Perth
[pick up general description from Scotland Delineated?]
	Approaching Perth from the Ochil hills, on the Edinburgh road, a traveler enjoyed famously picturesque prospects of the Earn and the Tay. From the south, the traveler entered the town through the South Inch, a “beautiful green” that had once been “the scene of the athletic sports and games of our ancestors” but that, in the early nineteenth century, showed the encroachment of what an 1806 writer demonized as “that monster improvement” (Memorabilia of Perth 6). By1849, the vantage had shifted so that a historian described the development on the South Inch as “superb villas, which heighten greatly the picturesque effect of the beautiful scenery” (Marshall, History of Perth 377). In fact, both writers were ambivalent about improvement, and Perth was evidently a town in transition during the Ruskins’ association with the city. The 1806 writer, contemplating the planned razing of a sixteenth-century house to make for a new street, could abruptly abandon his resistance: “Attachment to this interesting old house is natural, but antiquarian predilections ought not to be for a moment indulged, when opposed by the higher considerations of public utility” (Memorabilia of Perth 28). And the mid-century writer, while generally favoring progress, could end by looking backward nostalgically: despite “such decided superiority over our ancestors in regard to external comforts and intellectual advantages, we may have lost their simple manners, their temperance, their frugality, that disinterestedness . . . of regarding their neighbours, of whatever condition, with kindly and benevolent feelings” as compared with “that hauteur which now-a-days keep the various classes of society at a distance from their fellows” (Marshall, History of Perth 488).
	Ruskin’s Aunt Jessie married Patrick Richardson, who, as a tanner, participated in a trade “long . . . carried on to a considerable extent in Perth.” This commentary, published two years after the Richardsons’ marriage, notes that Perth tanning, as applied to clothing, had acquired “a well-earned reputation for cheapness,” and “several of the most extensive dealers have deserted their native lane”—the Skinnergate, where “the wooden fronts of the houses projected far enough to admit of the friendly contact of hands across the street” (Memorabilia of Perth 9–11). Beneath the projections ran “channels,” the open ground floor, sometimes “a foot or two below the level of the street,” where “articles for sale were displayed” (Marshall, History of Perth 376). By 1806, however, these quaint buildings were already disappearing, and tanners and other merchants were exhibiting their wares “in more spacious and better-frequented streets” (Memorabilia of Perth 11), and by 1849 only “a few of these houses with wooden fronts [were] still standing” and “the channels . . . filled up and converted into shops” (Marshall, History of Perth 376).
	Patrick Richardson was one such tanner on the move. Allegedly, he boasted of his property with exaggeration; and, according to a canceled passage of Praeterita, his death in 1824 left Ruskin’s aunt with “a moderate independence, and six children, with whom, leaving the large house and river-bank garden of Bridge End, she crossed the Tay to Rose Terrace” (Viljoen, Ruskin’s Scottish Heritage 73–74). Whether Jessie’s move to Rose Terrace could accurately be viewed as a decline is uncertain, however, since the prestige of both residences would have been tied to the improvements begun in the last quarter of the eighteenth century—particularly the 1771 bridge, Perth’s proudest structure symbolic of the development. A map in Memorabilia of Perth locates Bridge End at the east end of the bridge, across the river from the main city, and the text comments: “The village of Bridgend, formerly inconsiderable and neglected, has, since the building of the Bridge, become thriving and populous; and the value of land on that side of the river has risen rapidly” (18). The view from that side is shown in the engraving accompanying the text.
	Similarly, Rose Terrace belonged to Perth’s “new town”: “terraces, places, and crescents” along the North Inch, including “an elegant building” recently built to house the public seminaries, “in the highest degree ornamental to the town.” The North Inch itself was recently improved, and the writer vividly describes what Ruskin might have witnessed when playing there with his cousins: “Perhaps the community of no city in the kingdom are in possession of a finer or more extensive green; and the inhabitants do not neglect their good fortune. Cows grazing; women washing and bleaching linens; groups of the inhabitants enjoying a walk, or some more active amusement; and companies of soldiers exercising, are continually enlivening the scene, which is in the highest degree delightful” (Memorabilia of Perth 13–14).