This, the second volume in Adam White’s set of eight scrapbook albums, contains 376 items mounted on 253 pages and covers the counties of Mid-, East and West Lothian: the Midlothian coverage including areas such as Holyrood Park, Duddingston, Merchiston and the Burgh of Leith which today fall within the boundaries of the City of Edinburgh.

The arrangement is broadly by locality, and the emphasis of the contents is on topography and architecture, including views of castles – such as Craigmillar, Crichton and Roslin – ecclesiastical survivals at Rosslyn, Haddington, North Berwick and elsewhere, and numerous country seats.

Views of Linlithgow Palace and its surroundings are accompanied by portraits of Mary Queen of Scots and illustrations of Mary-related memorabilia. Landscapes with literary associations include depictions of William Drummond’s Hawthornden and of locations described in Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd and in works of Walter Scott.

In origin the plates range from the collections of the eighteenth-century antiquarians Francis Grose and Adam de Cardonell to engravings after nineteenth-century topographical illustrators such as Thomas Allom, Clarkson Stanfield, and J. P. Neale the specialist in views of country houses. Original artworks include a watercolour sketch by Montague Stanley and three etchings by John Clerk of Eldin.

Adam White’s own drawings and watercolours preserved in this volume include a series of pen and wash images worked up from tracings taken from Clerk of Eldin etchings in the album in the King’s Library in the British Museum – a near neighbour of White’s Department of Natural History.

More examples from this sequence of Clerk tracings, and tracings from other items in the King’s Collection, are to be found in other volumes of the Symbolae Scoticae.