What is "cowgate"

Usage examples of "cowgate".

Across the eastern end, where the valley suddenly narrowed to the ravine-like street of the Cowgate, the market was spanned by the lofty, crowded arches of George IV Bridge.

It cleared the roofs of the tallest, oldest houses that swarmed up the steep banks from the Cowgate, and ran on, by easy descent, to the main gateway of Greyfriars kirkyard at the lower top of the southern rise.

From the Burghmuir, all the way to the Grassmarket and the Cowgate, was downhill.

It was, indeed, difficult for the most imaginative to believe that the Cowgate was once a lovely, wooded ravine, with a rustic burn babbling over pebbles at its bottom, and along the brook a straggling path worn smooth by cattle on their driven way to the Grassmarket.

Then, when the Scottish nobility was crowded out of the piled-up mansions, on the sloping ridge of High Street that ran the mile from the Castle to Holyrood Palace, splendor camped in the Cowgate, in villas set in fair gardens, and separated by hedge-rows in which birds nested.

Galleries, stairs and jutting windows were added to outer walls, and the mansions climbed, story above story, until the Cowgate was an undercut canon, such as is worn through rock by the rivers of western America.

From its low situation the Cowgate came in the course of time to smell to heaven, and out of it was a sudden exodus of grand folk to the northern hills.

The Cowgate region presented many a startling contrast, but such a one as this must seldom have been seen.

Presently the policemen returned from the Cowgate with a motley assortment of pallbearers.

The very next morning he had gone down into the perilous Cowgate, and inquired in every place where it might be possible for such a timid old shepherd to be known.

To get into Greyfriars Place from the east at that time one had to descend to the Cowgate and climb out again.

An hour before the opening of court he crossed the bridge into High Street, which was then as picturesquely Gothic and decaying and overpopulated as the Cowgate, but high-set, wind-swept and sun-searched, all the way up the sloping mile from Holyrood Palace to the Castle.

And he was thinking, thinking, that he must hasten that other project nearest his heart, of knocking holes in solid rows of foul cliffs, in the Cowgate, on High Street, and around Greyfriars.

Once they lived in a very dark and dirty and crowded tenement, quite as bad as some that were torn down in the Cowgate and the Grassmarket.

He himself, remorseful, had gone with the Biblereader from the Medical Mission in the Cowgate to the dormer-lighted closet in College Wynd, where Auld Jock had died.