EERIE EDINBURGH: DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF SCOTLAND’S BEAUTIFUL CAPITAL CITY
Dr. Orton lived, taught and studied in Edinburgh while she was researching her PhD on Mathematical Reasoning in Plato’s Epistemology. In this blog post, she explores the hidden historic underworld beneath the city’s beautiful streets.
From the iconic theatrical festivals, Edinburgh Festival and Edinburgh Fringe, to seasonal celebrations like Hogmanay (New Year), Beltane (the return of the summer on the 30th of April) and Samhuinn (the transition from Summer to Winter on the 31st of October), Edinburgh is always worth visiting. It’s also worth getting to know the two sides of the city’s history: Edinburgh’s sparkling Enlightenment and its eerie underworld.
City of Extinct Volcanoes
Edinburgh stands on a series of extinct volcanoes from the Carboniferous period (around 340 million years ago), formed when Scotland was south of the equator. Arthur’s Seat, the city’s main vantage point, was formed from an explosion and vent collapse of ash and lava. Salisbury Crags, the dramatic cliffs below Arthur’s Seat, were formed when magma pushed through the layers of rock. Castle Rock, the seat of Edinburgh Castle, is the cooled lava core of a parasitic volcano off Arthur’s Seat and the classical-style monument of Calton Hill and its Burial Grounds sit on a giant mound of solidified lava and hardened volcanic ash.
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were in the Edinburgh area as early as the ninth millennium B.C. and the Celts and the Romans both occupied and built forts there.
In the medieval period, Edinburgh’s Old Town was founded by King David I in the twelfth century, with St. Margaret’s Chapel being the city’s surviving oldest building in 1130. David I also founded the gothic St. Giles Cathedral in 1124 and Holyrood Abbey in 1128, although these have been rebuilt and ruined respectively.
Medieval Edinburgh became famous for its wool, and cattle were sold in Cowgate; cereal and hay were sold at the Grassmarket.
Edinburgh’s Old Town
Scotland’s relationship with England created the secret underground world of Edinburgh’s Old Town. The two nations had been at odds during the fourteenth and fifteenth century over the question of Scottish sovereignty. The English-Scottish border was a lawless frontier, with Reivers raiding the border villages.
Meanwhile, Scotland had an agreement with France called the Auld Alliance, which meant that Scotland was bound to come to France’s aid in the case of an English attack. James IV of Scotland signed the Treaty of Perpetual Peace with Henry VII of England, which was supposed to end the warfare. Click the link to see the seal of the treaty!
However, when Henry VIII invaded France in 1513, the Auld Alliance meant that James IV felt bound to retaliate against England. James besieged and captured border castles, but was defeated by the Earl of Surrey and his men at the Battle of Flodden. James was killed in the battle.
The Battle of Flodden was devastating, not least because King James was killed (making him the last British King to die in battle) as well as a whole generation of Scottish aristocrats and warriors. In response to the defeat, the Flodden Wall was built around Edinburgh to protect it from the English.
In the sixteenth century, the Flodden Wall meant that new homes were built on top of existing ones because the city was running out of space to expand. As Edinburgh grew more overpopulated, it gained the nickname it still bears today: Auld Reekie (“Old Smoky”).
Edinburgh’s Enlightenment
J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, studied in Edinburgh in the 1880s. I remember seeing Barrie’s play Mary Rose at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh’s West End. I loved the play for its eerie atmosphere and exploration of folkloric themes, but it also has an interesting point to make about the Scottish Enlightenment.
In the play, Cameron, a young Highlander, appears “in the poor but honourable garb of the ghillie [local guide]” and “is not specially impressive until you question him about the universe.” Main characters Simon and Mary Rose agree to speak in French when they want to conceal their conversations from Cameron—only to have him offer suggestions when they struggle for French vocabulary. Cameron also mentions that he is reading Euripides, correcting Simon when he mistakenly thinks the play is a Latin one (“It may be Latin, but in these parts we know no better than to call it Greek”).
This is an example of the Scottish Enlightenment belief in the Democratic Intellect, an approach to education that was broad, interdisciplinary, and open to people from all social classes.
In the eighteenth century, Edinburgh’s historic New Town was built on the other side of the Nor Loch (a man-made loch north of Edinburgh's Old Town). The Nor Loch was drained and is now the site of Princes Street Gardens and Waverley Station.
Edinburgh was transformed into a haven for the Scottish Enlightenment. Encyclopædia Britannica was born in Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century and the city is associated with a number of great thinkers.
Also in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith, whose “invisible hand” has been one of the most influential ideas in economics, lectured and later lived in the city. The great Enlightenment philosopher David Hume was born in Edinburgh. Legend has it that if you rub the toe of David Hume’s statue on the Royal Mile, it will bring good luck, knowledge, or even a favourable decision in the nearby High Court.
