Edinburgh

Edinburgh is like the cool cousin of London. I wouldn’t be surprised if its popularity as a quick holiday destination has only increased during the pandemic, domestic travel being a hot commodity. I’d only ever heard good things about it but hadn’t managed to get there, despite it being only a 5-hr train ride the length of England from Cambridge. I was determined to squeeze it in before the term got into full swing or any unforeseen disruptions *cough* Covid *cough* got in the way, so my friend Marie and I made a long weekend of the Edinburgh bucket list. Hills, castles, kilts, neogothic grandeur, bagpipes, haggis, hipster art—we fit all of it in.

Day 0: Taking the train was part of the appeal for me—one could fly, but the train is so straightforward and less carbon-hungry. We made the mistake of booking both our train journeys at night to save daylight for Edinburgh, meaning we missed the apparently stunning seaside views and any sense of being on the Hogwarts Express, so I’ll have to do the train again.

Day 1: Due to a morning forecast of heavy rain, our first venture out of our mediocre guest house was to the National Gallery of Scotland. It wasn’t raining yet, though, so we walked and got a nice moist gray amble through the city for our first glimpse of Edinburgh. We quickly learned that getting around Edinburgh will almost always involve skirting around the towering cliff in the middle of the city where Edinburgh Castle broods and where the Old Town is arrayed along the hillside. We were down below in the New Town, flatter and broader streets lined with grand Georgian buildings and Victorian monuments. We started farther out among more modern commercial streets (admiring shops such as the punny Bread Meats Bread restaurant), but soon found ourselves among highly atmospheric headstones in St Cuthbert’s Kirkyard, which we cut through to get to the long, green avenue of Princes Street Gardens. (All of this was quite obliging for framing views of the Castle.)

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The National Gallery did its job of keeping us out of the worst of the rain, and did not disappoint as a collection of art, with both famous names and hidden gems. (I shouldn’t have been surprised, as Edinburgh is a capital city.) I was especially wooed by the Scottish displays—stunning Celtic revival art, brooding landscapes, the iconic stag, and an ice-skating minister.

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We trailed out into the rain to take in the rest of Princes Street, including the otherworldly neogothic Scott Monument—a dark, obsessively ornate needle towering over a statue of Walter Scott.  (I compared it to the towers built by those termite-like aliens in Ender’s Game…) They’re pretty obsessed with Walter Scott in Edinburgh—the main train station nearby is even named after one of his novels, Waverley. I guess I should read something by him.

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We were making our way up the hill to Old Town for an appointment with Mary King’s Close. The core of Old Town is basically a series of steep, narrow stairs and passageways threaded through a few long thoroughfares that lay parallel to the top of the hill. The narrow passageways are the iconic “closes,” each with its own iconic name, and were once the main residential and market streets of Edinburgh despite being claustrophobic, treacherous slicks sandwiched between towering buildings. Walking along the Royal Mile—one of those long hilltop thoroughfares, this one stretching from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse—is a feast for tourist eyes, not only because it’s crammed with shops (wool, whisky, shortbread, highland cattle, and tartan being the main themes) and bagpiping buskers, but for each little tantalizing glimpse of a narrow portal to somewhere else. Old Fishmarket Close, Fleshmarket Close, Advocate’s Close (with a sign for The Devil’s Advocate bar), Bell’s Wynd—we had to peek in each one.

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Our destination, Mary King’s Close, was not one we could peek in. That’s because it was levelled for the Royal Exchange in the 1700s, which was built up so that the original entrance to the close and its sloping street was left intact underground. Sometime since then, the time capsule of cobblestone and crumbling walls and hauntings was capitalized on by a tour company, and you can take actor-guided historical tours of the “Real Mary King’s Close.” The tour, a bit corny but informative nonetheless, highlighted residents from the merchant’s wife Mary King to the slum dwellers at the base of the street to the plague doctor that came through during the 17^th century epidemic that Edinburgh only bested after torching all the infected residences. We couldn’t take photos due to its location underneath a government building (apparently), but the only real photogenic spot was where mock clotheslines were strung between the now-undergrounds walls over the sloping street, where they took photos for us that we could buy with a plague doctor or a ghost superimposed on the background. The rest of it was mostly dark, bare stone and cramped rooms with a few replicas of furnishings and suitably creepy dummies of Mary Queen of Scots on house arrest and a blacksmith in a haunted workshop (“Prince Charles wouldn’t go inside after all the security dogs freaked out.”). Oh, and a better-preserved house we couldn’t go inside because of the arsenic wallpaper.

