The Royal Mile: From the Castle to a Song
The Castle Rock called Edinburgh into being. Ever since the first few houses clustered round the Castle, no city in the world has had a more spectacular medieval centrepiece. Once crucial for defence, surveillance, and maintaining order, the Castle remains a British military barracks but is now principally for looking at. Unfailingly photogenic, it still appears, as England’s John Taylor put it in his Pennyles Pilgrimage of 1618, “so strongly grounded, bounded, and founded, that by force of man it can never bee confounded.” Yet by day its visual dominance owes more to dark basaltic geology than to architecture, while by night what highlights its antiquity is electrical floodlighting. Singing the praises of Edinburgh, the Renaissance Scottish Latin poet Arthur Johnston thought “nowhere more deserves a sceptre.” Above all, the Castle makes Edinburgh’s capital-city bossiness seem easy: a product of terrain as much as of human ingenuity.
Thanks to its eminence on the massive, craggy rock, Edinburgh Castle looks ancient and unchanging. It is neither. What so impresses the modern eye is only the most recent version of a fortress whose earliest incarnations were swept away long ago. Some of the first poetry associated with the territory we now call Scotland mentions the tribal settlement of Eidyn, or Din Eidyn, its band of warriors drinking mead in a noble hall. Gold-torqued, their swords flashing, fighters galloped southwards to do battle. Their sixth-century leader was named Mynyddawg, and they called themselves the Gododdin—the double d being pronounced th. This is the tribe the Romans termed the Votadini. A fragmentary heroic poem, The Gododdin, records their deeds in Old Welsh, a language once spoken around Edinburgh. That poem’s mention of Eidyn and its hall may be the first literary record of what is now Edinburgh Castle, built atop a long-extinct volcano. Remains of prehistoric hilltop forts survive in the surrounding area, but the original hall of the Gododdin is no more. What survives is their commanding view from the windswept Castle Rock, north over the Firth of Forth to the Kingdom of Fife and the Grampian Mountains beyond, south towards the bare Pentland Hills.
5. Edinburgh Castle rises high above Princes Street Gardens on its craggy, basaltic rock. Pictured by twentieth-century photographer John Bethell, it still looks as described by John Taylor in the early seventeenth century: “so strongly grounded, bounded, and founded, that by force of man it can never bee confounded.”
By the eleventh century, the rock again boasted a royal residence—as well as a Christian chapel. Yet modern tourists approaching the Castle see something very different. Gone are the days when Victorian children scaled the rock face, finding it (as George Borrow writes in Lavengro) rich in “strange crypts, crannies, and recesses, where owls nestled, and the weasel brought forth her young.” Today’s visitors would face arrest if they attempted to climb up the fortress’s surrounding cliffs. Instead, having strolled up Castle-hill at the end of the great street called the Royal Mile, they cross the Castle Esplanade, an expansive parade ground. Here each summer night during the Edinburgh Festival, audiences on steeply raked seating applaud massed bands of pipers with dancers, army vehicles, soldiers in dress uniform, and other performers in the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. This popular amalgam of highly orchestrated armed-services nimbleness is all kilted march-pasts, bagpipes, and impressive brass-band shine. Beyond the Esplanade loom the Castle portals: a convincing late-nineteenth-century drawbridge with a castellated gatehouse of the same vintage, and twentieth-century statues of Robert the Bruce by Thomas J. Clapperton (who also sculpted figures for Liberty’s department store in London’s Regent Street) and William Wallace by Alexander Carrick of the Edinburgh College of Art.
If this sounds touristically phoney, it does not feel so. The stone ensemble of the Castle looks massively monumental simply because it is. Today’s Castle complex—part barracks, part visitor attraction—is a mélange of structures from different eras. Earlier buildings were demolished, succumbed to furious assault, or gradually and gracefully subsided. Everything in the Castle is a replacement. Fourteenth-century structures were substituted for older ones. The sixteenth-century Portcullis Gate, now a portal within a portal, took the place of the previous Constable’s Tower, destroyed by a bombardment of English artillery in 1573. The Portcullis Gate itself was soon scheduled for partial redevelopment, designed in Victorian times to re-create, centuries afterwards, aspects of the long-gone Constable’s Tower. Edinburgh Castle is the product of many people’s ideas of just how a monumental Castle ought to appear. Made up of everything from a prison to a dogs’ cemetery, it works magnificently. In 2011 a new temporary structure seating 8,700 people was developed to be installed on its Esplanade, making that venue all the more suitable for the Military Tattoo, rock concerts, and theatrical extravaganzas. Walking through the Castle itself is at times like strolling up a lane through a stage set of well-nigh impregnable solidity, or ascending through a conglomeration of stacked archæological levels.
One of the Castle’s most spirited restorers was Jean Hippolyte Blanc, born in Francophile Edinburgh in 1844, the son of a French immigrant who sold ladies’ shoes. Blanc designed several local churches and a brewery, but this enthusiast for photography, architecture, and antiquarianism set his sights loftily on the Castle. On February 10, 1886, the Scotsman reported his plans to restore the Portcullis Gate and Tower, along with parts of the twelfth-century St. Margaret’s Chapel. Blanc had sought advice from another Edinburgh Castle restoration enthusiast, Professor Daniel Wilson of Toronto, as well as from local public bodies. His head full of Gothic elaborations, details filched from British Museum manuscripts, and other historical Scottish buildings, Blanc pressed ahead with the aid of his associate William Nelson. Conscious of the desirability of having something good to show “tourists visiting the forthcoming International Exhibition,” Blanc soon after gave the Castle’s Renaissance Great Hall a makeover which involved a Late Gothic door, a substantially new south elevation, and, except for much of the splendid hammer-beam roof, a new interior. Such “restorers,” operating with one eye on supposed antiquarian sources and the other on tourists’ tastes, are easy to mock, but the Castle is in their debt. It still thrives today by mixing carefully monitored historical stewardship with the Tattoo’s spotlit glitz. Visitors in search of authenticity may find fragments of the medieval St. Mary’s Church kept as museum pieces, but most prefer to be overawed by the arsenal of weaponry flaunted in the Great Hall, or to relish the staircase Blanc added to improve access to what Victorians called “the Mons Meg battery.”
