A former mining village located 2½ miles (4 km) southeast of Loanhead and 3 miles (5 km) northeast of Penicuik. The majority of the village was laid out for and owned by the coal-baron Archibald Hood in the latter part of the 19th Century to house miners for his Whitehill Colliery which lay just to the southwest of the village, and employed 550 men at its peak. The workers were housed in neat rows of terraced cottages, each with its own garden (an innovation at the time), with the overseers housed in semi-detached villas nearby. Both are built using bricks from Hood's Whitehill Brickworks, which made use of the fire-clay which was removed from the coal workings. Hood take a detailed interest in every aspect of the running of his village, ensuring the establishment of churches, schools, a co-operative store and a system to put the profits from the public house back into community projects.
Notable buildings include the Parish Church (1871), the Rosewell Institute (1917), St. Matthews Roman Catholic Church (1925). Nearby is Whitehill House, built in 1844 by architects William Burn and David Bryce, Midfield House, renovated by Robert Lorimer (1918), and the 15th Century Hawthornden Castle.
In 1890, Hood formed a partnership with Schomberg Kerr, 9th Marquess of Lothian (1833 - 1900), to create the Lothian Coal Company, which ran the village from then until nationalisation of the coal industry in the 1940s. Whitehill Colliery eventually closed in 1961.
