So, I have been thinking about making this post for a while, and I have wondered where it belongs. Because it was the mud flood theories from the old site that got my brain working, I think here is the best place, but am happy to be redirected.
The “Buried” Capital of Scotland: Edinburgh
The name of the city comes from the Gaelic Dun Eiden, which means ‘hill fort on a sloping ridge’. It has been settled for as long as people have been in Scotland, and the castle, along with Stirling Castle, has long been considered strategically key to the royal families. Those familiar with the city may know it is referred to in two distinct parts: the New Town and the Old Town. The New Town being the part of the city directly across Princes Street Gardens rom the castle, and the Old Town being the miss mash of towering buildings sucked half in and half out of the hill Edinburgh Castle is built upon, creating a strange tier system, where the moneyed classes lived in the middle section of some of the tallest buildings in Europe, whilst the poorest lived in the tops and bottoms. The whole of the town is, in fact, riddled with underground tunnels, dwellings and huge caverns, some built from amazing brick arches and some carved directly into the rock, in the manner of some other notable European cities. Knowing Edinburgh fairly well I want to put forward my theory that it is a great example of post mud flood weirdness. I believe a key piece of evidence for me is that the city centre is now designated a UNESCO world heritage site due to some of the "finest public and commercial monuments of the New-classical revival in Europe”.
This photograph represents the evidence that I can find against my claim of the buildings in Edinburgh pre-existing- it is a painting commissioned by George III in the 1750s showing Edinburgh before the New Town was built. Map of the Month: Edinburgh in 1582 – National Library of Scotland Blog This link leads to a source of a medieval map which also does not show much of Edinburgh, but explains that in the text accompanying the map many buildings not depicted are mentioned.
It’s a strange city, and I have been fascinated by it since I was a child: my grandmother grew up in the city centre, and she told me stories of how they used the plague as an excuse to build on top of the poorest people, sometimes literally walling them in and leaving them to die. Since coming to read some of the histories and theories shared in these pages, and elsewhere, I have been reflecting on how the Mudflood situation may have been, in part or whole, a factor in Edinburgh’s unique city planning- other cities dug themselves out, Edinburgh built themselves on top? Water sources and supplies in the city have a strange history, and parts of the city have been flooded and drained at various times, and there are a great many underground tunnels with, in some cases, quite large dwelling places attached stretching under a huge area of the city, far more than the famous tourist attraction Vaults beneath the South Bridge.
One of the earliest mentions of a fort here is recorded in the old Welsh poem Y Gododdin which commemorates the lives of a force of 300 soldiers who were assembled at the stronghold of Din Eidyn frommas far as Pictland and Gwynedd, and, after a year of feasting, left to battle the Angles near Catterick in Yorkshire in 600AD. (This poem is one of the earliest records of King Arthur – a warrior is praised for his valour 'but he was not Arthur’.) Beautiful ancient jewellery has been found around the excavated sites at Edinburgh Castle, including a dragon broach and a trumpet broach, dated to the Iron Age, whenever that was. King David is said to have turned the hill fort into the grand castle. He granted the town a Royal Charter, meaning it had trading rights, and he began the building programme which established what we know as the Royal Mile today. The part of Edinburgh Castle that is known as David’s Tower (1200s), is in itself a structure with a strange burial story, in that it was also only ‘rediscovered’ recently, having been built on top of in the 1500s, making the castle one of the best examples of how the locals seem to have just buried things and built over them at some point, 'forgetting' about what lies inside. The esplanade, site of the famous Tattoo, is also built on top of the former castle defences, designed by an Italian general in the mid 1500s. Some ‘scholars’ dug it up in 1902, discovering three floors of tower had been concealed underneath the Half Moon Battery, although it once dominated the local skyline, standing around 100 feet tall. The Wellhouse Tower, which is only a two storey ruin at the base of Castle Rock today, once extended to the castle itself, and was known as the housing for St Margaret’s well (named for David’s mother, wife of Malcolm Canmore), the water source for castle inhabitants from the 1300’s. It has been ruined since the 17th century, but the stone is contemporary to David’s tower. (St Margaret is Scotland’s only deified royal, and warrants some looking into- she arrived in the same manner and almost at the same spot as St Andrew: shipwrecked on the Fife coast, and has many significant monuments around Fife. Oh, and her head was once owned by Mary Queen of Scots as a fertility related talisman, but it was lost to the Spanish, who wanted it for some reason, such is the superstition that surrounds her.)
