I think the sights I saw would have been enough for the day, but I was so excited to be exploring a completely new place, I decided to just keep on going. After all, I only had one more night in Edinburgh. I had scheduled a tour later in the evening of the underground city and needed to kill some time anyway.
By Holyroodhouse, the chained unicorn.
These were across from the Palace of Holyroodhouse – people still live in them!
Palace of the Holyroodhouse. Pretty place, but I didn’t go in. A lot of it has been modernized and I didn’t feel like seeing that.
More cobblestone streets off the Royal Mile! And a tall wall…let’s follow because there has to be something cool on the other side, right?
I bet that they used to keep horses in there. those look like stable doors.
And this was behind the tall wall. A small section of it opened up to a gate. I know graveyards aren’t for everyone, but these ones were ancient and, to me, just beautiful.
Some of these headstones no longer had anything written on them. On a couple, I could make out dates as early as the 1600s.
So eroded that there’s no telling who lies beneath.
This particular skull etching was all over the graveyards of Edinburgh. Not sure if it was a local thing or something during a particular time period. And the grass – everywhere! So green!
Another graveyard – I didn’t go crawling around in this one. It was across the street from the one I was currently in. A little more space in that one though – behind a church of some sort.
Shortly after the graveyard, I hit the stairs up to the observation deck for Edinburgh. Maybe if I had gone here first, I would have been more impressed. But after being at the top of Arthur’s Seat, it just didn’t seem like it was worth it to go up.
A memorial…again, unimpressive to me.
So I went back down to Princes’ Street, where I came in my first night. Here’s the train station from the outside, and in the odd light produced at around 5pm.
I remembered seeing this structure the night before and decided to come back to it during the day. Turns out you can actually climb up one of the spires from the inside, all the way to the top! My legs were already pretty spent from the hiking and walking around of the day, so I initially decided against it. However, one of the patrons of the Royal Oak, a Scotsman named Michael I met the night before, was in charge of the memorial. He was completely incomprehensible to me the night before until I started drinking (apparently you have to drink to understand drunk Scots), but I could make out most of what he said today. He told me to go on up, that it was worth the climb, and to just head in for free. See? It pays to make friends!
That’s a tall, thin tower…but ok. Here we go. Up and up.
Tiny staircases.
But wow! The stonework is amazing. And that first climb wasn’t too bad.
Not too high up yet.
More narrow stairs. The surface area is starting to get smaller as well. My second set of stairs to climb and my heels are starting to hang off the edges.
Still worth it though. It’s pretty awesome to get this close to see the structure in this type of detail.
Ok. More stairs. But first, the view off this floor (almost to the top) is pretty good. I’m starting to look forward to being at the very top of the structure if the view is this good here.
The train station and the buildings that line the Royal Mile. Plus look! There’s Arthur’s Seat in the background!
And now the stairs are so tiny my feet don’t fit. There was no passing someone on this staircase either. Shortly after this picture, I had to turn my body to the side to be able to fit through because it got extremely narrow. It’s a good thing I don’t have claustrophobia. I don’t imagine too many people get up this far; even without the fear of tight places, it did make my heart race a bit more than I’m used to.
But it was so worth it.
St. Giles’ main spire and the Edinburgh Castle.
Everything has a washed out feel to it in terms of color right now – the sunlight is just so odd and hard to get used to here.
…and now it’s time to head down. I had to yell that I was coming down before I started – I didn’t want to encounter someone on the stairs and face the prospect of trying to squeeze by or going back up. My legs were so tired by this point that they shook the entire trip down and for awhile after.
The doors to the next stair case are hard to find here if you don’t know what to look for.
That was just amazing. Amazing. I think I got the best views of the city from both Arthur’s Seat and this.
Time to walk back to the Royal Mile to relax before my night time tour.
Pff. The observation tower has a good view I’m sure, but I’m also positive the two perspectives I got today blew it out of the water.
…more stairs. This is a shorter way up, I can do it.
Not too bad of a climb, given my protesting knees.
