Up High in Edinburgh
Published May 09 2017
Edinburgh is a very up-and-down city. Sprawling out around Edinburgh Castle, which sits atop an ancient volcano, it slopes up and down at angles that must make driving and parking a particular pleasure. The first thing the weary traveler is confronted with on emerging from the train station is a steep, narrow staircase ascending four storeys or so to reach the Royal Mile. Just the thing for someone burdened with a heavy backpack or, heaven forbid, any sort of rolling luggage.
There aren't any stairs on the Royal Mile itself, but the street slopes up sharply from Holyrood Palace, where the monarch actually stays when in Edinburgh, to Edinburgh Castle at the far end. There's more at the top of the hill than the shell of an old fortress, though. The castle complex contains several small museums, an ancient chapel, active military barracks, a dungeon, and probably the main attraction: the Scottish crown jewels and the Stone of Destiny.
No pictures allowed of those, but of course the crown, sword and sceptre are spectacular. The Stone of Destiny, on the other hand, is a roundish gray rock about the size of a loaf of bread. It's also known as the Stone of Scone, which if absolutely nothing else means I finally get the joke behind the "Scone of Stone" in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.
The Stone has a long and storied history, with some legends claiming that it's actually the stone the Old Testament says Jacob laid his head on when he dreamed a vision, and that it was brought north by Jeremiah and eventually made its way to Scotland. One way or another, the Stone ended up at Scone Abbey and was used for the coronation of Scottish kings until 1296 when King Edward I, "Hammer of the Scots," stole it and transported it to Westminster Abbey. He had it installed in a wooden coronation chair in the abbey, and from that point onward it was English kings who would be crowned while sitting atop it, emphasizing their dominance over the Scottish nation.
The Stone of Destiny didn't return to Scotland until 1950, when Ian Hamilton and a group of three other students at Glasgow University made a daring attempt to rescue the Stone. The plan was to break into Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, then spiriting the Stone across the Scottish border to a secure location. Things began to go south when it turned out that the stone, which despite its modest size weighs over 300 lbs, proved difficult to remove from the coronation throne. It finally fell out, rather spectacularly, breaking two toes on one of the liberators and smashing into two pieces on Westminster Abbey's tough marble floor.
This was a rather drastically inauspicious start, but it was too late to go back at that point. Ian Hamilton took the smaller of the two pieces out to the getaway car and stowed it, but as he was returning to the abbey to help move the larger piece, his accomplice in the getaway car started the engine to indicate that there was a problem--she'd spotted a policeman approaching. Hamilton raced back to the car and started making out with her, and when the policeman arrived to ask them what they were up to, they played it off as if they'd been unable to find somewhere to stay that night. The officer ended up staying to chat and share a cigarette, and by the time they left it was getting dangerously close to morning.
Hamilton returned to the Abbey, only to find that his accomplices there had fled on seeing the policeman. He was left to drag the larger piece of the Stone of Destiny the 200 feet of Westminster Abbey alone, using his coat as a sledge. He and his remaining ally finally drove off, only to hear over the radio not long after, that the border had been closed. There was no way they could smuggle the larger portion of the Stone into Scotland with the police searching vehicles, so they were forced to pull over and bury it in a field, intending to return later and spirit it to safety.
They did, actually, and despite a months-long search the police never found the Stone. Hamilton was able to return to where he'd buried it, smuggle it across the border, and get a stonemason to repair the break. In the end he and his accomplices decided to turn the Stone over, and the police at last followed an anonymous tip to find it in Arbroath Abbey, wrapped in a Scottish flag. It was hustled back to Westminster and re-inserted into the coronation chair, but then at last formally returned to Scotland in 1996. There's one caveat, though: it must temporarily return to Westminster for the crowning of each new monarch.
The other castle attractions were great, too. The Great Hall, used for official royal visits and other fancy dinner occasions, had some great chandeliers. Also displayed was a key to the castle, which is traditionally presented to the monarch each time they come to Edinburgh. Along with the key was a chain hung with tags commemorating each of these visits, and while it was cool to see some recording events back in the 1800s, what really tickled me was that the vast majority of them were from visits by Queen Elizabeth--just a reminder of how long she's ruled compared to the majority of English kings and queens.
