Hearts and minds at the core of an eccentric Odyssey around Edinburgh
As we celebrate St Andrew’s Day author Jenni Calder takes us on a tour of the city that she says “runs in her blood” despite its knots of contradiction and paradox
Walk down the Royal Mile from the Castle to the Canongate. Pause at the heart shape set into the pavement close to the entrance of the High Kirk of St Giles. The Heart of Midlothian. Not a football team but the site of the Tolbooth, a grim, multipurpose building constructed in 1561, the year after the Flodden Wall was completed in an effort to keep out the English.
Edinburgh is a knot of contradiction and paradox, as all who have written about the city acknowledge, and the heart underfoot is an emblem of paradox. The Tolbooth, built to house Scotland’s parliament, courts of justice and a prison, contained government and punishment in the one building. In 1639, government moved to a new building almost next door, leaving what Lord Cockburn described as “a most atrocious jail…the very breath of which almost struck down any stranger who entered its dismal door”. The heads of executed prisoners labelled as “traitors” were displayed on its north gable. Yet when it was eventually demolished Cockburn was sorry to see it go. In his view, nothing justified the destruction of the repository of so much history.
It went in 1817. Walter Scott secured bits of it for Abbotsford, the splendidly eclectic house he was building 40 odd miles away. Scott grew up during an extraordinary time in Edinburgh’s history. He absorbed the legacy of the Enlightenment. He witnessed parts of the Old Town being “unbuilt”, to use Cockburn’s word, and the New Town rising to the north. Like Cockburn, he regretted the passing of the old but relished the opportunity to collect and preserve.
New buildings brought destruction of the old, but sometimes destruction brought discovery. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw an unprecedented degree of disturbance of the earth, as the city expanded, canals dug, roads and railways built. The past was uncovered in a way it had never been before. Scott was a keen member of the Society of Antiquaries, founded in 1780 with the object of preserving the evidence. His novels also aimed to recover and explain Scotland’s history.
I wasn’t born in Edinburgh, but the city has run in my bloodstream from my earliest years. I absorbed it first through the stories of my parents, who both grew up in the city, then on infrequent visits to my grandmother in Heriot Row, then as an adult when I came to live in Edinburgh. And I absorbed it through the words of others, Scott and Stevenson above all. When I walk through the city today I still feel them at my shoulder.
Edinburgh is powerfully a city of the mind and the imagination that has fed many versions of its past and much fictional drama. Its castle walls rising from solid rock have a stony reality that reinforces a history resonant with conflict and stubborn contradiction. Rivals for power fought and died in the Old Town’s wynds and closes. Covenanters were imprisoned in Greyfriar’s kirkyard and executed in the Grassmarket. Riots punctuated the debates on the union of the Scottish and English parliaments. Prince Charles Edward’s army assembled in the shadow of Salisbury Crags before marching to victory at Prestonpans and eventual bitter defeat. Capital cities attract contention, but Edinburgh has perhaps seen more than most.
Twenty years after Culloden, James Craig’s plan for the New Town was approved and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was published. David Hume, Robert Adam, James Hutton, Joseph Black were revealing 0 A skyline steeped in history is the essence of Edinburgh but it’s not only when you look up that you revisit the past, it’s also beneath our feet; inset, Jenni Calder; above, Essence of Edinburgh new ways of interpreting the world. Another 20 years on, Robert Burns is making his first visit to Edinburgh. Did he perhaps, as he returned from a night’s entertainment at Crochallan Fencibles in Anchor Close, pass Deacon Brodie going about his clandestine thievery? Would Scott have clocked William Burke and William Hare delivering a fresh corpse for dissection by Dr Robert Knox? Burke was hanged in front of a large crowd in 1829, the same year Scott witnessed with great satisfaction the return of Mons Meg to the Castle. The “Auld Murdress” had been removed to London in 1754. The ceremony of return involved letting off rockets, one of which set Scott’s daughter’s bonnet on fire.
For all the overlay of tartanry and the bland and brash intrusion of modern commerce, Edinburgh’s distinctive blend of the vexatious and the volatile, the thrawn and the thoughtful, the bloodily destructive and the boldly inventive, survives. But its history and character are much more than the contradictions embodied in the Old and New Towns. Edinburgh is its rivers – Almond and Esk as well as the Water of Leith. It’s the shore of the Forth, the highway for trade and migration. It’s the surrounding coal fields and shale mines and the canal which opened in 1822. It’s the Portobello pottery kilns and the breweries that once contributed to the city’s reek. It’s the Victorian villas of Newington and Morningside and the unlovely concrete of Pilton. It’s the locked-gate gardens of the New Town and the open green spaces of the Meadows, Princes Street, Hermitage of Braid and all Edinburgh’s many parks and hills.
Edinburgh is a city of strenuous climbs and sudden
descents, of tall towers and unexpected vistas, of vertiginous bridges and discordant modernity.
It’s as contradictory now as it was when Robert Louis Stevenson stepped out of 17 Heriot Row to explore the underworld a short walk away. And that clash of respectability and infamy is still being excavated by 21st-century writers, adding to the wealth of fiction and poetry, memoirs and travellers’ tales that have described, interpreted, exposed and often censured the city.
In the early years of the 20th century, a young Naomi Mitchison finds ghosts lurking in her grandmother’s Randolph Crescent house. In the 1930s Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie takes her girls on a walk through a network of slums and barefoot children who shout obscenities at the purple-uniformed schoolgirls. In the 1940s Chiang Yee, the “Silent Traveller”, walks backwards up Blackford Hill the better to observe as he climbs the changing aspect of Arthur’s Seat.
In 1965 the poet Sydney Goodsir Smith published Kynd Kittock’s Land, a long poem about Edinburgh. The poem captures with scathing humour a dark, raucous city, smug and hypocritical, living on dreams of a noble past.
Goodsir Smith died in 1975, but if he were today to walk down the Royal Mile, with pauses for refreshment at Deacon Brodie’s and the World’s End, he wouldn’t have to dig too deep to find the Edinburgh of his poem. It appeared first as a television programme illustrated with photographs taken by Alan Daiches. Alan was my brother, and his photographs add another dimension to my experience of the city.
At the beginning of Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, set in 1736, a group of lawyers speculate on the nature of Edinburgh’s heart. “A sad heart”, they say. “And a close heart, and a hard heart…a wicked heart and a poor heart.” But then one adds, “a strong heart and a high heart”. So Midlothian’s heart contains all of human life, gentility and squalour, justice and exploitation, villainy and decency, aspiration and defeat. Two hundred years after The Heart of Midlothian’s publication, how much has changed?
● Essence of Edinburgh: An Eccentric Odyssey by Jenni Calder is published by Luath Press, priced £12.99