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Back aboveground, we wandered over to Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, a burial ground that would otherwise be rather unremarkable except for its dual celebrity status: J. K. Rowling was said to frequent it and took several character names from the headstones, including Potter, McGonagall, Sirius Black, and Tom Riddle (except it was Thomas Riddell), which many online tours will guide you to. And before this, people were already obsessed with a little dog called Greyfriar’s Bobby, who apparently guarded his owner’s grave for 14 years and now has his own statue.

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The sky had cleared somewhat, and we somehow still had steam to make our way (via an atmospheric but underwhelming secondhand bookshop) to Calton Hill for sunset. Calton Hill sits opposite the biggest hill around, Arthur’s Seat, across Old Town, and is topped with no less than four neoclassical monuments and other buildings, with a promise of panoramic views. Lots of other people had the same idea so it was thronged with people winding up the paths and climbing the Parthenon-like National Monument. We got the tail end of a pink sunset over the New Town stone we had been wondering through, and castle off in the dstance, the lit up clock tower alongside the Scott Monument, and an excellent view of the most recent addition to the Edinburgh skyline, a creatively shaped hotel/shopping complex spitefully dubbed the Turd—can you see it? It was almost my first thought (specifically, 💩). Off in the other direction we saw the silvery estuary waters of the Firth of Forth—such a great name—lying between the geometrical rooftops of Edinburgh and the blue shoulders of land beyond. Turn another ninety degrees and we saw the rolling rocky green of Arthur’s Seat and the Crags of Holyrood Park. We had strangers help us clamber up the too-tall base of the National Monument and helped another stranger in turn. The sun set and the lights glowed on in the city.

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Food highlights: lovely breakfast at an upscale café called Loudon’s—incidentally the name of the hill and battle where Robert the Bruce turned the tide against the English in the brutal medieval war film we later watched. Lovely lunch at an Old Town “haggis and whisky house”, where we had haggis-stuffed chicken, which seemed like a good compromise for tasting haggis, the famous Scottish mystery meat made from various sheep organs. It was like soft meatloaf and not bad. Since I don’t drink I didn’t try the whisky; we had to order the Scottish dessert called cranachan, made from cream, oats, and berries, without the crucial ingredient (whisky), but it was still delicious. For dinner we ended up at a chain pizza place after all our efforts to go to a more Edinburgh-y location were met with booked out restaurants.

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*Deep breath*

Day 2: The morning, gauzy with clouds but not rainy, was for Arthur’s Seat. As mentioned, this is the tallest craggy hill around. We could have reasonably walked all the way from our guest house, it’s that close to the city, but we took the bus closer to the edge of the nature reserve, which rises right out of the residential streets. Before Arthur’s Seat, the Salisbury Crags rose up, a ring of dark jagged cliffs, clearly igneous and attesting to the volcanic origin of these hills. I scrambled up along the ridge to get a view west over the city, and east down over the valley of Holyrood Park between the Crags and Arthur’s Seat. (The crags used to be popular for climbing, but the trail below has been closed and semi-permanently fenced off due to rockfall. Too bad for the legacy of the “radicals” who were given jobs to build the road, giving it the name Radical Road.) We were kept company by many joggers and dog walkers here. When we looped over to the short and steep (but not the shortest and steepest) climb to the rise of Arthur’s Seat, tourists took over.

