I went quite a bit of my time Edinburgh without seeing the sun. This will surprise nobody who has been to Edinburgh but in my case it was at least partially deliberate. I found myself drawn to various subterranean tourist attractions. Underground tourist attractions all work on the same principle; everything looks more interesting if it’s dimly lit and if your customers are trapped underground they’re less likely to run away. In fact The Real Mary King’s Close takes the latter part of this to extremes by warning anyone who wants to go back to wait for a guide without which presumably they will wander the underground streets of Edinburgh for ever.
For clarity a close is a street. The Royal Mile serves as the spine of old Edinburgh and the closes ran off it rather like ribs or legs of a millipede. The closes were narrow, filthy and were lined with tenement buildings up to twelve stories high. The closes tended to be named after a prominent resident. Mary King’s is the only one named after a woman. Like the other closes on this side of the Royal Mile they all sloped down to what was then an artificial lake, part of the city’s defences, and is now the best fertilised park in Edinburgh. Fast forward a couple of centuries and the local council is looking to build a prominent new building on the Royal Mile. They did this by purchasing four of the closes including Mary King’s chopping off bits of the buildings there until they were level with the Royal Mile and building the new construction on top of what was left. This means that underneath the cellar of the new building is a maze of rooms, building remnants and streets. Down into this man created labyrinth we would journey to see how people lived in days of yore.
The answer is badly. For the poor it meant being crammed in tiny rooms surrounded by people you’d rather avoid (mainly relatives). For the less poor (and Mary King was by no means poor, she was a property owner and a businesswoman at a time when technically women could be neither) it still meant being crammed into somewhat more space with perhaps fewer irritating relatives but still not somewhere you’d go on your holidays. Ok so I did go there on my holidays, do you honestly think I’m an example to follow?
We were guided through the maze by a cheerful woman dressed as a serving woman from the sixteenth century only clean. There was a series of instructions beginning with “turn off your mobile phone “ there were other instructions but I didn’t hear them because the man next to me’s mobile phone went off for the remainder of the speech.
We went through the home of a family that died of plague which was quite a popular thing to die of at the time. The various types of plague were explained. Despite the bad press bubonic plague was definitely the one to get if you had the choice. The plague doctor had a treatment for that with a 50% survival rate. Definitely the best odds in town.
We were subsequently led through a cow byre (in the middle of what was essentially an apartment block just in case you were wondering how the plague got a hold in the first place) and a comfortable middle class home (three whole rooms) which of course had a ghost because that is a must have accessory for any sixteenth century home. The ghost is that of a young girl. She caught the plague and her parents did the responsible thing and abandoned her there. Somewhat closer to our own time a Japanese mystic visited the place for one of those “inconclusive bullshit about ghosts” television shows. Said mystic identified the presence of the ghost (where would we be without such people?) but it was what she did next that impressed me. Having determined that the girl had been stuck alone for centuries with no one to play with this mystic popped back up to the Royal Mile and bought a barbie doll which she left in the room for the girl to play with. Others have followed the example and there is now a whole shrine of toys (and other weirder items) in this room. Definitely dying miserable and alone was the best thing to happen to this little girl.
The tour was fascinating and it was possibly as a result of this experience that I made my second underground foray. I admit I skimped on the initial research. Basically I saw a sign saying “Edinburgh Dungeon” and I thought it would be an informative and educational guide to some of the grimmer parts of Edinburgh’s history. It was more of an interactive music hall show without the music. Performers chewed the somewhat shabby scenery, encouraged audience participation with a slight edge of desperation in their voices and sound effects and occasional bits of moving furniture added to the atmosphere. The atmosphere being that of a group of performers taking full advantage of the fact that their audience couldn’t run away. It was the sort of thing that would be loads of fun with fewer children and more alcohol.
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