04.10.2011 – 04.10.2011  15 °C

Edinburgh day to day so I got going early so that I could fit in as much as I could! My plan was to go straight to the Royal Mile and spend a couple of hours just soaking up the street before heading up to the castle. I walked around for probably about 30mins before I decided to sign up for a walking tour and save myself the time and just get the low down from a local!

So I grabbed a cuppa and waited the 20 mins for the next tour to leave and spent the next 3hrs wandering the streets of Edinburgh! It was quite nice because we spent most of our time out of the Royal Mile so I actually got a bit of detail about some of the more surprising aspects of the city. Here are just a couple of the most interesting tid bits of the tour:

I learnt today about a trip step! The medieval way of keeping thieves out of Edinburgh houses was by installing a trip step. A trip step is about 2 inches wide (not the usual foot length) this means that as someone is creeping up the stairs in the middle of the night (with no light) they will assume that each stair is the usual uniform length until the get to the trip stair, put down their weight and then “wham” they find themselves at the bottom of the stairs after tumbling down!

JK Rowling wrote all of the early HP books in Edinburgh! We spent a good portion of the tour checking out HP sites. She wrote the first few books (when she was down and out and had no cash) in a café in Edinburgh. For the cost of a cup of coffee she could stay in this particular café all day until closing time. This allowed her to spend all day writing her masterpiece.. Good return on investment from the café as they now get a ridiculous number of people going to eat in the café just because JK ate there! The school that Hogwarts was based on is also in the middle of Edinburgh and can be seen from many of the high points of the city. More interestingly is Grey Friar’s Kirk. Grey Friar’s is a church in the middle of Edinburgh and is surrounded by a very old graveyard. JK took many of the character’s names from grave stones in the yard. We found a McGonagall, Moody and Tom Riddle! I’m sure most of the characters are in the yard we just didn’t have time to look at all of the gravestones! (I have to admit I feel sorry for old Tom Riddle.. I’m sure he was a great guy when he was alive.. he will always be immortalised though as Lord Voldemort!!) Grey Friar’s is also home to a poltergeist. On the edge of the graveyard is one of those old fashioned mausoleums (you know the type that Hollywood always use when you think of vampires or zombies or something!), it has been locked by the Edinburgh council as too many people received too many weird injuries after entering the mausoleum. Apparently a priest was called to exoricse the poltergeist and was unsuccessful- in fact the poor guy died only two weeks after trying to get rid of the spirit. Since that date the council has kept the mausoleum locked so that no-one else can be hurt…..

Edinburgh also has a pretty interesting serial killer story from the early 1700s. Apparently there were two guys who killed over 30 people all so that they could get money from a fresh cadaver. Edinburgh has always had a prestigious medical school and back in the day there was no real way for the university to get dead bodies for the pupils to practice anatomy on. So they used to buy dead bodies from people on the black market. (I wonder how many complete graves must exist from those days in Edinburgh????) These two guys discovered that this was a very easy way to make heaps of money (they originally took an old dude who died of old age to the university because the old dude owed them money and didn’t have anything of value! They were paid more handsomely than they would have thought and so started their crime spree). What I don’t get is why no-one at the university got surprised when these two guys would walk in every other week with another dead body!!! The only reason they got caught is that they killed a very popular prostitute and when they took her into the university too many of the students recognised her and recognised that she hadn’t been ill and started to ask questions.. I guess when you lose your favourite whore it gets you thinking! One of the two guys spilled the beans and got only 6 months in prison, the other was hung and quartered! (It seems to be a popular way to die back in the day!)

I finished my day, not by going to the castle, but wandering through the Scottish National Gallery. It’s a pretty small gallery (compared to many of the others I’ve been in) but for such a small space it was packed with some pretty nice works of art! Like most galleries I spent most of my time in the Dutch, French and Italian sections but I liked the fact that because it is so small I could actually appreciate all of the works of art not just feel overwhelmed by the time I got to the end! I was also serenaded by a piper out the front of the gallery (he was playing Amazing Grace and I reckon there is no better song on the pipes!) Finished my night off with some very tasty chinese takeaway before heading in for some blogging and an early night. Castle day tomorrow (well it will have to be as it is my last day in Edinburgh!)