In the mid-19th century the entire village, which had been a separate entity from Edinburgh for hundreds of years, was wiped out to make way for the capital's Waverley Station.
Situated at the bottom of the deep ravine below the southern face of Calton Hill, and lying comfortably outside of the boundaries of old Edinburgh, the Calton, or Caltoun, was a small, but important, barony which had various owners stretching back to at least the 12th century.
One of the earliest recorded permanent buildings in the area was the Trinity College Kirk, which was founded in 1460 by Queen Mary of Gueldres in memory of her husband, King James II, who had been slain at the siege of Roxburgh Castle.
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An important development occurred in 1631 when the lands around Calton Hill formally became part of the barony of Restalrig, presided over by John, Lord Balermino.
As owner of the Caltoun estate, Lord Balmerino granted a deed in favour of the hamlet, which united all feuars and tenants in the area into a society. This gave them the exclusive right to trade within Calton and the right to collect taxes from traders who did not reside in the barony.
In 1718, the Society's coffers were suitably full to be able to purchase a half ace of land on the slopes of Calton Hill from Lord Balermino for what would become the Old Calton Burial Ground. They also created a new access road known as High Calton on the steep incline from the village to the burial ground.
With money flowing into the Calton, the village thrived over the next few generations. A tightly-packed community of stone and timber built cottages grew around a main street, variously known as St Ninian's Row or Low Calton - but its population remained very small.
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Writing in the mid-18th century, historian William Maitland recorded that the Calton was comprised of 108 families and a total of "560 examinable persons". It was miniscule in comparison to Edinburgh, which then had a population of more than 80,000.
Edinburgh annexation
In 1724, the Calton was purchased from the Balmerino family by the Town Council of Edinburgh, which continued to run the settlement as a separate barony along with Restalrig.
All notions of independence were thoroughly crushed in 1856, with the passing of Edinburgh's municipal extension act. The legislation divided the newly-defined city into 13 wards and rendered the barony of Calton obsolete.
With these new powers, Edinburgh now had complete control over the Burgh of Calton, but, in any case, it was already too late for the village.
The end of the Calton
In 1814, the Regent Bridge was constructed over the Low Calton, sweeping away numerous old streets in the ravine and displacing much of the community in the process.
The number of people living in Calton dwindled again in the 1840s with the building of three railway stations in the vicinity of the North Bridge, which facilitated the removal of scores of buildings to make way for sprawling platforms and branch lines. These three stations would be amalgamated in 1854 under the collective term "Waverley", after the popular Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott.
One of the most controversial developments was the removal of the historic Trinity College Kirk. The impressive medieval structure, the ownership of which had been passed over to Edinburgh during the Reformation, was unceremoniously razed much to the disgust of leading conservationists of the era.
Lord Henry Cockburn fumed at the ancient kirk's "scandalous desecration", stating: “It was not only the oldest, but almost the only remaining Gothic structure in Edinburgh; and those who understood the subject, revered it as one of great architectural interest."
Subsequent expansions of Waverley Station would leave almost nothing of the old Calton standing by the end of the century.
Today, very little remains of the old Calton village, save for the stone foundations of a handful of buildings that once formed part of Low Calton on modern-day Calton Road along the south face of Calton Hill. High Calton, meanwhile, is survived only by a group of buildings dating from the 1760s at the top of the street that is now called Calton Hill.
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