The royal family have been visitors only for a long time; the last to actually live in the castle was Mary, Queen of Scots, and they've restored the room where she gave birth to James VI, as well as chambers prepared especially for Charles I's coronation. It was the first time he visited Scotland, despite having promised to visit every three years, and was also the last.
From the Great Hall I went on to the dungeon, which was only a small exhibit, but interesting for its discussion of the difference between the prisoners of war it housed and common prisoners--basically, there were actual laws dictating how POWs could be treated, so they ended up having it far better than everybody else. Officers usually weren't even imprisoned, but were instead placed under house arrest. On the other hand, cabin boys seized from enemy ships, who might be younger than ten, were tossed in the dungeon with the rank and file. The castle hosted soldiers of many different nationalities and conflicts, including American rebels captured during the Revolutionary War. Unlike the French troops imprisoned around that time, they were considered pirates and treated as such.
Possibly my favorite exhibit was the National War Museum, dedicated to Scotland's military throughout the ages. I appreciated this one the most because it was the first I visited that started to answer the question I'd been wondering about since starting in on the Museum of Scotland's history section: just how did a country go from constantly beating back English invasion, "We will always fight for our freedom," distinctly not English allies, to forming a united kingdom with them?
At least according to this display, and a couple I visited later, it was primarily an economic issue: Scotland wanted in on England's trade agreements. Meanwhile England would add the Scots to its military strength and not have to worry about a hostile border to the north. And it wasn't a popular union in the beginning. The Highlanders in particular opposed it; they had always been some of the most fiercely independent members of the nation and wouldn't see nearly as much benefit from joining with England as merchants and artisans in the cities. They led an uprising against the new English monarch that at one point threatened London itself. When the uprising was put down, the crown issued the Act of Proscription that aggressively suppressed Highlands culture and diminished the clans' ability to rebel. So, basically, the union benefited primarily rich and powerful people who managed to shut up the people who weren't so enthralled. History! At least it seems to have worked out, more or less.
I visited the National War Museum last, and unfortunately didn't have time to do more than glance through a couple rooms and watch the overview video--definitely a candidate for coming back to someday!
Although I initially went to the castle by myself, I later ended up revisiting it as part of a walking tour and got to see the changing of the castle guard, which only occurs on special occasions. In this case, the occasion was the Queen's 91st birthday, which also warranted a twenty-one-gun salute. As it turns out, it takes a while to get through twenty-one guns when there's thirty seconds or so between each blast, and in the end our tour guide grew frustrated with waiting for it to end and led us away down the Mile, followed by regular cracking booms.
I got to hear (and see) a cannon fired on my first trip to the castle, too. That was the one o'clock gun, a tourist attraction today but once used to help ships in the firth of Forth (estuary of the River Forth) below calibrate their clocks. Previously they'd watched for the one o'clock descent of a iron ball on top of the Nelson Monument, a tall tower, at nearby Calton Hill, but an audible cue was substituted when the captains complained that it was too hard to see the ball from down in the river.
Calton Hill was actually my introduction to Edinburgh; I stumbled on it entirely by accident while searching (unsuccessfully) for a laundromat that was open on Easter Sunday afternoon. Like Edinburgh Castle, it projects above surrounding buildings, easily visible from across the city. It's the seat of the Scottish government, and the top of the hill hosts a few monuments of interest. The first of these is the previously-mentioned Nelson Monument, which was erected to honor Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars. Built at the highest point of the hill, it was originally intended as a signal tower for ships in the nearby river and eventually had a timing ball installed on its top. It was this timing ball that captains complained about and which led to the creation of the one o'clock gun: the ball was raised as one o'clock approached, then lowered again on the hour, so ship captains could watch it and set their clocks accordingly.
My personal favorite monument is Edinburgh's own Parthenon, the National Monument. This, as well as most of the other monuments on the hill, date from the time when Edinburgh was going through a bit of a classics fad, styling itself "the Athens of the north," and developing a sudden affinity for be-columned facades and depicting famous Edinburgh figures (e.g. David Hume) in togas. The National Monument was intended to be a tribute to the Scottish soldiers and sailors who died in the Napoleonic War. However, although construction began in 1826, the money ran out by 1829 and it was never completed. It remains the same today as it was then, a free-standing row of columns supporting nothing, at the heart of a scattering of other monuments on the top of a hill.