It says something about traditional local attitudes toward women that Edinburgh Castle has two contrasting Margarets—one a saint, the other (since “Meg” is short for “Margaret”) a cast-iron femme fatale. Mons Meg is the Castle’s toughest survivor. Arrayed with other ordnance high on the ramparts, as if about to bombard Princes Street below, this huge late-medieval gun from the town of Mons in Belgium is a weapon of mass destruction which has long since become a bulky good-luck charm. One of the world’s oldest surviving cannons, it is six thousand kilograms in weight—so heavy that, mounted on wheels, it would have been hauled across Renaissance Scotland at a rate of about three miles a day. Firing 150-kilogram cannonballs, Mons Meg was used as a roving siege gun in the fifteenth century, but by the 1540s was retired to Edinburgh Castle to blast out ceremonial salutes. One of these celebrated the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the French dauphin in 1558, but Meg’s birthday greeting to the future King James VII in 1681 was her last full-throated outburst. The gun’s great mouth—or “muckle mou”—burst, occasioning the later Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson to exclaim in Scots,
Oh willawins! mons meg, for you, woe!
’Twas firing crack’t thy muckle mou;
What black mishanter gart ye spew mischance made
Baith gut and ga’! both; gall
I fear they bang’d thy belly fu’ full
Against the law.
In the 1600s John Taylor, who climbed inside, was told the gun’s barrel was “so great within that a Childe was once gotten there,” while in late nineteenth-century California Robert Louis Stevenson met a man who “remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg.” The Castle’s modern guardians have long since placed a grate across the muzzle so that it is no longer possible to insert even the smallest human being. The great gun still excites visitors, though. I remember my infant daughter performing a gleeful pas-de-bas on meeting her, dancing in the cannon’s mouth.
This ancient weapon is a favourite Edinburgh emblem, though it is a nearby, far more modern piece of ordnance which is fired daily at one o’clock to alarm visitors and summon the city’s residents to lunch. Today’s Castle is a spectacular showpiece. Tourists hear how the citadel changed hands several times under sustained attack during the late-medieval Scottish Wars of Independence. Often besieged—and once bombed by a 1916 German Zeppelin—this architectural icon is a doughty symbol of Scotland’s refusal to be subjugated by centuries of (mainly English) attackers. Yet its story is also one of complex Scottish infighting. During the sixteenth-century Reformation, it was held by a local garrison commanded by Sir William Kirkcaldy. For all his Protestantism and friendship with John Knox, Kirkcaldy was loyal to his Catholic sovereign, Mary Queen of Scots. Mary had given birth to her son, the future King James VI of Scotland, in Edinburgh Castle in 1566, and for three long years after her imprisonment in England by Queen Elizabeth, Kirkcaldy held the Castle for his exiled sovereign. Eventually it fell to a combined English and Scottish force. In “Ane Ballat [Ballad] of the Captane of the Castell,” Kirkcaldy defended Mary as his rightful “prince” and denounced all who “Abused hir, accused hir / With serpent wordis fell [evil].” He was hanged for his trouble. Modern visitors to the Castle’s Palace area can see a cartouche bearing the date 1566 and the monogram “MAH” (for Mary and her then husband, Henry, Lord Darnley) above a door close to the small room where James Stuart, James VI, that last king of an independent Scotland, was born. This room has a medieval ceiling and, high on the walls, ornamentation incorporating the Latin initials “MR” and “IR”—for Maria Regina and Iacobus Rex—painted in 1617. Fourteen years earlier, James had headed south to succeed Queen Elizabeth I of England at the time of the Union of the Crowns of the Scottish and English kingdoms. An enthusiast for the divine right of kings, he relished being the first monarch of all Britain.
6. Mons Meg, used as a roving siege gun in the fifteenth century, is one of the world’s oldest surviving large cannons. Meg has been admired by visitors to Edinburgh Castle since the 1540s, but was last fired in 1681.
If Edinburgh Castle is most usually associated with royal struggles, titled people, and battling kingdoms, it is also a place bound up with the city’s largely forgotten insurgent democratic energies. The Edinburgh democrats David Downie and Robert Watt were held there after their arrest in 1794. Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, after the British government’s suppression of the radical Friends of the People in Edinburgh, Watt and Downie were involved in a plot to manufacture pikes for use in a popular insurrection. Edinburgh Castle was to be captured, the town’s judges and magistrates seized, public banks taken over; then the king in London was to be ordered to end war with France. Downie, a goldsmith, and Watt, a bookseller’s clerk in his thirties, had hoped to storm the Castle as if it were a Scottish Bastille. Instead they found themselves arrested and incarcerated there. Drawn with a dignified countenance by the celebrated Edinburgh miniaturist John Kay in 1794, Downie was banished and died in exile. Wrapped in a greatcoat and wearing a red nightcap, his stockings hanging loose, a wretched-looking Watt was hauled from the Castle on a black-painted hurdle drawn by a white horse and heavily guarded by soldiers. He was executed farther down the Royal Mile for what was called in court “one of the wildest phrenzies that ever entered into the heart of man.”
Such democratic conspiracies are seldom mentioned by the Castle’s present-day guardians, but are as much part of the history of Edinburgh as the sufferings and machinations during the era of Mary Queen of Scots or the exciting moment in 1818 when the arch-royalist Walter Scott (who had helped beat up democratic radicals as a young man) discovered in Edinburgh Castle the forgotten crown jewels of King James VI’s Stuart dynasty. Today the royal regalia are proudly displayed behind glass. Scott’s Castle was a Romantic treasure trove: feudalism in stone, timber, and metalwork. The Castle of Watt and Downie represented oppressively antidemocratic authority. High on its dark rock, hiding its prison cells and dominating the city, this great fortress evokes not just the Bastille but also Kafka’s castle above Prague. For hundreds of years it served as a gaol for notable Scots. Imprisoned there in the fifteenth century, poet and Latinist Gavin Douglas (translator of the Æneid) complained it was “wyndy and richt [right] unple-sand.”
With all its violent past and imposing architectural hodgepodge, Edinburgh Castle still provides dignity, as well as panoramic vistas. At the Castle Rock’s highest point stands a small chapel dedicated (probably in the twelfth century) to the memory of St. Margaret. A revered immigrant, that Hungarian-born and English-reared queen of Scotland died in 1093 after reigning with her Scottish husband, King Malcolm Canmore. Her Vita (Life), written in Latin soon after Margaret’s death by her confessor, Turgot, is the first biography of a Scotswoman. It celebrates her learning, piety, and determination, presenting her as saintly but tough: she delights in books, meditates frequently on “the terrible day of judgment,” and tells the governor who looks after her children “to whip them when they were naughty.” For all that the architecture of St. Margaret’s Chapel has been modified over the centuries, and measures only around thirty feet by fifteen, it has a stateliness enhanced by its stained-glass windows. Designed by Douglas Strachan in 1922, these depict Scottish saints and warriors, Margaret being the only woman amongst them. Her presence in this small space, like her association with the founding of the grander Holyrood Abbey at the other end of the Royal Mile, asserts that Edinburgh is a city whose physical structure speaks of femininity as well as masculinity. The Royal Mile runs from Margaret to Margaret. Close to her chapel on the Castle Rock, the much more masculine space of the Scottish National War Memorial, planned by Sir Robert Lorimer and built in the 1920s to memorialize Scottish troops killed in World War I, is not without its own female figures. Interior bronze reliefs by Alice Meredith Williams memorialize the Women’s Services. Lorimer’s shrine has a paved floor of Ailsa Craig granite out of which bursts the bare rock on which the Castle sits. This chapel articulates a sense of sacrifice, but of endurance too. It appears ancient, but is also modern—like the Castle itself.
