Secret Wild West ghost town... in the middle of Morningside

EL Paso is deserted this weekend afternoon. Faded. Ghostly. Wells Fargo ain’t doing trade today. No honky-tonk piano resounds from the cantina. You could git a steed, I suppose, from Ed Newbey’s place (‘GRAIN – HORSES – LIVERY’) or stand in line for pemmican and beef jerky at the Trading Station…

But this is Saturday and ain’t nobody be going nowhere. You all but strain your ears. Was that the sinister shake of a rattlesnake? Did someone on a rooftop just cock a Winchester repeater?

Three decades after its construction, and two after the failure and flight of its founding spirit, this Wild West street is still eerily authentic, from the clapboard shopfronts to the period signage. Tumbleweed might blow by any minute, folks, as you await the last stage out of Dodge.

But El Paso is not a street, but a set. A brilliant mid-1990s promotional gimmick for one Ulsterman’s trade. And we are nowhere near the Red River Valley, bleeding Kansas or the Alamo.

Or, for that matter, Belfast. We are in Morningside, Edinburgh. It’s got a Waitrose. It has a tongue of quirky independent retailers, flogging everything from Tarot cards to hand-made chocolate.

It’s home to Scotland’s biggest psychiatric hospital, the country’s most high-end charity shops – and this extraordinary cul de sac where, at any moment, Clint Eastwood, or John Wayne himself, might strut forth and look you up and down, hands on hips. ‘Git off yo’ hoss an’ drink yo’ milk…’

El Paso is not signposted and few locals, even, know of its existence. It’s up a cobbled archway through a remodelled tenement block in Morningside’s Springvalley Gardens and – even three decades after its construction, and tired as it inevitably is – is still a pretty impressive feat of stage dressing.

But, then, the crew hired to knock it up had worked for Euro Disney. They laboured at the commission of Michael Faulkner, an entrepreneur from Northern Ireland who really had been a cowboy, no kidding, in the States, until badly injuring his back after falling from his horse.

It may have been all the more distressing as his father, Brian Faulkner – who was the last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland before Heath imposed direct rule in 1972 – died in a 1977 riding accident, just 18 days after becoming a life peer.

So, still quite a young man, Michael Faulkner came to Scotland. And, in this very lane, opened a shop called Pine Country, restoring and indeed making tables, dressers and so on.

Things went well, and he opened a second shop next door, The Great American Indoors, flogging high-end handmade furniture. And then, in a lightbulb moment, thought how cool it would be to give the joint some atmosphere.

Other shops adjacent, like Tom Frankish’s lawnmower Services, were happy to get it on the act and, for a fistful of dollars, the guys from Disney had been and gone… and there you had it. The perfect pioneer street, with impressive attention to detail. Just the sort of place where the Man With No Name could hang up his poncho, as white man spoke with forked tongue.

It’s not real, of course. Most of the doors do not actually open. There are no horses, blacksmiths, saloon-keepers or girls most happy to give a fella a real good time. One of the very few real doors – at the Cantina – is actually the rear fire exit from Morningside library.

Tom Frankish’s place is real enough, despite the Jesse James signage. He’s been in business since 1974, the 75-year-old recently confided to the BBC, and still has some of Michael Faulkner’s well-crafted furniture. It’ll last ‘forever’, he enthuses. And he remembers the Ulsterman fondly. ‘I used to see him on a daily basis and he was a very nice and easy-going person.’ The Wild West doesn’t have the resonance with boys today that it had 40 or 50 years ago. There are no longer the comics or TV shows – Champion the Wonder Horse, little House On The Prairie and so on – to bring it into the home, and parents now are understandably jumpy about anything that glamourises guns or demonises Native Americans. Yet the Wild West entrances us still. The fantasy of claiming new ground, making overnight fortunes, wrangling herds of longhorn cattle, keeping your wits about you in territory largely beyond the rule of law.

The manhunts, the bounty hunters. Colt .45s, swinging saloon doors and whiskey for breakfast… galloping on horseback over wide, wild plains; travel without limit over endless frontiers.

It was a real, specific period of history, from the end of the American Civil War till about 1900, as the reach and power of these great United States expanded across the continent – if tenuously, at first – as, by the tens of thousands, ordinary folk flooded westwards in covered wagons in the hope of new lives.

The best Western is really a moral parable: the good against the bad, with little chance of local law enforcement showing up and when you can never be quite sure anyone is quite what they seem.

So many jumpy people on the run – from the law, from their past, and from themselves.

But there was a high environmental price, from the almost casual extermination of the passenger pigeon, the wholesale poisoning of the Great lakes and the near wipeout of North American bison.

And highest of all, of course, was the price paid by the First Nations – a dismal tale of broken treaties, casual little genocides, untold atrocities and an abiding stain on America’s conscience.

This was nevertheless a time etched deeply in Anglo-American folk memory and remains an inexhaustible well for the tellers of the tales, the writers of novels and the makers of films.

Indeed, there was something very Wild West about the fortunes – raised and finally dashed – of Michael Faulkner.

In 1999, the worst thing possible happened to his business. Ikea. They opened a huge store on Edinburgh’s southern outskirts and, while Faulkner’s artisan chairs and consoles and coffee-tables easily whipped the Scandic behemoth on quality, there was no way he could match their prices.

Business went south and, in short order Michael Faulkner went bust. With matchless dignity he retreated to Northern Ireland and, with his wife and West Highland Terrier, made a new home on a seagirt island in Strangford lough.

That existence gave him material for two widely praised books. Today he runs a well-regarded editorial business for budding authors and the Faulkners now live by the shores of loch Awe in Argyll. And he’s still writing.

El Paso has not had a lick of paint in the 21st century. But its faded air only lends it all the more character and, in recent years and largely by word of mouth, its fame has spread.

Of course, El Paso is all that today survives of one man’s dream. But Michael Faulkner is contented, reinvented and happy.

Y’all have a nice day, now, and – jes’ sayin’ – remember, folks, life ain’t always won by the guys in black hats.