Walking tour of Edinburgh

 Walking through Edinburgh on a sunny, late spring morning must surely be a favourite activity judging by the people there by 9.30 in the morning. By the afternoon there were twice as many.

There are some ‘must see’ locations, and we saw them.

The Mercat cross is a 19th century replacement of the medieval timber one. This is where town criers delivered the news of the day, including the most recent announcement of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. No-doubt it needed replacing with time, but I think the widening of the street was also important. Where it used to stand there is a lovely brick-formed heart. 

Sir Walter Scott, who I read about at the Writers Museum the next day, was so disturbed by the destruction of the old town, that he was moved to write a book called The Heart of Midlothian, which was about the Edinburgh Toll booth and mercat cross.

There is a section of the old town wall, just visible in the distance, and I did not get a chance to revisit it. The wall was required for defense from the English (often in Medieval and early Modern times), and then from the Jacobites. It was not safe to be outside the walls, which we built by about the 1200s. The wall was about 15 feet high and encircled Edinburgh castle, both sides of the closes and wynds falling away to the North Loch and to Colgate and the grass market area to the south, and cutting through the Royal Mile we see today, at about half way. 

The Royal Mile is a little over a mile long, but is called royal as it connects the two royal residences of Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace. It is thought that about 50,000 people were living with half a square mile in the 1700s. The city felt safer after the defeat of the Jacobites, and could start to extend the city towards Holyrood Palace, and build the bridges to open up the New Town (where The George Hotel and the National Registry Office can be found, along with shopping malls.) nevertheless councils thought it a good move to impose a tax on entering the city, through manned gates of course. Regular citizens and their cattle therefore rarely left the city. We saw that cow byres existed in the closes like Mary King Close, and so animal waste was also part of the nastiness, see below.

After the North and South Bridges were built in the late 1700s, they drained the North Loch where centuries of Nastiness had gathered. This is where the abundantly verdant Princes Street Gardens are located, and they are lush. Now we know why.

Much was made by every tour leader of the nasties bucket. Seeing as the multi-storied tenements were so close together, and the slope of the passageways, a family of up to 12 people who inhabited a single room ‘house’ would all have a public bucket for a toilet in the corner. Every morning someone had to empty it onto those passageways, waiting for rain to help ‘flush’ it away. Thankfully rain is plentiful and regular.

The Nastiness Act of 1770s made rules about how to do this, and I should look it up, but it is a great name.

A number of solutions to wading through the human and animal filth were devised. There were platform shoes called pattens to raise you off the surface, and examples appeared to be no more than two inches, which seemed way too short! But if you were a bit wealthier, you hired a sedan chair. Highland men who were strongly built, and used to hard labour, and were often displaced from their homes pulled the sedan chairs up and down the gullies. There was one in our Museum of Scotland tour. Eventually sanitation was brought to the city.

Returning to our religious reforming zealot John Knox, we saw the house that never was his. However whoever thought to make a tourist destination of the cottage on the Main Street did history a favour by saving these two houses as examples of a medieval town house. Now these two houses were at street level. Beyond them, going down wards were buildings that became progressively taller to maintain the same height as the street-level ones.

Buildings often had wooden galleries on upper floors, which further cut off light to the lower stories of the tenements. Above has a modern example, as do these building just before Edinburgh Castle. Our guide assured us this is what they would have looked like.

The difference between closes and wynds were that Closes had gates, while the Wynds did not. Once there were over 300 of these, and now about 70 still operating passageways. Photographs will struggle to display these but I have tried to capture some sense of the plunge downwards from street level.

Canongate is at the lower end of the town near holyrood palace - plenty of experience with canon over the centuries was had by all. Edinburgh was fully destroyed several times. Many Buchans lived in Canongate, and were married in St Giles Cathedral.

There are no street signs in Edinburgh Old Town. Closes were often named after a prominent business, or person, although close names changed several times over the centuries. The address of a say a butcher would be known by a close named after him, but there were other butchers than just one. Caddies were paid a few pence to direct visitors as there are no street signs (although in Ireland, the British army renamed places with Edinburgh street names in the New Town in order to help people find their way around).

Just before the wall were two important places. One was the Tron Kirk, an odd name you might think. It comes from French word for balancing scales. The Tron Kirk or church stands where people would bring their pound of meat if they thought they had been overcharged. There were scales to check and if the seller had diddled the customer, the guards went and got him, nailed him to the tree where he could be publicly scorned, and he had to tear his ear off himself - giving rise to the expression ear-marked.

Nearby is a famous inn, ‘World’s End’ so named because for so many citizens of Edinburgh, who could not afford the tax to rerun back to their homes, the wall was literally the end of their world. It is a sobering thought. Here you can only see the ‘End’ of it.

You do see some characters on the Royal Mile, here are some of my favourites:

It is currently dawn on Monday 2 June (Edinburgh time). The streets are empty apart from a garbage truck. I must be excited about the day as I have been awake since 2am. My plan is the try and transcribe 230 death certificates at nearby Registry House in the 6.5 hours I have available to me. Then back to the hotel to collect my luggage and catch the tram to the airport, arriving by 4.45pm to catch my 6.35pm plane to London. 

The Ibis on South Andrew Street was tight but trendy. A very nice bathroom and big TV where I could catch up on Midsomer Murder and the last episode of Blood of the Clans, a Neil Oliver series on the ‘45 - the last Jacobite rebellion of 1745 that ended at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746. You can imagine how I recall the date.