EDINBURGH EXPERT WALKING TOURS - BLOG

Within Scotland, the town of Arbroath - on the coast between Dundee and Aberdeen - has two major claims to fame. One is for the Arbroath smokie, a local smoked fish that is notorious for clearing kitchens with its rich aromas (and for that reason rarely found on restaurant menus - if you want to try it, pick up a smokie in a fishmonger and cook it in the privacy of your own home!).

But the second claim to fame is for being the location for the signing of Scotland's early statement of independence from England, known as the Declaration of Arbroath, which kickstarted seven hundred years of Scottish struggle for autonomy. And the date it happened - 6 April - is still celebrated in North America as Tartan Day.

Signed at Arbroath Abbey on 6 April 1320, the Declaration of Arbroath document is one of the earliest formal expressions of the Scots' desire to operate as an independent nation. The text is in the form of a letter to the Pope, detailing the history of Scotland as a self-governing nation, having raised "one hundred and thirteen kings ... without interruption by foreigners".

The letter seeks the Pope's support in standing against the English king, Edward I, and asks him to:

The letter makes the case that the Scots would use military might to meet any attack from the English, and asks the Pope to recognise their right to do so (despite the Pope having excommunicated King Robert I, known as Robert the Bruce, and given express right to Edward I of England to claims on Scotland as its overlord).

Interestingly, the letter isn't written directly from Robert the Bruce (who had been excommunicated for murdering John Comyn in the church at Dumfries in 1306) but from a cabal of lords and nobles, expressing a collective expression of sovereign independence, writing on behalf of the people of Scotland rather than from one single figurehead. Moreover, the lords write that if their king should move towards a position of English support, "we would immediately take steps to drive him out as the enemy ... and install another King who would make good our defence".

This is a notable assertion - to the Pope, of all people! - at a time when kings were generally believed to be appointed by God directly, and to operate with His blessing and support. The people of Scotland are telling the Pope that they will appoint a king to rule them - suggesting an assertion of the Scots' will not just against England but against the church itself.

Mostly, though, it is an expression of a collective will and a collective voice, arguing from the point of view of the common man, who wouldn't actually be given any formal political voice until over five hundred years later.

And most famously the letter contains this passage that is often cited, but which may not be an entirely accurate rendering of the original Latin text:

It's a line straight out of the Braveheart playbook of Scottish history!

And so began the long struggle for independence for Scotland, a battle waged by the people of Scotland over the last seven centuries. 

Barely three hundred years later, Scotland and England would be brought into a union - firstly of shared monarchy in 1603, and then of joint government, in 1707 - that survives today.

But there is still a strong drive for Scotland to be able to stand apart from outside governance, and many people in Scotland continue to seek greater powers for the modern Scottish Parliament, furthering the devolution of political control from the British government at Westminster.

​The latest formal public debate on the idea of independence took place in 2014, when the people of Scotland voted narrowly in favour of retaining the union as it stands. With developments in the Brexit situation since 2016, when Scotland voted to retain EU membership, there have been renewed calls for a further referendum on Scottish independence to be held.

So it is a debate that continues to be heated and divisive at times, but certainly one which shows no signs of abating.

No one can accurately foretell the future of Scotland - especially in 1320, before much of the political and social tumult which followed - but it is an interesting example of how Scotland's history manages to be bother distant and contemporary, as discussions that were being had seven centuries ago remain on the political agenda today.

Explore more of Scotland's political history with my private Edinburgh walking tours!

There's probably only one thing in Edinburgh more popular with tourists than the hoary old Harry Potter inspirations, and that's the concept of an 'underground city'.

​I have written before about the various areas of the city centre that might qualify as 'underground' attractions, but the best and most genuinely subterranean attraction of all is one that remains a hidden gem, a little further from the tourist trail than the vaults of South Bridge or Mary King's Close.

A significant stretch of these tunnels has been excavated, and a local guide will take you down with hard hats and torches to give you an introduction to the various features of the cove, along with some of the known history of the area. Then you're free to explore by yourselves - as far as you dare!

The passageways are believed to be at least 300 years old, but there is speculation that their origin goes back as far as the Roman period.