Fresh water was brought to the rest of the city from Comiston Springs, it is said this was only accomplished in the mid 1600s, by means of paying the titled families who owned the lands to lay lead pipes from the springs on their lands to the centre of the city, but oral history would argue that these lead pipes replaced elm pipes already in place and dating back to King David’s time. The reservoir was housed in a building which was demolished in the early 1900s to make way for the Tartan Weaving Mill currently standing at the entrance to the Castle Esplanade. (This building hosts a strange little plaque marking “The Witches Well, which states, “This Fountain, designed by John Duncan, R.S.A.is near the site on which many witches were burned at the stake. The wicked head and serene head signify that some used their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes while others were misunderstood and wished their kind nothing but good. The serpent has the dual significance of evil and wisdom. The Foxglove spray further emphasises the dual purpose of many common objects.” Duality is definitely a term to apply to Edinburgh.)
It is stated in the conventional story of the city that the original houses of Edinburgh city centre were very grand, but only constructed of timber, and that they were burned in the 1500s by the English, during the period referred to as ‘the rough wooing’, when the English king wanted to force Mary Queen of Scots to marry his son, instead of the French prince. This is mirrored by the Great Fire of Edinburgh in the 1820s, when a fire burned for two days, killing 13 people and destroying 400 homes and businesses. A contemporary picture shows only two tall buildings burning, which gives a good indication of the living arrangements at the time. They say that after the burning of the ‘rough wooing’ period that they rebuilt the city with stone buildings, which were not grand, but it seems unlikely that they would have built the buildings in the exact same fashion, super tall and close together, with the narrow ‘closes’ between leading to a warren of streets, thus continuing the overcrowding of the city, so whether there were fires in the 1500s and the 1800s or not, the layout of the Royal Mile would suggest the buildings were always stone.
Looking at the conventionally accepted chronology of events for Edinburgh, there are some potential timeline issues, with repeated events overlapping, and, while I accept that the timeline we are taught in school does not reliably account for what time has actually passed, this is a complex situation, and I cannot work it out. The dates I have supplied for occurrences are based on the current mainstream calendar, and it would take a mind greater than mine to work out when they really took place. All I can say is that there is a repeated, or recurring pattern of plagues affecting Edinburgh for similar periods at the beginning and end of each century and potentially these then condense down into one and the same. (In this link: http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/t_eleven_plagues.pdf WJ MacLennan, Professor Emeritus at the University Hospital of Edinburgh, mentions Bower’s Scotichronicon, which is a text from the late 1400s compiling the works of other writers spanning the previous years to the early 1100s. MacLennan mentions 11 plagues in total in Edinburgh, from the 1300s to the 1800s.) One of the conflicts in information provided by the conventional timeline of events is that they say on one hand that by the late 1600s as many as 70,000 people were living within the Royal Mile, and that the buildings were as high as 14 storeys. They also say, however, that the plague of 1645 ravaged the city so badly that at one point there were fewer than 70 men left to defend the city- it would seem that surely both of these things cannot be true?
The accepted story tells that the city was built upwards instead of outwards during the time between the 1500s and the 1800s because of the fear of attack, from whichever force desired to possess and control this strangely desirable city at the time. They built Flodden Wall in the early 1500s, apparently after the Battle of Flodden (which is, to my mind, a prime candidate in the history of questionable wars which may never have happened- right up there with the Battle of Hastings- a key figure in this wee bit of history is the earl of Mar, and a wee look at Mormaers, Scottish earls, will give good flavour of how lines of succession are so corruptable- is he the first earl, the sixth earl, the nineteenth earl?). The 24-foot-tall wall encased a 140-acre area, and, for my money, was more likely to have been constructed during the rein of King David, when he granted the Royal Trading Charter, in order to be able to control the flow of trade in and out of the city- although, of course, we are expected to believe that a great stone wall of this nature is outwit the capability of people of this time, and a fence, or even just a ditch, was the precursor to the wall. About 10,000 people lived within its confines and six ports guarded the entrances in and out of the walled city, which also helped control smuggling (it’s real main purpose?). They destroyed homes which had been built outside the walls, on the pretext that they were built by those who were disloyal and put the city at risk, and chose to build upwards, and downwards, instead, which gives the unusual assortment of tall buildings and streets on many levels you can still see today.