As far as my Edinburgh trip went, probably the most important part of my visit to Calton Hill wasn't anything on the hill itself, but instead one of the landmarks I saw on my way down to visit it: the geological formation known as Arthur's Seat.
Like I said earlier, I made my journey to Calton Hill on my first day in Edinburgh, at which point I hadn't even had a good look at a map to get oriented. I had no idea what the big ridge of rock on the edge of the city was. I could see the silhouettes of tiny people dotting the ridgeline, though, and that was all I needed to know. I said to myself, "Imma climb that rock. 8D"
And so, on the last full day of my visit to Edinburgh, I climbed that rock.
It turned out to be a lucky choice of day to do it; the sun decided to peek between the clouds now and then, and the bitter wind that annoyed me during my visit to Edinburgh Castle subsided. The hill itself is part of Holyrood park, just past the end of the Royal Mile, Holyrood Palace, and Scottish parliament, making it an easy walk from the front door of my hostel.
Lots of other people were taking advantage of the weather to go for a climb, so I had plenty of company starting up the long, gentle ridge that lies along the Old City side of the park. Like the other geologic formations around Edinburgh, Arthur's Seat is volcanic in origin, made up of black basalt. As a helpful sign informed me, this was of some historical significance. James Hutton is traditionally said to have asked local quarrymen to spare part of the hill since it showed a fine example of an iron vein. Hutton was the first to recognize that the rocks in this area had been formed by volcanic activity rather than precipitation out of ocean water as had previously been thought.
There are two main trails leading up to Arthur's seat: a long, gentle route and a shorter, steeper path. I wasn't bothered with which one I ended up on, so I simply started climbing.
I think I ended up on the steeper path, and ended up following the gentler one on the way down. It wasn't a bad climb, mostly made up of stairs winding up through the gorse, the bushes with bright yellow flowers you can see in all my pictures of Arthur's Seat. Incidentally, gorse is extremely prickly with very long thorns and not a good thing to grab for if you, say, start losing your balance in the middle of a climb.
I continued on and up, stopping at every major curve to look out at the view and to admire the shadows of clouds passing across the valley below. They blew quickly across the grass, which shone almost metallically in the sun, shifting and re-forming as they went.
It probably took around half an hour for me to reach the top of the lower hill; from there, it was just a short walk along the ridge and a scramble up to the rocky peak. The wind picked up substantially here, which was a bit tricky; I'm tall and light, and even a stiff breeze is liable to push me around a bit. I spent the rocky final section trying to climb without any sudden gusts knocking me over and with my raincoat, which I was wearing as a windbreaker, snapping dramatically around me.
There were a dozen or so people hanging around the Seat itself, taking pictures, sharing water, filtering in and out. A concrete marker offered an opportunity to say definitively that you'd reached the summit, as well as a climbing and photo opportunity for the sure-footed. I hung around looking out at the views: the Old City with its castle, the New City stretching down and to the sea, and on the reverse side of the hill, farms and rolling green stretching up into the Highlands.
With pictures taken and water drunk, I was ready to head back down. Rather than return the way I came, I wandered down the back of the hill, where there were fewer hikers. The wind kept pestering me, slapping me sideways with blustery surges and hissing through the grass. There was a pond I hadn't even realized was there, winding between the hills of the Salisbury Crags that make up the western side of Holyrood Park.
Along the way I took a detour towards the remains of a building I saw perched on an outcropping. This turned out to be the partial wall of an old church, and I wondered whether it might have been destroyed in the Reformation, like so many others in the country. According to the sign it's more likely that it was simply abandoned, but very little is known about the place. Had there once been an actual settlement on the hillside which had drifted away with time, or had the building always been somewhat remote, and in the end too out of the way to justify its upkeep? No idea, but it was something to contemplate as I wandered around the remaining stonework, peering through the sole intact doorway at the loch below.
After all the walking I'd been doing, this looked like an excellent place to stop for a break. I climbed up into a pile of rocks which, according to the sign, were probably stones pulled from the old church, and wedged myself into a comfortable spot. For a while I just sat there, sipping my water and looking out at the city with the wind gusting around me. All was calm, all was peaceful, until, somewhere far below in the city, a bagpiper began to play.
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