Various suggestions have been expressed about the people who may have once utilised these mysterious spaces.

• Could Mary Queen of Scots have met secret admirers here, safe from the prying eyes of her courtiers and family?
• Was it a safe harbour for persecuted figures during the Reformation, or the later Covenanters who made powerful enemies with their religious beliefs?
• Was it an atmospheric drinking den for wealthy aristocrats seeking devilry in the popular 'hell fire' clubs of the eighteenth century?
• Could the Knights Templar, known to have local associations at the nearby Rosslyn Chapel, have used it as a secret hideout? 
• Was it a storage space for Scottish smugglers operating illicit whisky stills to circumvent the British tax system?
• Or perhaps it's a Victorian folly, created as part of a wholesale invention of Scotland's mythology and heritage in the age of Walter Scott?

There are plenty of questions but no solid answers at Gilmerton Cove, and the sense of genuine mystery is something that gives it an appeal to those whose appetites are unsatisfied by the ghost tours or the artifice of the Edinburgh Dungeons. 

Even Mary King's Close lacks some of the darkness and mysterious atmosphere of these chilly, slightly damp, strangely quiet tunnels and chambers.

​So if the glare of the sun is too much for you, or you have an urge to get up-close and personal with the world beneath your feet, take the trip to Gilmerton Cove for a truly unusual, unsettling and unique experience.

For above-ground thrills, my private Edinburgh walking tours can show you more of the city and its history!

For as long as Edinburgh has had a visitor industry there have been stories about a secret tunnel running the length of the Old Town, from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Tales were told about Mary Queen of Scots making her way through this passage for covert romantic assignations, and anyone who has been on a ghost tour has probably heard about the soldier sent into the tunnel with a drum, allowing cartographers to map the line of the tunnel by tracking the sound of his drumming from the surface. He was never seen again, but when the nights are still and quiet a ghostly drum can still be heard on the Royal Mile...

The fire place had been removed for cleaning as part of the castle's extensive maintenance programme, and a void was uncovered dropping to just below the level of the dry moat that was dug in the eighteenth century, and then runs in a more or less straight line beneath the esplanade in front of the castle, to Castlehill at the top of the Royal Mile.

The first indications that this tunnel was more than just mythology were discovered in 2011 when new foundations for the seating stands for Edinburgh Military Tattoo were being built into the ground under the esplanade, when a section of rock collapsed exposing a short length of passageway.

Early explorations showed that the tunnel had been badly damaged over the years, but over the last nine years, a team of excavators have been working beneath the feet of the thousands of tourists who visit the castle to clear rock and debris from the passage. ​

So far the team have excavated approximately 150m of the tunnel, and they are being cautious about how far it may extend to at its fullest.

There's no solid idea of when the tunnel was created, by whom, how far it stretches, or what its purpose was - most likely it was a defensive structure or a military storage area.

Intriguingly, a research team based at the University of Edinburgh have uncovered references to efforts made at the time of the Reformation to provide security for Catholic priests and bishops.

So-called 'priest holes' are a common feature of a lot of historic houses in Britain, providing a hidden space behind wall panels or beneath staircases to shelter religious figures who were vulnerable to persecution. There's a reference in an old record of a similar space, a bunker or "priest closet", developed at the time of the Reformation in Scotland, that may have been accessible from the lower level of St Giles' Cathedral.

The teams are hoping that if that secret space exists beneath the cathedral, it may be part of this network of passageways that could - in theory - have reached all the way along the length of the city, providing safe passage for priests out of Edinburgh. 

Although the team hope to find evidence of the tunnel continuing further along the line of the Royal Mile, for the time being, modern utilities have made it difficult to perform the necessary LIDAR radar surveys necessary to identify if it continues as far as Holyroodhouse.

Edinburgh has had a Jewish population since the seventeenth century, when the some of the first Jewish migrants to Scotland came as merchants, medical students or professors. 