Seemingly in 1460 one of the King James’ (how many were there?!! Really?!!) ordered the marshy grazing land below the castle to be flooded, forming what came to be known as Nor’Loch, a body of water which occupied the centre of the city, although records show there may well have been a body of water there for some time.. Its roles were varied, as it was a defence for the castle, a fun skating rink, a common smuggling route, a place to punish witches by ‘dooking’ (drowning), or other criminals were punished by being placed in boxes with holes and sunk. The loch became polluted and stunk with fumes so bad they caused locals to hallucinate, contributing to Edinburgh’s nickname, Auld Reekie, and the town planners of the 1800s had their own plans for ‘The Athens of the North’ so they had it drained again, and it is now the site of Princes Street Gardens and Waverley Railway Station- although there is not much record of what they did with the detritus- although there was a partially engraved pictish symbol stone found being used as a footbridge in part of the gardens, now housed in the museum nearby. There was a twin loch in the area known as The Meadows (next to George Square, and an area which also houses vast tunnels beneath) which was drained in 1621, so that the PTB had better control over the city residents access to drinking water, via the city reservoir, and turned to common grazing land, which it was until the 1920s. This area is protected from being built upon by an Act of Parliament, but supposing it could be uncovered and we could see what the top of these tunnels looks like- the roofs of some beautiful buildings?
By the time of the 'Enlightenment' (mid 1700s), Lord Provost George Drummond decided the New Town needed a centre for commerce and trade, so they built the Royal Exchange opposite St Giles Cathedral, but instead of clearing the way by knocking buildings down, they took off the top few floors and built directly on top. They blocked up one end of Mary King’s Close in this building project, sealing 300 people inside who were supposedly suffering from the plague, and leaving them to die. (This was unsealed in the 1990s and is now a very popular, money spinning tourist exhibition, which cost over £500,00 to start up, but which has become one of the most frequented attractions on the Royal Mile.) They even built parts of the Old College on top of crumbling parts of the Flodden Wall. The popular narrative suggests that the Old Town was at bursting point by the mid 1700s and in 1752 Drummond launched the Commission of Proposals for Public Works, with an ambition to “improve and enlarge the city and to adorn it with public buildings which may be for the national benefit”. The resulting document, authored by the scholar Sir Gilbert Elliott, states “Wealth is only to be obtained by trade and commerce, and these are only carried on to advantage in populous cities. There also we find the chief objects of pleasure and ambition, and there consequently all those will flock whose circumstances can afford it.” This proposal is widely regarded as modern and forward thinking, and is echoed in the proposals of UK city planners even now.
And so, it would seem, they famously had a competition to redesign the city, with young unknown, and newly qualified architect James Craig, winning with a design incorporating ‘wide boulevards, squares and grand new public buildings’. Craig came from nowhere to get this job, he is described as being “apprenticed to one of the city’s leading masons from the age of 16, he displayed notable draughtsman skills, and was soon absorbing himself in architectural treatises and learning as much as he could about surveying, building materials and town planning. Abandoning his apprenticeship in his early 20s, he set himself up as an architect without qualifications, and immediately entered the council’s competition.” The names of the street and civic spaces in Craig’s design reflected a new era of British patriotism. The principal street, George Street, was named after George III, the ruling monarch, while Queen Street was named after his wife, Queen Charlotte. Princes Street, to the south, was originally named St Giles Street, but was changed by George III and renamed after his sons as he discovered that St Giles, although the patron saint of the city of Edinburgh, is also the patron saint of lepers. St Andrew’s Square and St George’s square were the names given the two squares to symbolise the union of Scotland and England, yet St George’s Square was also quickly renamed as Charlotte Square to avoid confusion with George Square on the south side of the Old Town.