This present chapter (like Edinburgh, some would say) is very much about appearances; it is about modes of looking and control, and about the city’s official and unofficial view of itself. Anyone who strolls down the north side of Castlehill, a little below the Esplanade, can enjoy fine views over the city as well as down the Royal Mile; but the best vantage point—sanctioned by generations of locals and tourists alike—is from the pinnacle of the nearby tall, curious building known as the Camera Obscura which now houses a popular “world of illusions.” Here, just a few hundred yards from the venerable Mons Meg, are twenty-first-century holographs, what is billed as our planet’s “largest plasmasphere,” and a host of other high-tech optical devices. On the top storey sits an older invention: a camera obscura, which is a large flat circular screen more than twenty feet in diameter onto which a complex periscope-like arrangement of lenses and mirrors projects real-time images of the surrounding city—from the Castle portcullis to Princes Street and the distant hills of Fife. If Edinburgh is sometimes regarded, not least by Glaswegians, as a city whose superior surfaces mask inveterate nosiness, the top floor of the Camera Obscura wholeheartedly confirms this. When I last visited, its “megascope,” touted as “probably the world’s most powerful public telescope,” was strategically placed to snoop on passersby. Tourists are asked politely not to point the building’s surveillance equipment at neighbouring windows. Indoors, though, wholly unobserved under cover of the small, tower-top dome, the traditional camera obscura lets adults and fascinated children spy with gleeful abandon: zooming in on soldiers with rifles guarding the entry to the Castle, on couples strolling among the grassy slopes of Princes Street Gardens, or on shoppers with carrier-bags walking along the Royal Mile. Few can resist this quintessentially Edinburgh pleasure—a citywide intelligence gathering that rings changes on the traditional Scottish Calvinist’s anxiously invasive search for signs of saving grace. To survey the Camera Obscura’s own little-known history and the lives of its founders reveals much about the mores of Scotland’s capital. Familiar in the mid-nineteenth century as “Short’s Observatory,” the building’s lower storeys once formed part of a seventeenth-century tenement; they were remodeled in 1853 under instructions from the redoubtable entrepreneur Maria Theresa Short.
Thought by some to have been an impostor, this lady appears to have returned from the West Indies in 1827, declaring herself the daughter of local optician Thomas Short, who had helped to establish an observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill in 1776. James Craig, planner of the city’s New Town area, had designed an octagonal observatory for Calton Hill. His scheme had been modified by the celebrated architect Robert Adam, eager for the observatory to resemble a fortress. Building commenced, but when money ran out Thomas Short turned the structure into his family home, erecting a little observatory nearby. After Thomas’s death, a family feud involving combat with blades and guns led to the abandonment of the observatory, but the campaigning Maria Theresa got hold of its great telescope and was allowed to set up a new, wooden building not far off. A popular Calton Hill alternative to the neighbouring, much grander Royal Observatory, this wooden structure was controversial; Maria Theresa Short, a feisty woman with markedly Catholic forenames in a male-dominated Protestant society, was soon subjected to criticism.
For all that it contained powerful scientific instruments, her observatory was unashamedly crowd-pleasing. It had sideshows, statuary, and what the polite Edinburgh bourgeoisie saw as a “peep show.” Accused of being behind the “teasing and pestering” of walkers on Calton Hill, Short maintained: “All I have ever done has been simply to point out the Observatory to strangers.” In 1834 Lord Cockburn scornfully described her observatory, then in its planning stages, as “a wooden show-box about thirty feet high and as many in diameter, in the form of an inverted punch-bowl, which was to rest on a rim of wall six feet high, and to be open night and day for a camera obscura, telescopes, and all manner of optical exhibitions.” Cockburn persuaded the Town Council to rescind permission for the observatory’s construction, but Maria fought back. So, Cockburn complained, the “abominable edifice” was built. In 1836 the Scotsman was advertising its “SPLENDID CAMERA OBSCURA . . . of 12 feet focal length . . . adapted for displaying the magnificent scenery around the Calton Hill.” A decade later, advertisements proclaimed that “for one week only” the observatory would host a public explanation of the principles underlying “THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH, which is creating a sensation in the Scientific World at the present period.” Attempts to turn the nearby Nelson Monument into “a place of exhibition” by installing a camera obscura inside it drew the ire of the Town Council. A local councillor suggested facetiously that this optical device should be used to monitor church attendance on Sundays, with policemen noting down details of “carriages, cabs, and other vehicles” conveying people to their kirks. Maria Theresa Short unsettled Edinburgh. A petition was got up against her. One prominent citizen complained of “the annoyance to which the Council had for so many years been subjected from the proprietrix of the Observatory.”
By 1850, despite Miss Short’s having mounted three appeals, the Town Council voted by twelve votes to six to have her observatory removed. Dr. William Glover, one of the dissenting members, complained that this “was neither just nor honest.” Author Samuel Laing lamented the banishing of Short’s “good solar microscope, models of various interesting machines, such as the atmospheric locomotive engine, and the electric telegraph, showing their working”—not to mention the telescopes and displays which nourished the imagination: “For the small sum of three pence the intelligent school-boy or the reading artisan could realize in his mind the aspects of the moon, of Jupiter, of Saturn.” Laing complained that “a great educational means, honourable to the city” had been “swept away one morning by order of the provost, baillies, and town council, because the proprietrix’s servant had insulted the dignity and disturbed the quietude of a town councillor’s digestive walk on the esplanade, by thrusting into his hand a bill of the wonders of animalculæ exhibited by the microscope in a drop of water.” Laing’s colourful denunciation of a zealous Council who had made sure the finest telescope was “thrown out on the green” and the observatory’s “roof and walls torn down” was disputed, but carries conviction in its defence of the enterprising “proprietrix.”
Short was not a woman to be suppressed. After she married Robert Henderson in 1849, she and her husband purchased property on Castlehill and converted that into a reborn “Short’s Observatory.” After rebuilding the side and rear walls of the old tenement in ashlar (squared stone), the new owners added two storeys topped by fortress-like battlements surrounding a wooden octagonal domed structure. By the 1860s, advertisements were proudly proclaiming “TO STRANGERS VISITING EDINBURGH” that “the only Point from which [one can obtain] a complete View of the entire City, with the surrounding Country, is from the Tower of SHORT’S OBSERVATORY, CASTLE HILL.” If Maria Theresa Short had lost her battles on Calton Hill, on Castlehill she erected her tower of victory. Along with the camera obscura, she advertised “Grand Solar and Compound Microscopes.” Visitors were given maps of Edinburgh “in which every place of interest is clearly marked”; these complemented the “pictorial effect” of the camera obscura itself.