In 1642, Edinburgh University established a position teaching 'Hebrew and Oriental Languages', for which they employed a "learned Jew" from Vienna named Julius Conradus Otto. It is thought that Otto had been born a Jew in Vienna, and later converted to Christianity. He remained in post at the university until his death in 1649. In 1665 a town council meeting refers to a man named Paulus Scialitti Rabin who had converted from Judaism to Christianity in order to be able to work as a religious teacher in the city. 

The first recorded Jewish merchant given the right to operate in Edinburgh was a man named David Brown in 1691, although this was hardly the indication of a society fully open to freedom of religion - Brown was opposed by some on the council for being a threat to the religious community here.

In 1698 a Jewish trader named Moses Mosias was denied the right to operate in the city unless he convert to Christianity, and in 1717 a Jewish merchant named Isaac Queen was granted permission to establish a business in Edinburgh only after paying a fee of £100 - equivalent to around £12,000 in modern currency!

There's a focus on self-isolating and avoiding social contact at the moment, as the Covid-19 Coronavirus is sending the world into shutdown. For many people the idea of social distancing is rather challenging one, as the modern world has drawn us into ever tighter connections with those around us.

The historic concept of quarantine was developed in Venice, as a way of protecting the city from disease arriving from trade ships, and the original word 'quarantine' derived from the Italian phrase 'forty days', which was the period of isolation they specified in order to stop the transmission of illness.

The Hermitage of Braid, as it's known, is a public park and nature reserve to the south of Edinburgh, adjacent to Blackford Hill, an elevated spot with commanding views over the city.

The valley in which the park sits was carved out by the Braid burn, or stream, and is a steep ravine with heavily wooded sides. 

The land here was owned by the de Brad family (from which the modern name 'Braid' is derived), one of whom - Henry de Brad - was sheriff of Edinburgh in the twelfth century. The surrounding forests and fields would have been populated with wild board and deer, and it would have been a popular spot for hunting.

The original estate property would have been a fortified house in a castle style, but the buildings and developments here today date from the 18th century when the area was redeveloped as a place of retreat.

Robert Burn was the architect who designed and built the Hermitage House in the 1780s, replete with a pump system to bring fresh running water from the Braid burn, and an ice house, a separate feature dug into the rock of the landscape in which to store ice from the winter for keeping food fresh over the summer months.

There's also an original stable block, and a doocot - Scots for a dovecot - which would have been home to pigeons that would have been plentiful supply of meat to the estate, along with a walled garden in which fresh herbs and vegetables would have been grown.

The Old Town of Edinburgh is the area that most visitors think of as being the 'historic' bit of the city, and relatively few tourists take the time to check out the New Town...

I think the name puts them off, and people don't realise that the 'new' part of Edinburgh is still over 250 years old! As such it has over two centuries of history to explore, and offers a fantastic contrast to the Old Town and Royal Mile area.

For most of its history the city of Edinburgh was clustered along a narrow strip of rock rising to a ridge with a valley on either side of it. That ridge is still there - the Royal Mile runs along it - as are the valleys, which for a long time formed the northern and southern boundaries of the city.

But by the 1740s the population of Edinburgh was rising faster than ever, and this city with an area of just a half square mile (1.3 square kilometres) suddenly found itself with a population in excess of 50,000 people. Conditions in the old city were squalid and filthy, with as many as a thousand people living on each of the narrow lanes or 'closes' along the main street.

Plans were drawn up to formally grow the city for the first time in its history, to spread to the north onto land which was dotted with fields and farms, an area marked on maps of the time as Bearford's (or Barefoot's) Park. This land was bought up from individual landowners, and a comprehensive plan was drawn up to build a whole new town.

In 1767 development started in the area known today as St Andrew Square. This large open space was originally a private garden for the wealth people who lived around the square - all of the New Town was planned as residential property, to allow the wealthy and high-status residents of the Old Town to start a new life away from the the filth and overcrowding of the original city.

The plan for the New Town had been drawn up by a young architect called James Craig, and his vision was a grid system of three broad streets running east-west, bisected by smaller streets running north-south. It was the first example of coordinated town planning in the UK, and his grid system - although it seems common in modern planning - was a truly creative approach to the system of city development.

