Cricket in Scotland — The Grange Club and Edinburgh's Early Devotion, 1840s

Cricket arrived in Scotland through the British Army and through Scottish professionals who had worked in England, and by the 1840s several permanent clubs had been established in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth. The Grange Club, playing at Raeburn Place (later famous as the ground where the first rugby international was played in 1871), was the most prominent. The AEE visited Edinburgh in 1849 and the match drew a large crowd despite the unfamiliar format of eleven against twenty-two of Scots. Scottish cricket at this period was an entirely amateur, middle-class game; the professional structure that sustained the English counties was absent. Nonetheless the quality was respectable — Scottish club sides could match English county teams of the period on good wickets — and the social prestige attached to cricket in Edinburgh's legal and medical communities gave the game a secure institutional base.