The view from the top of the tower is still breathtaking. After Short’s death in 1869, her establishment was taken over by W. D. Hart, a “philosophical instrument-maker,” who lived in it with his family. His business interests including fitting newly fashionable electric bells to Edinburgh properties, ranging “from Mansions to Stables.” Hart kept the name “Short’s Observatory,” and the tower remained a popular family attraction in the Victorian city. Renovating and refitting it, he incorporated a lecture room and set up telescopes alongside “beautiful working models of machinery which are wrought by electricity.” These included a model railway, pumping engines, and telegraph instruments “which the visitors are allowed to work at pleasure.” In the 1890s, after Hart’s death, most of his observatory’s contents—from a “galvanic machine” to a large barrel organ—were sold off and the property was taken over by an imaginative polymath, Patrick Geddes. An enthusiast for microscopes and all kinds of science, Geddes kept the camera obscura, but carried out a remarkable reorganization of the building, changing its name to the Outlook Tower. Its uniqueness was now boosted by Geddes’s own far-reaching vision.
Born in Aberdeenshire in 1854, Geddes had studied briefly with the Darwinist T. H. Huxley in London, and had helped to regenerate old properties in the Royal Mile. A product of Edinburgh’s tradition of encyclopædism (in his twenties he had written for the locally produced Encyclopædia Britannica), he sought a renaissance in Scottish culture. As a young man in the 1880s, the charismatic Geddes gave daring public “Lectures to Ladies” on “The Elements of Biology.” Dashing and brilliant, when he established his Outlook Tower in 1892 he was best known as the co-author of The Evolution of Sex. Seeking to relate biology to human behaviour, Geddes was often controversial, but also a conservationist. In Edinburgh he helped to restore houses near the Castle at Ramsay Gardens, today one of the city’s most exclusive addresses, where he took up residence close to his Outlook Tower. Ramsay Gardens incorporated the old home, nicknamed the “Goose Pie,” designed by eighteenth-century poet Allan Ramsay, whose anthology The Ever Green had collected and revived glories of older Scottish poetry. From the Outlook Tower, Geddes ran summer schools for men and women that offered courses relating to his interest in social evolution. Drawing on much older traditions of the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France, he helped to found a modern Franco-Scottish Society. He set up the Edinburgh Social Union. He produced his own new magazine, The Evergreen, calling for a “Scots Renascence” and questioning the anglicizing of Scottish education and customs. Geddes wanted nothing less than a fresh synthesis between culture and democracy.
In 1895 he wrote about the need to “express the larger view of Edinburgh as not only a National and Imperial, but a European city—the larger view of Scotland, again as in recent, in mediæval, most of all in ancient times, one of the European Powers of Culture—as of course far smaller countries like Norway are to-day.” His invocation of Norway, which was then seeking independence from Sweden, signals a Scottish nationalist aspect to his thought, and he was inspirational for Scotland’s greatest twentieth-century poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, who championed the cause of political independence as well as a Scottish renaissance in culture. Like MacDiarmid, Geddes saw Scottish nationalism and internationalism as interdependent.
At the Outlook Tower, Geddes established what has been seen as the world’s first sociological museum. A 1906 booklet, A First Visit to the Outlook Tower, sets out his unsettling ideas. Visitors were first of all rushed up a spiral staircase to the very top, “because the exertion of climbing makes one’s blood circulate more rapidly, thus clearing the fog out of the brain and preparing one physically for the mental thrill of these outlooks.” People contemplated life through the camera obscura. Then they sat in a darkened “in-look room,” encouraged to ponder the significance of what they had seen. Next, they descended via different floors of the building given over respectively to Edinburgh, to Scotland, to language, to Europe, and to the world. Loving holistic views, Geddes sought a synthesis of the arts and sciences, including what he had learned in Paris to call “La Science Sociale”; across his lifetime, his correspondents ranged from Charles Darwin to Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Convinced that “physics and æsthetics, economics and ethics are alike steadily recovering their long-forgotten unity,” Geddes emphasized repeatedly the need to begin with the local and move towards the universal. The man who had taken over Short’s Observatory was an enthusiast for Edinburgh as a city of encyclopædic vision. He was sure that “the studies of sun and stars, of rock and flower, of beast and man, of race and destiny are becoming once more a single discipline.”
If his talk of “race and destiny” now sounds worrying, Geddes’s work on environmental studies, “civics,” and town planning was nonetheless influential. Having set up a small Environment Society in Edinburgh with a local teacher, he went on to help shape the establishment of the British Sociological Society in 1903, and had a viewpoint that, like his Outlook Tower, was productively eccentric and visionary. “This is a green world,” wrote this biologist, town planner, and environmentalist, “with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependant on the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.”
Geddes’s words have been quoted by twenty-first-century Edinburgh campaigners from the “People’s Republic of the Canongate” and by environmental activists in the United States. He saw his Outlook Tower as a national resource helping to set forth a vision of human ecology; he held some of his summer schools at the nearby sixteenth-century Riddle’s Court, while to further his vision he sought to establish a linked series of national museums and exhibition centres in Edinburgh and internationally. Though these ambitious schemes failed, they fed into his books City Development: A Study of Parks, Gardens, and Culture Institutes (1904) and Cities in Evolution (1915), which incorporates his sketch of the Outlook Tower. Geddes coined the term “conurbation,” but emphasized, too, the importance of regionalism and the understanding of local historic environments—whether in Edinburgh, India, or Palestine. His staging of a large urban exhibition in the Scottish capital brought an invitation to contribute on a grand scale to town planning in India, while his work was taken to the United States by admirers like Lewis Mumford.
It was the Old Town of Edinburgh and the Outlook Tower which inspired Geddes. They were the laboratory for his developing “Science of Cities.” He rejoiced that “amid what was and is the most dense and dire confusion of material and human wreck and misery in Europe, we have every here and there some spark of art, some strenuous beginnings of civic sanitation, some group of healthy homes of workman and student, of rich and poor, some slight but daily strengthening of Democracy with Culture; and this in no parliamentary and abstract sense, but in the civic and concrete one.” The present-day structures at the Outlook Tower, Ramsay Gardens, and elsewhere are among the local legacies of this visionary.