It took developers nearly 50 years to build the first phase of the New Town, spreading westwards from St Andrew Square, with the housing around Charlotte Square being completed in the 1820s. But the city continued growing in stages - seven major phases of development in all - spreading all the way out to the west, the north, and later to the east as well. Today everything north of Princes Street is broadly considered to be New Town.

Today the New Town is the more contemporary, local side of Edinburgh, with many local shops, offices, restaurants and bars, and the streets here have a different feel from the more tourist-focused side of the city, in the Old Town along the Royal Mile. 

The centre of Edinburgh is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the bulk of this protected area covers the New Town of Edinburgh. 

I offer a specific New Town tour, focusing on this less visited side of the city, which features the Dean Village and Calton Hill along with a stroll along some of the (still) grand residential streets of the Georgian-era Edinburgh, or we can combine Old and New in a customised tour to suit your interests.

Not all of Edinburgh's historical figures belong to the dim and distant past - many notable residents have walked the streets within living memory and offer a more modern sense of Edinburgh's historical influences.

In a city noted for its literary and artistic influences, one figure had a particular impact on the world of modern art. Born on 7 March 1924, Eduardo Paolozzi was an early proponent of the Pop Art style, and may even have given the movement its name from one of his colourful early collages.

Paolozzi was born in Leith, to parents who were Italian immigrants who had settled in the city early in the twentieth century. The city today retains many of its links to these immigrant families who brought a fresh new vision of food, art, music and culture to Scotland - Paolozzi's parents ran an ice cream and confectionery shop in Leith, and many of the fish and chip shops around the city today are still family-run, while shops like the Valvona and Crolla delicatessen have become local institutions.

This isn't to say that the immigrant families were always treated well in Scotland. Notably in 1940, when Italy became a British enemy during the Second World War, many Italian men and boys across the country were forcibly detained in local internment camps, and a teenage Paolozzi spent three months in Edinburgh's Saughton prison. His fate was rather better than that of many Italian men at that time, however, who had also been detained and were being transported to an internment camp in Canada. The ship they were on, the Arandora Star, was torpedoed by German u-boats in the North Atlantic, and over 800 men perished, 446 of them Italian detainees, including Paolozzi's father and grandfather.

In 1943, Paolozzi joined Edinburgh College of Art, and later studied fine art at University College London. In Paris at the end of the 1940s Paolozzi associated with Alberto Giacometti and Georges Braque, both of whom became major figures in the world of post-war sculpture and painting. ​

​On his return to London, Paolozzi established his studio in London's district of Chelsea, where he began a pioneering approach to assembling collages and printing. In 1952 he was a founder of the Independent Group, whose work and vision would later be a significant influence on the American pop art movement of the late 1950s and 60s. It was Paolozzi's 1947 collage of images and advertising text snipped from American magazines, entitled I Was a Rich Man's Plaything, which influenced the bold, colourful style of pop art, and prominently at the top of the piece is the word 'pop' itself.

Paolozzi was awarded a CBE in 1968, and was knighted by the Queen in 1989. He had already been appointed to the position of Queen's Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland, a role originally created by Queen Victoria for Edinburgh artist John Steell in the 19th century, and a position currently held by another Edinburgh sculptor, Alexander Stoddart.

Paolozzi's extensive output took in a wide range of media, from sculpture and collage to print and mosaic, and some of his public artworks can be found today across the world, from the walls of London tube stations to the foyer of the British Library.

In Edinburgh you can spot some of his pieces to the east of the city centre, outside St Mary's Cathedral on Picardy Place, where huge sculptures of a foot and a hand are mounted on the pavement, entitled The Manuscript of Monte Cassino. 

You can also find some of his statues in the lower levels of the National Museum of Scotland, and around the University of Edinburgh campus at King's Buildings and their central library on George Square.

Paolozzi donated much of his work and material to the National Galleries of Scotland in 1994, and in the former Dean Gallery (now named Modern Two) you can see a recreation of his studio, along with other works including a major figure of an iron giant named Vulcan who stands in the gallery's cafe. 

Paolozzi died in London in 2005.

Find out more about Edinburgh's major figures of art and culture with my private city walking tours.