Aberdeen, on Scotland's north-east coast where the rivers Dee and Don reach the sea, consisted at the close of the eighteenth century of two distinct towns that would only later fully merge into a single city. Old Aberdeen, on the southern bank of the Don and connected by a single ancient pointed-arch bridge resting on opposing rocks, was built essentially around one street, its buildings notable more for antiquity than elegance, dominated by the Gothic cathedral of the old bishopric and by King's College, founded by Bishop Elphinstone and once presided over by Hector Boece, the Dundee-born historian whose 'History of Scotland', though prone to fable and exaggeration, was written with an elegance of style much admired by contemporaries.
New Aberdeen, on the northern bank of the Dee, had been sited deliberately to favour sea trade, its harbour protected by a stone pier built at great expense; Marischal College, founded by the Earl Marischal at the end of the sixteenth century, stood alongside handsome parish churches, an elegant Episcopal chapel, a spired town house, Gordon's Hospital and a well-regarded grammar school as the ornaments of what an eighteenth-century survey called a flourishing city of well-paved streets and lofty, spacious houses. By the 1790s the suburbs of the two towns had very nearly joined into one, their combined population approaching 30,000.
Aberdeen's economy already rested on the combination that would define it for the next two centuries: a resident university population supporting scholarship and trade, woollen stocking manufacture, salmon and sea fisheries, and shipping trade extending to London, Germany and the Baltic ports, all built upon the twin foundations of its two ancient colleges and its increasingly busy harbour at the mouth of the Dee, the beginning of the city's long journey toward becoming the granite-built regional capital of north-east Scotland.