Geddes imagined an Old Town renaissance bound up with “towers of great observatories” such as his own. In Edinburgh, the Outlook Tower has been seen both as a forerunner of the mid-twentieth-century “Mass Observation” project and as an eccentric tourist attraction. Familiar today as the commercially oriented Camera Obscura, the building survives as an emblem of Geddes’s town-planning ideals, and of the earlier scientific populism of Maria Theresa Short. Both were imaginative stagers of exhibitions, though Geddes’s Outlook Tower was not financially self-sustaining. The twenty-first-century Camera Obscura, with its popular scientific optical illusions, telescopes, and exhibits, is closer to Short’s vision. Yet few who climb the flights of stone stairs to the rooftop camera obscura can fail to see Edinburgh as a jewel of the town planning which so fascinated and inspired Patrick Geddes.
Not far from the Camera Obscura is Lady Stair’s Close, where Robert Burns lodged in 1786 on his first visit to the Scottish capital. Today, small exhibitions about Burns, Walter Scott, R. L. Stevenson, and others connected with literary Edinburgh are part of the alluring, low-lintelled Writers’ Museum housed in seventeenth-century-style premises within the Close. Outside, in “Makars’ [Poets’] Court,” quotations from Scottish literature are carved into flagstones. Higher up the hill, from the airier vantage point of the Camera Obscura, you can see the nearby towers of Edinburgh University’s divinity school (New College) and the Assembly Halls on Mound Place that host the meetings of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly—its annual ecclesiastical parliament. The New College and Assembly Halls complex of buildings is celebrated for its imposing bronze statue of that sixteenth-century leader of the nation’s Protestant Reformation, John Knox (c. 1513–1572), who championed the educational ideal of having a school in every Scottish parish. The long-bearded Knox stands on the left, with one arm raised, just inside the courtyard of the college.
7. Surmounted by a round white wall and small dark dome, the Camera Obscura is a landmark on the Old Town skyline. Here viewed from the north, it rises beyond the imposing towers of New College and the Church of Scotland’s Assembly Halls. This photograph was taken from an upper-storey window in the New Town’s Princes Street, with Princes Street Gardens in the foreground.
New College was new in 1846. During that year, it was established as an educational arm of the strictly Presbyterian Free Church of Scotland, whose ministers had staged a mass walkout from the established Church of Scotland three years earlier, protesting against aristocratic interference in the democratic rights of their congregations. Other spires cluster around, including that of the Tolbooth Church on Castlehill (now headquarters of the Edinburgh International Festival) and the Tron Kirk, remodeled in each of the past four centuries, and still upright, if disused, in the part of the Royal Mile known as the High Street. Yet no Edinburgh ecclesiastical building is more striking than the High Kirk of St. Giles, which stands surrounded by a courtyard farther down the High Street’s south side. St. Giles and the surrounding buildings constitute a rich nexus of Scottish culture. In the cobbled roadway outside, several stones are patterned in a heart shape, indicating the site of the Old Tolbooth prison featured in one of Walter Scott’s finest novels, The Heart of Midlothian. When that gaol was demolished, the obsessive antiquarian Scott looted its ancient door, which still survives with a hoard of spoils in his mansion at Abbotsford in the Scottish Borders. Not far from the cobblestone heart beside St. Giles, trampled by tourists and parked on by cars, is John Knox’s grave. It is marked only by a small plaque on parking space 23. Few people recognize its significance, but—charismatically stern, egotistically masculine, iconoclastic, and vigorously democratic—Knox still holds a place of ambivalence in Edinburgh’s heart, while the High Kirk where he once preached remains a flourishing place of worship.
Beside St. Giles are the Law Courts, a complex of buildings including the old Parliament House (where the pre-1707 Scottish Parliament met), the High Court, and attendant legal quarters, as well as several law-related libraries. Architecturally noble among these, though generally closed to the public, are the grand Signet Library (used by lawyers known as “Writers to the Signet”) and the Advocates’ Library, which appointed philosopher and historian David Hume as its Keeper in 1752. The National Library of Scotland, a less æsthetically distinguished newcomer built mainly in the 1950s, backs on to these older book hoards, but there is no through-way for the general public. Visitors have to enter the National Library from round the corner on George IV Bridge to see a free public exhibition of its world-class John Murray Archive (manuscripts of Byron, Darwin, Jane Austen, David Livingstone, and many others) or to apply to consult its millions of books. The law requires that one copy of every volume published in Britain be sent there.
Books have long mattered in Edinburgh. The city was an important centre for publishers and printers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; but its most scandalous book-related incident is reputed to have taken place much earlier, in 1637—not in a library or a printing house, but in St. Giles. Having had a new Parliament House and law courts built over the church’s old graveyard, the London-based King Charles I decided that unruly Scots Presbyterians should be subject to a new, Anglican prayer book. Its rules presumed that worshippers would kneel at Communion, venerate saints’ days, and engage in other threateningly Romish and thoroughly un-John-Knoxian practices. Legend has it that when this prayer book was introduced at St. Giles on July 23, 1637, an old woman named Jenny Geddes, who sold vegetables in the street nearby, was sitting on a wooden stool in the congregation. As the Bishop of Edinburgh encouraged a public reading from the new prayer book, Jenny yelled with biblical vehemence, “Out, thou false thief, dost thou say mass at my lug [ear]?” and hurled her stool at the preacher. A riot ensued. Whether or not she existed, Jenny Geddes, female and feisty in a man’s world, iconoclastic and resolutely egalitarian, embodies something dear to a great many Scots, whatever their religious beliefs. Few people today could identify the life-size equestrian statue outside St. Giles in Parliament Square as that of Charles II, son of the prayer-book-toting Charles I; but for generations, almost all Scots knew who Jenny Geddes was. Robert Burns, poet and horseman, named his mare after her. The horse threw him.
When Edinburgh was founded as a burgh around 1130, St. Giles was to be its large-scale parish church. Almost nothing of the twelfth-century structure remains. Medieval Scottish chroniclers record that it was burned by the English when they sacked the city in 1385. The following century saw extensive building on the site, and the distinctive crowned Scottish Late Gothic spire, still one of the glories of Edinburgh’s skyline, was in place by 1500. Knox became minister of St. Giles in 1560, the most decisive year of the Scottish Reformation. The church’s shining weathercock arrived in 1567, crafted by skilled smith Alexander Hunyman. Long before that, rows of timber-fronted booths, or lock-up shops—the “luckenbooths”—had been built by silversmiths and other traders nearby, partly blocking the roadway. The name “Luckenbooths” was later applied to tall tenements on the High Street, built to overlook the lock-ups, but the original Luckenbooths were demolished in 1817. “Luckenbooth brooches,” once sold by silversmiths from their booths, are still designed for sale in local jewellery shops. These small silver love tokens often feature two intertwined hearts ornamented with precious stones. Traditional, wish-laden, often delicately elaborate, they are Edinburgh at its most romantic.
