Versions of the song appear in both England and Scotland, with Scottish versions referring to the Canongate rather than Sandgate. The earliest printing was in the 1770s in Edinburgh in "A Collection of Favourite Scots Tunes", edited by Charles Maclean, though the tune was also found in several late eighteenth-century English manuscript collections. Frank Kidson surmised that like many other songs collected by Maclean it may originally have been a Jacobite air from the time of the 1745 rebellion. Some versions of the song make reference to a ""blue bonnet [...] with a snowy rose upon it"", a clear attempt to evoke Jacobite symbolism, whether dating from 1745 or not.