Now for the tour. A friend (KS) recommended that I see the underground city – a series of vaults in Edinburgh that were constructed in the hopes of being additional storage space for the city. However, during a particular terrible time in Edinburgh’s history, the poorest of the poor were forced to live in these vaults – a terrible place to live, without light, without fresh air, and often overcrowded and completely lawless. They did as they could for a century, building here and there, living in appalling conditions. Edinburgh forgot about the vaults for a long time and when someone chanced to rediscover them by accidentally smashing open a wall, they found hundreds of bodies and still suspect that there are vaults that have not yet been found. There are amazing tunnels that stretch across the city and link these vaults.
I opted for a night time tour for two reasons: I wanted to hike around all day as I did, and scheduling this tour also gave me access to the Convenanter’s Prison – a part of the Greyfriars’ graveyard that few people get to ever see, and the site of Scotland’s first and last concentration camp. You can read more about it via a google search (I’ll try and link it here asap), but it was pretty terrible what happened here. Supposedly it’s also haunted by an entity known as the Mackenzie ghost, but I don’t imagine ghosts care to bother with tour groups.
The dirt floor of the first vault we entered. Unfortunately I don’t have as many pictures of this tour as I would like – often it was hard to take pictures because of the cramped conditions and too many people, but it was an amazing tour. Despite the terrible conditions these people lived in, they still lived, and tried to improve things. Here, they dug into the rock a little further and widened this particular vault as you can somewhat see n the next picture. They also dug out a tunnel to another vault that is actually across an outside street, below obviously, but the tour group didn’t go that direction.
They’ve put in some modern conveniences (stairs) for tour groups these days, but even this structure was slightly unstable because of how much they’re trying to preserve these vaults.
This was a huge space. It was also quite damp. A lot of leaks from the moisture outside – which made the vaults a terrible storage place to begin with. I can’t imagine living in such a damp, cold, dark place.
Some knocked out part of a wall in the attempt to widen living areas.
No, this isn’t an original structure. And I’m almost positive they didn’t have fire extinguishers back then either. In fact, I am positive, because our tour guide told us that they found a vault where a fire had obviously raged, burning the poor people trapped in it. Ugh.
Trying to show how dark it is in here. Pitch. I’ve never experienced complete darkness before. The wall here isn’t more than maybe 15 feet from me.
Again, but with light.
Little stalactites formed all over these vaults from the moisture and minerals leaking in from the city above.
Whew. And we’re heading out. The place is amazing, but I’m a big chicken and was more than happy to break out into some fresh air.
This area was a bit gimmicky – another tour group, that uses the same vaults, put some replicas of items found in the vaults to give it more of an authentic feel. Meh.
And out! You’d never know there was a different world behind that gate.
And now we’re at the Greyfrair’s. This is a mausoleum near the gate to the Convenanter’s Prison. I’ve never really seen one of these until today; they’re extremely common in Edinburgh.
Just some grave markers (tombstones?) Funny to think that the ground below that has bodies – it’s different from a stone on the ground to mark the actual burial spot.
The gate to the Covenanter’s Prison. Our tour guide said that the city locked this place up in the late 1990s because so many strange things were happening to people who visited it – didn’t matter if it was in the broad daylight or not. They couldn’t explain any of what was going on, so they figured that locking it up was the best course of action. Supposedly the company that ran this tour is the only one in Scotland that has permission from the city to go in.
More mausoleums. No ghosts though.
A sadly ghost-less walking of the grounds. Mackenzie, the man who built this place (read up on it!) was a terrible, terrible person. He was so proud of the work he did that he wanted to be buried as close to it as possible. So his resting place is almost right next to the gates. Supposedly, during construction, they found bodies already buried where he wanted to be, but he didn’t care – he had them piled up and covered over below him.
Mackenzie’s final resting place.
You can peer through a hole in the door. Dingy place. They keep it locked up tight because it’s a favorite target of vandals.
Well. That was fun. Definitely need to check out Greyfriar’s during the day. But back to the Royal Oak!