The demolition of the Luckenbooths was part of the early nineteenth-century rebuilding of Parliament Square and St. Giles. In the later eighteenth century, the church’s minister had been Hugh Blair, whose blandly eloquent sermons were read across the English-speaking world; but St. Giles decayed after Blair’s death. In the 1820s it was still functioning as a kirk, but it also housed police offices and provided stabling for a fire engine. The Victorians rebuilt most of the external walls, and in the 1870s—spurred by Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, William Chambers—made the kirk’s interior dourly grand. Shortly before World War I, architect Sir Robert Lorimer added the tall, elongated, Gothic-style Thistle Chapel, but the overall interior remains what The Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh calls the nation’s “finest piece of late medieval parish church architecture.” People who enter St. Giles today see an uneasy stand-off between its original Catholic cathedral-grandeur and its later Protestant heritage. They may also realize that it has a resonant bookishness that grandly outdistances Jenny Geddes’s spirited critique of the Anglican prayer book. Though there is no poets’ corner, the Moray Chapel bears an inscription by Scotland’s great Renaissance poet George Buchanan, while the South Aisle has bronze reliefs of Robert Fergusson and of the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant; not far off is Augustus St. Gaudens’s life-size bronze of Robert Louis Stevenson reclining on his chaise longue. Stevenson, who trained nearby to be an advocate, would have been surprised to find himself lolling for all eternity in St. Giles, so close to the courts where he spent many boring hours observing Edinburgh lawmen and learning “to breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf.”
8. This view of the Royal Mile looks eastward down the High Street toward the distinctive crowned spire of St. Giles Cathedral, with the Firth of Forth visible over the rooftops beyond.
9. The interior of St. Giles, photographed in 1948 during the second year of the Edinburgh Festival. Today the renovated interior is little changed, and the imposing High Kirk is used not only for religious services but also as a venue for Edinburgh Festival performances.
Around St. Giles, lawyers come and go as they have done for centuries. Yet for a few weeks each summer since 1947, the Edinburgh Festival has put a very different complexion on things. Once the Festival was all opera and high culture; several of T. S. Eliot’s plays were premiered there. Gradually, however, the official Festival has been engorged by its huge “Fringe,” which features all sorts of performances, ranging from stand-up comedy to students’ Shakespeare. Almost every public space in the city, including the High Kirk, becomes a venue for artistes. I remember being taken as a child in the 1960s to see a rather solemn procession entering St. Giles for a religious service to bless the Festival’s commencement; more recently, I have stood with my son, perched on a low stone wall near the High Kirk’s door, watching an Australian juggler delighting the crowd, and a fire-eater manoeuvring a unicycle taller than a man. He cycled away, oblivious to any disrespect, neatly over John Knox’s grave.
Another John—John Scott, Master Wright to the Town of Edinburgh—designed the magnificent hammer-beam roof of the old Parliament Hall, built in the 1630s. Its sculpted Danish oak is now more than matched by the great beams of the debating chamber in the new Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, but Parliament Hall conjures up its own telling sense of museum-like emptiness. Here, about a hundred steps back from the Heart of Midlothian patterned in the cobbles outside, is where the old Scottish Parliament died. Most of the statues around the walls (Walter Scott, the judge and diarist Lord Cockburn, Francis Jeffrey, law lord and founder of the Edinburgh Review) portray nineteenth-century Unionists. Yet it is impossible not to reflect on the pre-1707 bustle which made this room the centre of Scottish political wrangling, before parliamentary power in Scotland’s capital was killed off for almost three centuries. However much British Unionist historians and commentators have tried to defuse its eloquence, the account given by George Lockhart of Carnwath, a Jacobite member of the old Parliament, remains utterly compelling:
And so the Union commenced on the first of May 1707, a day never to be forgot by Scotland. A day on which the Scots were stripped of what their predecessors had gallantly maintained for many hundred years—I mean the independency and sovereignty of the kingdom. Both which the Earl of Seafield so little valued that when he, as Chancellor, signed the engrossed exemplification of the Act of Union, he returned it to the clerk, in the face of Parliament with this despising and contemning remark: “now there’s ane end of ane old song.”
If Parliament Hall remains as a reminder of a parliament that was almost lost forever, then the libraries that surround it show something of the book culture that helped to maintain Scottish identity. That self-image was reinforced by the country’s legal, ecclesiastical, and educational institutions, whose distinctiveness survived the Union and still continues. Walter Scott, an Edinburgh-trained lawyer, read in these libraries. His late-Victorian successor, R. L. Stevenson, a less eager law student, pointed out with novelistic glee that beyond Parliament Hall “you may see Scott’s place within the bar, where he wrote many a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial proceeding.” Accessible from Parliament Square, the Signet Library was being constructed when Scott’s first novel, Waverley, went on sale in 1814. This library is on two levels, the upper particularly notable for its long, light, book-lined extent, and a central dome thronged with images of ancient and modern poets, philosophers, historians, the god Apollo, and the nine Muses. By 1821, when Thomas Stothard painted these, many a “drone of judicial proceeding” had been heard, and Scott, Edinburgh’s most famous lawyer, had published thirteen major novels in seven years.
In their extant architectural form, the surrounding book rooms such as the Solicitors’ Library and the Advocates’ Library are nineteenth-century structures. Originally founded in 1689 by novelist and lawyer Sir George Mackenzie (later nicknamed “Bluidy Mackenzie” for his persecution of the fundamentalist Protestant Covenanters), the Advocates’ Library began as a collection of specialist texts for Edinburgh’s legal fraternity, but soon some poetry, theology, and even fiction were added. The library was used by Edinburgh Advocates such as the eighteenth-century biographer and diarist James Boswell, who became one of its curators. Its most famous librarian was the great philosopher David Hume, who held what he called the “genteel office” of Keeper of the Advocates’ Library from 1752 until 1758. During Hume’s tenure, there was some controversy over “indecent Books” such as L’Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (The Amorous History of the Gauls)—a work promptly expunged from the Library’s catalogue. The Francophile Hume, then at work on An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758), seems to have been uncomfortable in his post; he is rightly remembered as an incisive Enlightenment thinker who explored ways of knowing and interrogated theories of causation, rather than as a law librarian. His emphasis on the value of the imagination in perception and comprehension accords with his remark in his work on “human understanding” that in the perfect republic “music, poetry, and contemplation” would be the “sole business.” Articulating this ideal, he does not mention the business of lawyers.