This whole sorry tale is a red flag for me, and I suggest that these buildings pre-existed and were mud flooded, and either dug out, or restored from contemporary ground level upwards. The Edinburgh News states 23 men who worked on the project were dead as a result of silicosis four years after its completion, other sources show half of the 30 stonemasons who built a branch of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Bank on George Street in 1831 had succumbed to silicosis 12 years after the scheme had finished, and the Old Royal High School on Calton Hill had about 120 stonemasons working on it and the research shows that only 10 of them were alive 24 years after its 1829 completion, all dead as a result of silicosis. The BBC reported that almost 200 years on, the problem still remains, “A study for an occupational medicine publication found that between 2007 and 2013, six stonemasons between the ages of 24 and 39 were found to have developed silicosis while working in Edinburgh”. These men were working on restoration projects, not building from scratch.
You can see in the photo of Charlotte Square that the palace frontage of the street extends below the street line for every single building, a classic mud flood building feature. The centre of the palace front is Bute House, the First Minister's official residence, and at the centre of the square lies a large garden covering an underground bunker, used as an air raid shelter in WWII, and topped by a weird, phallic monument with a mounted Prince Albert perched at the peak- apparently a later addition. St Andrew’s Square has the same acclaimed neo-classical (or just ‘classical’) architecture, but with more discolouration to the lower floor, which may suggest having been dug out. It is also centred around a weird, phallic monument, but this time with Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville on top (a controversial figure, once nicknamed King Harry the Ninth and the Grand Master of Scotland (a play on the Masonic office, hence the huge eye symbol), he was an epitome of corruption and famously betrayed Scotland, but he does have places named after him all over the world, including Canada, America, Australia and Hong Kong).
Beneath St Andrew’s Square lies part of the Scotland Street Tunnel, a substantial underground space that runs from Canonmills, under Scotland Street, Dublin Street and Princes Street, and connects to the tunnels at Broughton and Rodney Street. It is not in any way a small tunnel, but is in fact quite cavernous. Another large, spacious tunnel, Crawley Tunnel, also runs under The Meadows, all the way to Princes Street, and there are several smaller tunnels running off it which connect to those at Scotland Street and also over to Lothian Road. It is a vast network, all apparently built in the mid 1800s, beneath all of the grand buildings recently erected above- but not thought of during the planning stages before these were completed, only a decade or so before. Edinburgh's architecture is so varied and eclectic that the sealed entrances to these tunnel networks are often hidden in plain sight. Hand carved caves, rumoured to connect to the constructed tunnels beneath the city centre, stretch under the crossroads at Gilmerton Cove, with huge rooms and dwelling places carved into the rock, and only a portion of what lies here is open to the public as it is a vast network. Brick built vaults exist under Waverley Railway Station, situated between arches which have now been bricked up. The official narrative is that they were built by the engineers responsible for the railway station in the 1890s, but closer reading would suggest that rather than building these vaults to situate the station on top, they did the traditional Edinburgh thing of building on top of what was already there- why build something just to raise the station up and then brick it in and never use it?
In the 1780s they constructed (or took credit for) the South Bridge, which consists of 19 arches, only one of which is visible, every other of the 18 arches being concealed between buildings on both sides or beneath the ground. I can find no pictures of construction of either of the bridges, and this seems to me to more logically be a mud flood remnant. There is certainly much superstition surrounding the bridge, not only around the famous ghost tours you can take to visit the many famous spirits of walled in plague victims in the Vaults, but apparently TPTB decided in their wisdom that the ‘first’ person to cross the bridge should be the eldest resident of the homes along the bridge itself, the wife of a local judge, and, although she died before the ceremony, they continued and carried her over in her coffin. This was judged by the locals to be a very poor omen and an evil action, but typical of TPTB here.
