The Derren Brown show, Miracles, was amazing. My seat was right up front1, right on the central aisle. At one point, Derren was close enough to me that I could have licked him2. I’m not going to say anything more about the show, because it’s best to see it unspoiled. But see it. Really.
As for the rest of the day, I wandered around the Royal Mile for most of it, just kind of taking it easy and seeing stuff.
I found the Witches’ Well that Sandy told me to look for. It used to be a fountain, but doesn’t seem to have any water feature. This is where they used to burn witches, and the fountain is a memorial for that. There were a lot of witches tortured and burned in Edinburgh. They even had to come up with rules for the Witchhunters – you could only hold up to 13 witches at a time, and could only torture each one once per day. Of course, there was no law about how long the period of daily torture could last, so 24 hours was not uncommon.This is St. Giles, the church of the patron saint of Edinburgh.The statue of David Hume in the High Street. He would be very cold in that toga. I wondered about his shiny toe, and found out that it’s traditional to touch his toe for wisdom, and that keeps the verdigris from settling – it keeps getting rubbed clean. Yeah, I touched the toe.“But do ye never think about the Heart of Midlothian? Folks always spit on it in passing. That granite heart in the High Street near St. Giles that marks the gates of the erstwhile Tollbooth Jail – as nice a bit of demolition as I could wish, that. And there ye have it. The Heart of Midlothian. Of which County Edinburgh is the heart, so ye have the heart of the heart of the heart of Scotland, as ye might say, upon which we customarily spit because it marks a jail that isn’t there. There’s something right Edinburgh about that.” Robin Williamson, Edinburgh
One thing that made my day awesome was that I took a ghost tour, and the guide told us about the Tollbooth Jail and the Heart of Midlothian and encouraged us to spit in it, just like in the Robin Williamson poem.
So, yeah, I spit on the Heart of Midlothian, and that made me happier than it really should have.
James was our guide on the ghost tour. His stories were fantastic, and his character performance was great.
Something I really liked about the tour was that it didn’t deal with Burke and Hare. So many tours I’ve been on find any link to Burke and Hare, but this tour, in Edinburgh, where the pair committed their crimes, didn’t even bring them up.
There were better stories: the Duke of Queensberry and his cannibal son, Deacon William Brodie and his mad double life, Sawney Beane and his horrific family.
This is one of the underground sections of Edinburgh. After the Great Fire of Edinburgh, when the city was being rebuilt, a lot of little alleys and closes were covered over by the new construction. They were rediscovered in the 80s. This is Niddry’s Wynd, and it was only discovered about 18 months ago. It was lit only by a very faint green lantern while James told us the story of Sawney Beane. Creepy as hell.
Then, I had some nice dinner, and came back to the hotel to rest up for Derren Brown. You know how that part of the day went.
Tomorrow, Rosslyn Chapel, Dunfermline, and Stirling Castle. If the Dan Brown stuff doesn’t drive me to kill someone, I leave Edinburgh the next day, and fly back home on Sunday.
And now, for those wondering about the title of this post, I give you Edinburgh, by Robin Williamson.
