Bracing I think you would call it and just cold enough to seep through jackets and shoes if you stopped walking for any period of time.Thankfully I barely stopped walking for the 2 days I was there. The first day we (I say we as I was travelling with my work mate Claudia) started our tour of the city with a 3 hour guided walk. The guide, strangely enough, was from Oklahoma, but he was very entertaining and knowledgeable about the town and its history despite having only lived there for a month! He did mention that he was a history student so I suppose that helps.
In 3 hours he walked us through streets, lanes, closes, back alleys, cemeteries and parts of the Royal Mile. There was a stop for lunch half way through and Claudia and I chose a pub first owned by a woman who was hanged for illegal pregnancy – she wasn’t married to the father - only to regain consciousness on the way the cemetery. She apparently lived a long and healthy life afterwards owning a pub overlooking the place she was hanged.
Walk completed and promises made to our guide to tackle the ghost tour he was guiding later that evening, we wandered up the hill to the Castle. Clearly a highlight of any trip to Edinburgh it is a wonderful place to explore, even if the exhibit showing the crown jewels of Scotland looks like it was made for 10 year olds. We were treated to a wedding being celebrated in the tiny St Margaret's Chapel on the very top of the hill - so tiny that most of the guests had to wait outside. The wedding party was accompanied by a most excellent piper. Even I, a person who generally thinks bag pipes sound like a bunch of strangled cats, enjoyed the performance.So, after an examination of Mons Meg (a rather large gun), a look at the Scottish Crown Jewels, the Stone of Destiny, and the confusion of seeing the name HMAS Sydney carved into the wall of the Scottish War Memorial (if anyone knows why, please let me know... were there Scots on board?) we headed back down the hill for a pint or two of some rather pleasant local ale, ahead of our ghost tour!
Now, for me, the appeal of a ghost tour is somewhat dampened when it is conducted completely in daylight. You don’t here too many people saying they saw ghost, ghouls or unnatural things with the sun still an hour and a half from setting - as it was when we started our walk at 7pm -
so my expectations of being scared witless where low – and they were met. But, despite the lack of scariness, we did have the same excellent guide from our morning’s walk, and we were taken into the New City (built in the 1700s but still a damn site newer than that old City!) and up to the Acropolis. The views of the Old City, Arthur’s Seat and Leith are excellent and we were lucky enough to have a clear, sunny – but still windy – afternoon.…and so, after our tour, the sun set and while we enjoyed another couple of pints maybe the real ghosts started to come out. I didn’t see any… even after a couple of drinks.
Day 2 in Edinburgh dawned as day 1 had, overcast with high cloud and the same breeze blowing. We climbed on a bus and started our journey to Leith and Ocean Terminal - the current, and probably final, resting place of HMY Britannia. She is a remarkable pretty thing to look at, even jammed up against a new, and not particularly well designed, shopping centre.
The tour started well (with the UK standard audio-guide provided with the entry price) with a
tour of the Bridge and upper deck, but by the time we had reached the Royal staterooms it was clear the tour was tailored to the ‘royalist’ and not necessarily to people like Claudia and I. To be honest neither she nor I was particularly interested in the Queen’s bed linen. I would much rather have learned about how and where she was built (the ship, not the Queen) and even some of the politics around why she was built. But no, alas, pillow cases, napkins and carpets were the order of that day. Despite this, the visit was great. To walk the decks of the ship is an experience in itself; to see how those above and below decks lived, worked and partied. The tour ends with the engine room. From what we could see through the windows it is cleaner than most hospitals, but it would have been nice to get a bit closer. It would have been even nicer to hear it running… a ship tied forever to a quay does seem to me to be something a little sad.