Today frequented by prosperous-looking legal professionals, most of whom are male, the area around and especially behind St. Giles can seem Edinburgh at its most exclusive. It is also rich in strange stories from the past. Just after Hume left the Advocates’ Library, inside the Parliament House eighteenth-century entrepreneur and author Peter Williamson set up Indian Peter’s Coffee Room, sadly no longer extant. Kidnapped from Aberdeen at the age of ten, Williamson had been taken to America where he was sold for sixteen shillings as an indentured slave to a fellow Scot in Pennsylvania. Not long afterwards, he was captured and tortured by Native Americans; he escaped and thereafter served with the British army at the siege of Fort Oswego. His autobiographical French and Indian Cruelty (1757) records his “kidnapping” and his progress—“bruis’d[,] cut, mangled and terrified”—across eastern North America. The Edinburgh hangman ordered that this book be publicly burned because of its accusations against Williamson’s Scottish abductors, but Peter won legal actions against them and became one of the capital’s most colourful Enlightenment characters, setting up not just his Coffee Room and a newspaper, the Scots Spy, but also the city’s first street directory and penny postal service. For this last accomplishment he was awarded a substantial pension, and he would stroll past St. Giles looking rather different from the 1759 engraving which depicts him smoking a very long pipe and wearing the attire of a Native American of Delaware. Frequently republished, tales of Williamson’s kidnapping and adventures were popular far beyond the Parliament House, and, more than a century later, were surely familiar to the future Edinburgh author of Kidnapped.
Tellingly, R. L. Stevenson points out in Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes that the Parliament House, built on a slope, presents one storey to the north, but many to the south, “and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries.” The Victorian writer takes his readers “by the flicker of a match” through “a labyrinth of stone cellars” below ground, under “the interminable pattering of legal feet,” down past the cells, past a lumber room full of artefacts—“lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door with a shot hole through a panel, behind which a man fell dead.” Eventually, now with the aid of “a peep of yellow gaslight,” his readers pass an engine and “gear of the steam ventilator,” then exit through the engineers’ door into what was then Edinburgh’s “Irish quarter,” associated with the notorious murderers Burke and Hare: “broken shutters, wry gables, old palsied houses on the brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for human pigs.”
Disconcertingly, Stevenson has passed in one short walk from respectable legal tedium to dire squalor, where the poor “will return at night and stagger to their pallets.” This city of closely compacted contrasts is the Edinburgh which underpins The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as the imagination of Stevenson’s Edinburgh admirer Arthur Conan Doyle: both men set their most celebrated crime fictions in London, but it was a London nourished by the Scottish capital. In the twenty-first century, the narrow, below-street-level stacks where the National Library of Scotland stores some of its many tomes recall Stevenson’s words about “range after range of vaults,” while the dark chasm of the Cowgate at night, seen vertiginously from George IV Bridge as it tunnels along the back of the Law Courts behind St. Giles, can still echo with taunts and druggy yells very different from the Parliament Square lawyers’ billable, measured tones by day.
Parts of the Royal Mile were once thronged with children. In the 1760s, according to Burns’s Edinburgh publisher, William Creech, “Young ladies might have walked, unattended through every street in the city.” By 1783, however, it seemed to him that “the mistresses of boarding-schools have found it necessary to advertise, that their young ladies are not permitted to go abroad without proper attendants,” since “boys, from bad examples at home, and worse abroad, are become forward and insolent.” This certainly struck the sharp-eyed forty-two-year-old English traveller Sarah Murray when she observed the street children of the Royal Mile at the end of the eighteenth century:
I never saw any thing like the swarms of children in the Canongate. I believe they do every thing but sleep in the street. It may be truly said that they are fat, ragged, and saucy: and it is not to be wondered at; for what can be expected from an education begun and ended in the street. I was one fine evening walking up this inviting Canongate, nicely dressed, in white muslin: an arch boy eyed me, and laid his scheme;—for when I arrived opposite a pool, in the golden gutter, in he dashed a large stone, and, like a monkey, ran off chuckling at his mischief.
10. Old lodging houses in the Cowgate, painted by James Riddel for the 1912 edition of Robert Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh (1824), the world’s first study of urban folklore.
Just over a hundred years later, farther up the Royal Mile, near the Castle, Castlehill School—today the premises of Scots Whisky Centre (the school’s teachers might or might not have approved the change)—counted more than a thousand children on its roll. In the twenty-first century, adult tourists predominate all along the Royal Mile, though bus parties of school students regularly visit the Castle and other sites, eager for toys and souvenirs. “If you could bring a humming top to me I would like to have it,” four-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, known in his family as “Smoutie,” wrote to his father, who was then away from the family home at 1 Inverleith Terrace in the New Town. The young boy also wanted “a kind of Swiss cottage that won’t break.” As a child, Stevenson (whose ancestors’ business was lighthouse building) was fascinated by mid-nineteenth-century street life, especially by the man who came with his ladder each evening to light the gas lamps. One of these stood outside the front door of the Stevensons’ house. “The Lamplighter” became the most famous poem in Stevenson’s deft poetic kindergarten of 1885, A Child’s Garden of Verses:
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky:
It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,
And my papa’s a banker and as rich as rich can be;
But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,
O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you.
Stevenson was an infant in the 1850s. Later in life, as cities were beginning to install electric lighting, he penned “A Plea for Gas Lamps,” praising their “warm domestic radiance.” Electric street lighting had reached Edinburgh’s principal thoroughfares by the early twentieth century, but the future novelist Muriel Spark, growing up as Muriel Camberg at 160 Brunts-field Place in the 1920s, still lived on a gas-lit tenement street. In her day, the street lamps had pilot lights. A lamplighter carrying a long pole came in the evening to turn each one on, and Muriel, like Louis in the previous century, waited at her window to watch him. One of her favourite toys was her capacious toy pram. Made for twins, it had a folding hood at either end. Her dolls, Red Rosie and Queenie, sat facing each other.
Like the Muriel Spark who so relished her childhood toys, Stevenson spent his childhood in Edinburgh and often walked past the historic tenements of the Royal Mile. One of his early books was called Virginibus Puerisque (For Boys and Girls), and he knew that his home city could captivate infants as well as impress adults. Fittingly but also innovatively, in the mid-twentieth century Edinburgh opened the first museum in the world devoted exclusively to the history of childhood. Now situated in tenements on the south side of the High Street, a little farther down the Royal Mile, this institution was started in 1955 by a town councillor, Patrick Murray. He used some of his own boyhood toys, such as his model railway set, as its nucleus. An eccentric, balding, bespectacled bachelor optician, Murray had a preoccupation with UFOs. Almost as soon as he started his museum, donated playthings flooded in. Within two years it had moved to an eighteenth-century tenement in the High Street. Three years after that, Murray left the Town Council and became the museum’s first full-time curator. Insisting that the new institution was “not aimed at children” but was “about them,” he did a brilliant job, but it is unlikely he would have been hired today. Once, when asked if he liked children, he retorted, “Not between meals.” More controversially, he encouraged a proposal to have a memorial window placed in his museum’s entrance hall showing “Good King Herod” and the infants whose slaughter that monarch had ordered. Murray’s captions for his exhibits became notorious. One, beside a display of tiny toys, read:
The Maniacal Cult of “Smallness”
The love of extremely miniature work is probably an aspect of some obscure mental disease, but it’s great fun nevertheless. In its minor form it broke out in the construction of small models which can be set in matchboxes or nutshells. But when it becomes really virulent it can only be expressed by such outrages as dressing fleas. Naturally, doing a “Flea’s Wedding” calls for extreme care as nothing reflects so badly on all concerned as a woman turned out carelessly on her wedding day.
