Spring Nostalgia Trip # 12: The Auld Town of Auld Reekie

If visiting the New Town, West End, and Dean Village seems much like a tourist experience in any major city, then Edinburgh's Old Town takes your experience to the same level of overcrowding, over-noisy overload which ranks with the craziest touristic madhouses on the planet. I don't remember feeling this way after my visit to Edinburgh half a century ago, but I was grateful to escape at the bottom end of the Royal Mile with my sanity and my possessions intact.

 

Even so, I would recommend anyone to spend some time in the Old Town. Just try to get there early in the day, and not (as I did) on a weekend. 

 

Post # 11 concluded my visit to the New Town with a climb up the street called The Mound. Here's the view ahead as you begin to ascend the Mound towards the summit of the Castle Hill.

 

 

The building with the two square towers is now the home of New College in the University of Edinburgh, but its historic role was to house the Assembly Rooms for the Annual Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which is known in other countries as the Presbyterian Church. It's a fitting introduction to the Old Town, since the wars of religion in Scotland generated a good deal of the history you're going to experience up on this hill. The Rooms are still used for the regular Assembly sessions, and the main hall is also used to hold concerts when the Assembly is not in session. Here's a closeup of the facade.

The building still looks dark, especially at a distance, but when I came here as a young traveller it was all but pitch black, due to the many generations of exposure to the smog of Auld Reekie.

To reach the Castle, you have to turn off The Mound and walk along the narrower roadway past the College entrance, Mound Place. At the end of the building, you turn a corner and find yourself on the steepest road I've ever tried to walk on in my life -- Ramsay Lane. It's not a long hill, and the summit is on the crest of the Castle Hill, but steep! I'm sure the lower end of this road was steeper than 9/10 of all the staircases I've ever climbed in my life. I didn't even try to take a picture looking up, because I feared that if I raised my camera, I would lose my balance on the steep, slippery cobbles and go back down the hill "arse over teakettle," to quote an old expression. Instead, I turned around once I reached the top, and took the picture looking back downhill. The road keeps getting steeper and steeper as you go down the hill.

At the top, I was now standing on the roadway called Castlehill, directly in front of the outer gates of Edinburgh Castle. Since I had cringed at the £20 admission fee, I took just one picture, looking past the huge bleachers which provide seating for the annual Military Tattoo towards the main castle buildings, and then turned around.

For those who wish to visit Edinburgh Castle in more depth, a word to the wise. Here's a screenshot from the official Castle website:

According to the desk clerk at my hotel, this is not just an idle threat. The wording seems to hint delicately that you will end up paying far more to a scalper if you don't reserve ahead of time. I can well believe it!

Standing on Castlehill, you are now standing at the top end of the "Royal Mile." There is no actual street by that name. It's the mile-long roadway connecting the fortress and palace of Edinburgh Castle to the more ceremonial and luxurious Palace of Holyroodhouse at the lower east end of the escarpment. The streets which comprise the Royal Mile, in order, are Castlehill, Lawnmarket, High Street, Canongate, and Abbey Strand. Despite all these names, it is a single continuous roadway running more or less straight along the summit of the escarpment all the way down.

Here's the map of Edinburgh again, this time with the Royal Mile marked in with a bright pink line.

This picture gives you a view of the first stretch of the Royal Mile below the Castle, looking downhill.

Already you can see that almost every building in the picture has its own distinctive style of architecture. The contrast couldn't be greater from the sane, sensible stylistic harmony of the New Town. Here in the Old Town, there is no such thing at all. It's a gloriously anarchic hodge-podge of styles from any and all times for the last seven centuries, sometimes with multiple styles jammed side-by-each into a single structure. 

With that as a hint, here is a photo gallery of the Royal Mile.

 

An eye-catching sight is the old Tolbooth Kirk, at the foot of Castlehill. The towering spire is impossible to miss. Unused as a church for many years, it was renovated and converted into a performance hall and office spaces for the Edinburgh International Festival, one of the world's premier summer festivals of the arts. The new space, christened The Hub, opened in 1991.

 

At the end of Lawnmarket, the street widens into a sizable plaza, which is occupied by St. Giles Cathedral.

 

Like many of Britain's great Gothic churches, St. Giles has undergone numerous renovations, improvements, and expansions during its centuries of existence here. The most recent major addition is the exquisite Thistle Chapel of 1911.

 

The most striking architectural feature of St. Giles is its central Crown Tower. Such towers can be found on a number of churches in different parts of Scotland and northern England, but St. Giles is unique among all the examples I have seen in having four central buttresses on each side as well as the usual four corner buttresses to support the central spire. It's also the largest such crown I know.

 

Outside the east end of the church is the Mercat (Market) Cross, a common feature of many older towns and cities throughout the British Isles.

 

The commonly-used name "Cathedral" is actually misleading, since St. Giles is a Church of Scotland congregation, and the Presbyterian churches do not have bishops (the name "cathedral" means "the official seat of a bishop). Sometimes referred to as the High Kirk, although that name conveys no particular distinction either, St. Giles embodies a large part of Scottish history within its complex and unusual structure.

The church has passed back and forth between Catholics and Protestants as the tides of the country's wars of religion ebbed and flowed repeatedly through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like many of Britain's great Gothic churches, St. Giles has undergone numerous renovations, improvements, and expansions during its centuries of existence here. 