There were literary giants in Edinburgh, too. Beloved Scottish novelist, poet and historian Sir Walter Scott was born in Old Town in 1771 and he lived in New Town as an adult. Edinburgh’s train station is named after his novel Waverley.
Robert Burns (celebrated every year on Burns Night) moved to Edinburgh from Ayrshire. There is a life-sized marble statue of him (previously on Calton Hill) in the National Portrait Gallery on Queen Street. He wrote his ‘Address to Edinburgh’ about moving to the city in 1786.
In the nineteenth century, the gothic Scott Monument (in honour of Sir Walter Scott) was built on Princes Street, the neoclassical National Gallery of Scotland was built on the Mound and the National Monument was built on Calton Hill.
Edinburgh’s Underworld
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edinburgh was rife with body snatching. Enlightenment Edinburgh was hungry for anatomical learning, and the city’s reputation for leading medical knowledge relied on a ready supply of cadavers for practical demonstration. An underworld of “resurrectionists” (criminals who would steal freshly buried corpses to sell to anatomy schools) grew up around the Old Town.
The bodies would be smuggled in to Edinburgh for physicians like the infamous Dr. Knox, stored in places like the South Bridge Vaults. The body snatching phenomenon reached its peak when William Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants to the city, began killing people themselves obtain bodies to sell.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher (1884), is based on these gruesome events. His The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is actually set in London, but critics think that Stevenson was inspired by the contrast between Edinburgh’s intellectual life and its gloomy, clandestine underworld.
Edinburgh University’s Medical School is closely associated with the morbid history of body snatching. The School relied on illegally obtained bodies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Dr. Knox (whose lectures Medical School students were allowed to attend) was an extra-mural lecturer at Surgeon’s Square. Burke was actually sentenced to be hanged and publicly dissected and his skeleton remains in the Medical School collection.
But the Medical School is also associated with the forward-thinking, intellectual side of the Enlightenment. Charles Darwin was briefly a student there, collecting biological specimens in the Firth of Forth before eventually giving up on his medical studies.
The Medical School is also the birthplace of our most famous literary detectives. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh and studied at the Medical School. His professor, Dr. Joseph Bell, was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. There is a Sherlock Holmes statue at Picardy Place near Conan Doyle’s birthplace in the New Town.
The Haar
The harr is a dense mist, particularly an easterly sea mist, that creeps up from the North Sea through the Firth of Forth and engulfs the city for hours or even days, particularly in April or May.
Sometimes the haar is linked to the mythical Kraken sea monster, perhaps because they are both associated with mists. The thirteenth-century Old Norse text The King’s Mirror describes the Kraken as “more like an island than a fish” and it was once believed that the great monsters were linked to sea mists.
The haar features in much of Edinburgh’s literature. Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novel Strip Jack (1992) describes the haar: “It was dark outside, and foggy too, a haar drifting in across the city from the North Sea. In a haar, Edinburgh seemed to shift backwards through time.”
James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) features a dense haar on Arthur’s Seat: a dense vapour that refracted the rays of the sun: “the cloud of haze lying dense in that deep dell that separates the hill from the rocks of Salisbury, and the dull shadow of the hill mingling with that cloud made the dell a pit of darkness. On that shadowy cloud was the lovely rainbow formed, spreading itself on a horizontal plain, and having a slight and brilliant shade of all the colours of the heavenly bow, but all of them paler and less defined.” However, delineated in the cloud is a demonic apparition of the character George’s brother (the “Justified Sinner”).
Edinburgh’s Literary Legacy
Today, Edinburgh retains its literary reputation. Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie novel is set in 1930s Edinburgh. The fictional Marcia Blaine School for Girls in the book is based on the school Spark attended herself, James Gillespie’s School for Girls.
Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting is set in Edinburgh, and the iconic opening scene of the Trainspotting film shows the characters Renton and Spud running down Princes Street and Calton Road.
Alexander McCall Smith is from Edinburgh and his 44 Scotland Street series is set there. McCall Smith has also written A Work of Beauty, a non-fictional account of Edinburgh’s architecture and history.
J. K. Rowling wrote much of Harry Potter in Edinburgh, particularly at the Elephant House coffee shop, where she drew inspiration from the graves in nearby Greyfriar’s Kirkyard. The Kirkyard is where Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye Terrier, guarded his master’s grave for fourteen years.
Find Out More
Dr. Orton also explores the secrets of other European cities in her blog posts about Durham, Oxford, Siena, Bologna, Berlin, Athens, Paris and Leicester.
Click the link to listen to one of Dr. Orton’s talks at the University of Edinburgh!
You might be interested in our Intellectual, Cultural and Art History course, The Enlightenment. If you’d like to learn more about Historical Mysteries, we have suggestions for a customisable course on this on our History page. Alternatively, if you’re interested in the rare, the niche and the esoteric aspects of the world’s most fascinating cities, take a look at our Interdisciplinary course, The Secret History of Cities.
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