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The top of Arthur’s Seat was a somewhat treacherous mound of craggy bare rock, tricky under the feet, and the wind was blowing hard, so the crowd of people on top of all this made it difficult to enjoy fully (Marie is also uneasy about heights). We were happier when we came down the rocks back to the long grass and heather and over to the neighboring Crow Hill with no one else on it except some eponymous crows who really wanted our chocolate ginger biscuits.

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When we had had enough of views and wind, we took the longer, gentler trail down the other side of the rise to the grounds of Holyrood Palace, via a picturesque little chapel ruin and a park where we witnessed the winner of the Cancer Research UK 5K cross the finish line. Holyrood Park was once a hunting ground for Holyrood Palace, so it’s basically the backyard. The palace is a compact, fortress-like stone affair with classic round turrets, first built in the 1500s. The rooms are well-furnished with period pieces and provided a good historical walkthrough of the palace, with plenty of highlights for Mary Queen of Scots and her drama (including a supposed blood stain on the wood floor where her secretary David Rizzio was murdered in 1566, but it was most certainly fake, apparently courtesy of Victorian docents).

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The other equally impressive attraction is the ruin of the Augustinian Holyrood Abbey, which the palace was built right up against while it was still operating (it was where James IV married Margaret Tudor while the palace was being built). It didn’t fare well during the Reformation or subsequent wars and eventually the roof collapsed under the weight of supports meant to keep it up. So we’re treated to the brooding gothic ruin with empty arched windows and crumbling buttresses.

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Nearby: the extremely modern Scottish Parliament and a nice close.

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Marie is a big fan of the seaside, so we devoted the rest of the afternoon to Portobello, a seaside suburb of Edinburgh. After a 15-minute bus ride and a stop at another indie bookshop (Portobello Books, much snazzier than the other one), we found the beach and walked the promenade. It had a festive, local vibe—I’m sure there were other tourists, but somehow I don’t think most tourists come to Edinburgh for the beach, so we were mostly among local dog walkers, bonfire gatherings, and Zumba classes. We met a dog named Indy whose owner was walking the same direction as us, and Indy’s most heartfelt desire was for every new friend to throw her soggy, sandy ball. We also found the Coadestone pillars listed in the “Secret Edinburgh” book we browsed at Portobello Books.

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We made our way back up the High Street as the sun set in hopes of finding some good fish and chips, but the most promising place was all booked out for the night. We squeezed in at a tapas place instead, and managed to find enough tastes in common to enjoy a delectable spread.

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Day 3: Edinburgh Castle was the biggest bucket list item remaining. We ambled there via a crepe place and then back up the hill and along the Royal Mile to the fortress crowning it all.

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Once in the castle grounds, we got audio guides and wandered around learning about various military campaigns, and about when the well went dry during a siege but then it snowed unseasonably late and saved them, and about when Walter Scott (for some reason I didn’t quite understand) found the crown jewels…to be honest, by now we were running low on steam, and the tour was a bit disjointed. But we enjoyed the general ambience of stone and history and the view. The highlight was definitely the one-o-clock gun, which we were lucky to be perfectly situation to observe: people gather and a sharp-looking officer marches up, looks at a stopwatch, and fires a big gun over the city from the battlements. Apparently once for ship navigation/clock-setting, it’s now a daily tradition for the heck of it.

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We had planned to find somewhere to have a lavish afternoon tea (the cheapest being around 20 per person, with trays and trays of sandwiches and biscuits and scones, etc, in addition to the tea) for our sendoff activity in Edinburgh, but it turns out you have to book these things well in advance, so we ended up spending a sad amount of time traipsing between the potential places on the internet list (which failed to mention this detail). We gave up at the National Portrait Gallery and ate at the mediocre canteen and went through the exhibits instead. I learned a lot about the Jacobite Rebellion (1700s, Bonny Prince Charlie wanted his father James (“Jacob”) on the throne of England).

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Chocolate tea and pistachio polenta and carrot cake at a very hipster art gallery then tided our tired selves over to the train.

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Congratulations on making it through this massive post! Since this has been more of a travel rehash than my usual posts, I’m not going try to end on anything profound…but expect a return of Cambridge content soon!