People lived in the vaults created in the arches of South Bridge, which were never designed for living in, and were damp and had poor ventilation- ideal conditions for disease to spread. The conditions became appallingly overcrowded, although it is not explained in the accepted narrative where these people came from. I read that many inhabitants were Highlanders who had been cleared from their lands, but I have a good knowledge of the Highland Clearances and know that those who were cleared were sent overseas, on the whole. Further research would suggest that immigrants to the area comprised mainly of Irish people escaping the Great Famine, who were often poor and would work for less than the accepted minimum wage of the time because they did not speak English well and were desperate, and Jews escaping persecution and agricultural depression in Russia, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. (As another aside, one of the sources I looked at was a 1990 publication called “Annales de Demographie Historique” by Houston and Withers, where they put forward the controversial view that “The 18th century Highlands were increasingly overpopulated.”, which is to say that famine and poverty in the north was caused by people escaping the situation in the cities, and implies that the Clearances of the Highlands were merciful. The situation was, in fact, caused by greedy landlords moving their tenant farmers onto smaller and poorer quality land, to discourage them from staying, to force them to move on. Please see this link for some excellent information about the Highland Clearances, running from their inception to the debate in the modern Scottish parliament, should you be interested: Highland Clearances)
Although the town vaults were apparently a forgotten secret until the 1980s, there are newspaper articles advertising them for use as storage space throughout the 1900s. Then, to round off this weird tale, and because there is no secret quite like one kept in plain sight, many of the vaults and caves are sealed up and not available to be viewed by the public, but some are exploited for cash, like the famous Scottish rugby player who apparently single handedly emptied some of the vaults under South Bridge. He has created quite the hospitality business, The Caves, within these vaults, and often leads tours around them personally, trading on the story that he helped Romanian rugby player, Cristian Raducanu, to escape capture by the Romanian Securitate by letting him exit through the maze of tunnels. He is not quite the ‘nice guy’ he likes to promote himself as, having famously campaigned against a homeless shelter being built in the centre of the city with the campaign slogan, “If you want a junkie for a neighbour, vote for labour”. I suppose those who lived and died in his business previously only refrain from haunting him to avoid further exploitation.
The “Buried” Capital of Scotland: Edinburgh
The name of the city comes from the Gaelic Dun Eiden, which means ‘hill fort on a sloping ridge’. It has been settled for as long as people have been in Scotland, and the castle, along with Stirling Castle, has long been considered strategically key to the royal families. Those familiar with the city may know it is referred to in two distinct parts: the New Town and the Old Town. The New Town being the part of the city directly across Princes Street Gardens rom the castle, and the Old Town being the miss mash of towering buildings sucked half in and half out of the hill Edinburgh Castle is built upon, creating a strange tier system, where the moneyed classes lived in the middle section of some of the tallest buildings in Europe, whilst the poorest lived in the tops and bottoms. The whole of the town is, in fact, riddled with underground tunnels, dwellings and huge caverns, some built from amazing brick arches and some carved directly into the rock, in the manner of some other notable European cities. Knowing Edinburgh fairly well I want to put forward my theory that it is a great example of post mud flood weirdness. I believe a key piece of evidence for me is that the city centre is now designated a UNESCO world heritage site due to some of the "finest public and commercial monuments of the New-classical revival in Europe”.
It’s a strange city, and I have been fascinated by it since I was a child: my grandmother grew up in the city centre, and she told me stories of how they used the plague as an excuse to build on top of the poorest people, sometimes literally walling them in and leaving them to die. Since coming to read some of the histories and theories shared in these pages, and elsewhere, I have been reflecting on how the Mudflood situation may have been, in part or whole, a factor in Edinburgh’s unique city planning- other cities dug themselves out, Edinburgh built themselves on top? Water sources and supplies in the city have a strange history, and parts of the city have been flooded and drained at various times, and there are a great many underground tunnels with, in some cases, quite large dwelling places attached stretching under a huge area of the city, far more than the famous tourist attraction Vaults beneath the South Bridge.