Politically incorrect, even at times sinister-sounding, Murray was an utterly inspired curator. Today the free museum he founded occupies five storeys, crammed with everything from puppet shows, automata, and dollhouses to phenaktiscopes, zoetropes, stereoscopes, magic lanterns, and a robot donated in the 1970s by locally born sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. If you want to see a wooden miniature nineteenth-century butcher’s shop with more than forty joints of meat hanging in it, this is the place. If you simply choose to sit down with your children and play snakes and ladders on a very big board, you can do that too.
Though it may be that more of today’s youngsters clamour to visit the nearby fairground horrors of the Edinburgh Dungeon on Market Street, or to be taken to that abandoned, reputedly haunted underground street called Mary King’s Close, the Museum of Childhood is the best reminder that the Royal Mile is not just a place for adults. The tenement which houses the present-day museum was formerly the childhood home of three famous eighteenth-century Edinburgh beauties, Catherine, Jane, and Eglintoune Maxwell. All were tomboys, and there is a famous story of how young Jane (later a patroness of Robert Burns) rode a pig along the Royal Mile, with her sister Eglintoune running along behind, spurring the creature on with a stick.
While they come from several countries, many of the toys in the Museum of Childhood were made for well-off middle-class children such as Stevenson and Spark. Stevenson remembered that one day when he was a little child, in Howe Street, just round the corner from his house, he was sworn at vehemently by “a lame boy of rather a rough and poor appearance” when he asked the lad if he would like to play. Edinburgh class barriers were and are sensed even by the very young. Spark was taken to preschool children’s parties wearing a simple white-silk knitted dress adorned with feather stitching. The little kilted middle-class boys she met there were quite different from the “rough boys” she would see playing “Scotch or English?” in streets and playgrounds. This game involved tying a stone to a piece of string and swinging it round, while challenging other lads to say which country they belonged to. In her autobiography, Curriculum Vitæ, Spark recalls that though all the boys she saw playing the game were Scots, most, when challenged, would shout back “English!” and run away, trying to dodge the whirring stone. Much earlier, the famous Edinburgh mathematician and autobiographer Mary Somerville (after whom Somerville College in Oxford is named) remembered participating with other eighteenth-century girls in a game called “Scotch and English.” It “represented a raid on the debatable land, or Border between Scotland and England, in which each party tried to rob the other of their play-things. The little ones were always compelled to be English, for the bigger girls thought it too degrading.”
Since he was too sickly, and probably too middle-class, to play street games with rough lads, Stevenson, who termed some of his favourite novels “romances,” regarded childhood games of hide-and-seek as “the well-spring of romance.” Some of his greatest fictions—Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—are games of hide-and-seek: stories to play at, as well as to read. Like the Museum of Childhood, where you can see spinning tops and other toys from the Victorian era, Stevenson’s work, so much of which is rooted in his Edinburgh upbringing, is a great celebration of the vital links between play, imagination, and art.
Today a good deal of children’s play in Edinburgh, as elsewhere, takes place indoors in front of electronic screens. Yet the heritage of street games is not entirely forgotten. A cinematic classic is the short black-and-white film The Singing Street. Made in 1951 by Edinburgh’s Norton Park Group, a team of schoolteachers turned filmmakers, it features the children—mainly the girls—of Norton Park School, in the city’s working-class Abbeyhill district, not far from the east end of the Royal Mile. In a smoky city of grime-coated tenements and alongside dark, spiked railings near back-courts where white blouses and shirts hang pegged to washing-lines beside the railway, young girls, a few in headscarves and many in mid-length woollen coats, dance and sing of sweethearts and a bonnie bunch of roses. Many of their rhymes, not least the skipping songs, are designed to identify romantic partners. Stressing the regular metrical beat of the words as two girls swing the skipping rope for a third to jump over—or as they dance in a circle, hands joined and arms raised, around a girl in the centre—they sing:
The wind, the wind, the wind blows high,
The snow comes falling from the sky.
Audrey Fraser says she’ll die
For the want of the golden city.
She is handsome, she is pretty,
She is the girl of the golden city.
She is handsome, one, two, three,
Come and tell me who shall be . . .
Then come verses spelling out the sweetheart’s name. The girls’ skipping to their songs is sometimes elaborate, as they tap “Heel, toe; heel, toe; / All the way to Jericho.” Dancing, they beat time on each other’s shoulders, or weave in and out of a circle of singers chanting, “In and out of the dusty bluebells.” Though trams and buses and cars pass, they have a confident sense of their own territory. “Come on, away ye go, this is a lasses’ game,” one tells a group of boys who have come to play marbles where the girls have chalked on flagstones the markings for a game of “peever” (hopscotch). The Edinburgh filmmakers’ mid-twentieth-century movie may be choreographed to some extent, but its impetus clearly comes from the children. Touching tenement doorways as she goes, a dark-haired lass rollerskates excitedly downhill in black-and-white. Fittingly, this film is sometimes screened at the Museum of Childhood. One of the movie’s creators, mathematics and science teacher James T. R. Ritchie (1908–1998), went on to write modern classics of Edinburgh children’s lore, including the book The Singing Street (1964).
Song as well as spoken narrative for children remains part of the area, not least thanks to the work of the Scottish Storytelling Centre, opened during 2006 on the Royal Mile—next to the fine sixteenth-century museum known (traditionally but inaccurately) as John Knox’s House—in property owned by the Church of Scotland. Designed by distinguished local architect Malcolm Fraser and linked to the associated Scottish Storytelling Forum, the Centre aims to give every child in the nation the experience of live storytelling. Sustaining oral culture in Scotland and beyond, so as to enable old traditions and values to flourish in new ways, this institution presents a great range of offerings, from puppet labs and “tiny tales” for people younger than three, to workshops on Scots ballads, to spoken narratives that accompany painted scrolls illustrating Bengali chants. Vibrantly international while rooted in Edinburgh’s centuries-old inheritance, the Centre is a wee twenty-first-century castle of whispering, oral history, and song.