose with orders to detain a vessel in 1304. The name is found in various documents pertaining to persons living around Edinburgh in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The lands, however, were so close to those of the mighty Norman barons the Sinclair Earls of Caithness and Orkney, that they soon fell under their influence. The Sinclairs sold the barony of Pentland in 1633 to the Gibsones who were to hold the lands into the twentieth century. The Pentlands of that Ilk passed through an heiress to the Campbells, and the arms as recorded in the Lyon register now are quartered. All that remains of Pentland is the churchyard which contains an old family vault of the Gibsones and also the graves of many of the Covenanters who were slain at the Battle of Rullion Green in 1666. They are commemorated on the Martyrs’ Monument in Greyfriars Churchyard in Edinburgh.