For years, it has served as a burial place for distinguished persons of various kinds, much like the role of Westminster Abbey in London. Also like Westminster, St. Giles is the location for various ceremonial and royal functions. St. Giles appeared in many a television newscast as the scene of the lying in state of Queen Elizabeth II before her casket was taken to London. Subsequently, the square in front of the church witnessed the official welcome of King Charles III, and an official service of thanksgiving was held in St. Giles to mark that occasion.

 

So even if the names "Cathedral" and "High Kirk" carry no specific meaning, they prove in the end to be appropriate anyway for this magnificent church's role in the national life.

 

By the way, I did not go inside because I was passing St. Giles just at the time of the principal Sunday service of worship.

Leaving St. Giles behind, I continued down High Street which is pedestrian only for the first couple of blocks after leaving the Cathedral.

This large complex in the last photo appears no different from any of the others, until you take a good look at the round turret on the far end.

One thing's for sure -- no guests of this hotel in the upmarket Radisson Blu chain have to climb any hills at all to get from their hotel rooms out onto the Royal Mile!

 

Getting closer to the bottom of the Royal Mile now, I came to the most bizarre architectural hodge-podge of all -- the house of John Knox. Known as a firebrand preacher and remembered and honoured as the founder of the Protestant Church of Scotland, Knox served for some years as the minister of St. Giles.

 

 

Not far beyond Knox's house is the Canongate Tolbooth of 1591, which served at one time as a prison. It now houses a museum and a tavern -- and some apartments! The term "Tolbooth" was used from the 1300s until the 1800s to describe a building as a seat of municipal government in a burgh, a city chartered by the Scottish crown.

So what else is there to do on the Royal Mile besides looking at the architecture or going into the several museums? The answer: SHOP! If you want to buy anything at all with a Scottish theme or connection, you've come to the right place.

 

Kilts, plaids, accessories, souvenirs, whisky, woollens, tweed, candy, jewellery, antiques, cashmere -- if it's made in Scotland, you'll find a shop selling it here -- or two or three or more. They range from the dignified and upmarket to the quirky and entertaining -- such as this example.

 

Another cute name which I missed seeing but caught later from Google Maps was a gift shop cleverly named "Thistle Do Nicely."

 

Finally, at the foot of the hill at last, here are the historic buildings on either side of the short little street called Abbey Strand.

The King's Gallery, quite understandably, has only recently been renamed.

Now, turn around -- very slowly and carefully lest you suffer a severe shock.

 

 

This building, right across the street from the palace, is the home of the Scottish Parliament -- that is the new Parliament since the devolution of many powers of government from Westminster back to Scotland in 1998. The new building was officially opened in 2004. It's quite the contrast to its historic surroundings.

 

"Abbey Strand" got its name because it formerly led to the abbey of the Holy Rood, which most likely took its name from a fragment of the True Cross. The extended name "Holyroodhouse" may derive from the custom in medieval times of describing convents, monasteries, nunneries, and abbeys as "religious houses." The first palace was built adjacent to the abbey in the 1500s, and the more recent palace -- mainly dating from the later 1600s -- still adjoins the abbey ruins.

The Palace of Holyroodhouse, as it stands today, is the official royal residence in Scotland, and is open to the public whenever no members of the Royal Family are in residence. Again there's a £20 admission fee, and again I said to myself, "Thanks but no thanks." These pictures were taken through the space between the bars of the elaborate iron gates. I wonder if I used the same exact gap in the bars with my old Instamatic camera back in 1975?

Beyond the palace, to the south and east, is the large public area of greenery, forest, lochs, and mountains known as Holyrood Park. Although I didn't go into the park this time, I have done in the past, and there are great hiking opportunities. Two of the best are shown in these pictures, taken from up on Regent Road as I made my way back to Princes Street. First are the abrupt cliffs of Salisbury Craigs.

Behind Salisbury Craigs rises the even more prominent mountain known as Arthur's Seat, a name which pays tribute to old legends which claim a Scottish connection with the career of King Arthur.

Just along the road from the viewpoints where I took those mountain views, there stands the official monument of Scotland's true poet laureate, Robert Burns.

Not far away, on the other side of the road, is the neo-Classical majesty of a palace of education -- the Royal High School.

Next up on the north side of Regent Road is Calton Hill, which stands above the east end of Princes Street and holds numerous monuments to significant figures in history. Two which can be seen from below are the memorial to Admiral Lord Nelson, in the shape of a naval officer's telescope....

...and another neo-Classical temple, a memorial to Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart.

 

Passing by Calton Hill, I came at last down to Princes Street again, and one significant landmark which I haven't mentioned yet. It's that iconic clock tower, visible from everywhere on the street, standing atop the Balmoral Hotel. Originally called the North British Hotel after the railway which built it, the Balmoral remains the most distinguished and certainly one of the most expensive accommodations in Edinburgh. Maybe if I start up a Go Fund Me, I can get enough money to afford a room there the next time!

And with that, this fabulous trip has come to its close. Thanks to all of you who've stuck with me right through all the different chapters of this story. Time to stay home for a bit and lick my financial wounds, but this whole experience has been worth every penny I spent on it!