One of the earliest mentions of a fort here is recorded in the old Welsh poem Y Gododdin which commemorates the lives of a force of 300 soldiers who were assembled at the stronghold of Din Eidyn frommas far as Pictland and Gwynedd, and, after a year of feasting, left to battle the Angles near Catterick in Yorkshire in 600AD. (This poem is one of the earliest records of King Arthur – a warrior is praised for his valour 'but he was not Arthur’.) Beautiful ancient jewellery has been found around the excavated sites at Edinburgh Castle, including a dragon broach and a trumpet broach, dated to the Iron Age, whenever that was. King David is said to have turned the hill fort into the grand castle. He granted the town a Royal Charter, meaning it had trading rights, and he began the building programme which established what we know as the Royal Mile today. The part of Edinburgh Castle that is known as David’s Tower (1200s), is in itself a structure with a strange burial story, in that it was also only ‘rediscovered’ recently, having been built on top of in the 1500s, making the castle one of the best examples of how the locals seem to have just buried things and built over them at some point, 'forgetting' about what lies inside. The esplanade, site of the famous Tattoo, is also built on top of the former castle defences, designed by an Italian general in the mid 1500s. Some ‘scholars’ dug it up in 1902, discovering three floors of tower had been concealed underneath the Half Moon Battery, although it once dominated the local skyline, standing around 100 feet tall. The Wellhouse Tower, which is only a two storey ruin at the base of Castle Rock today, once extended to the castle itself, and was known as the housing for St Margaret’s well (named for David’s mother, wife of Malcolm Canmore), the water source for castle inhabitants from the 1300’s. It has been ruined since the 17th century, but the stone is contemporary to David’s tower. (St Margaret is Scotland’s only deified royal, and warrants some looking into- she arrived in the same manner and almost at the same spot as St Andrew: shipwrecked on the Fife coast, and has many significant monuments around Fife. Oh, and her head was once owned by Mary Queen of Scots as a fertility related talisman, but it was lost to the Spanish, who wanted it for some reason, such is the superstition that surrounds her.)
Fresh water was brought to the rest of the city from Comiston Springs, it is said this was only accomplished in the mid 1600s, by means of paying the titled families who owned the lands to lay lead pipes from the springs on their lands to the centre of the city, but oral history would argue that these lead pipes replaced elm pipes already in place and dating back to King David’s time. The reservoir was housed in a building which was demolished in the early 1900s to make way for the Tartan Weaving Mill currently standing at the entrance to the Castle Esplanade. (This building hosts a strange little plaque marking “The Witches Well, which states, “This Fountain, designed by John Duncan, R.S.A.is near the site on which many witches were burned at the stake. The wicked head and serene head signify that some used their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes while others were misunderstood and wished their kind nothing but good. The serpent has the dual significance of evil and wisdom. The Foxglove spray further emphasises the dual purpose of many common objects.” Duality is definitely a term to apply to Edinburgh.)
It is stated in the conventional story of the city that the original houses of Edinburgh city centre were very grand, but only constructed of timber, and that they were burned in the 1500s by the English, during the period referred to as ‘the rough wooing’, when the English king wanted to force Mary Queen of Scots to marry his son, instead of the French prince. This is mirrored by the Great Fire of Edinburgh in the 1820s, when a fire burned for two days, killing 13 people and destroying 400 homes and businesses. A contemporary picture shows only two tall buildings burning, which gives a good indication of the living arrangements at the time. They say that after the burning of the ‘rough wooing’ period that they rebuilt the city with stone buildings, which were not grand, but it seems unlikely that they would have built the buildings in the exact same fashion, super tall and close together, with the narrow ‘closes’ between leading to a warren of streets, thus continuing the overcrowding of the city, so whether there were fires in the 1500s and the 1800s or not, the layout of the Royal Mile would suggest the buildings were always stone.
Looking at the conventionally accepted chronology of events for Edinburgh, there are some potential timeline issues, with repeated events overlapping, and, while I accept that the timeline we are taught in school does not reliably account for what time has actually passed, this is a complex situation, and I cannot work it out. The dates I have supplied for occurrences are based on the current mainstream calendar, and it would take a mind greater than mine to work out when they really took place. All I can say is that there is a repeated, or recurring pattern of plagues affecting Edinburgh for similar periods at the beginning and end of each century and potentially these then condense down into one and the same. (In this link: http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/t_eleven_plagues.pdf WJ MacLennan, Professor Emeritus at the University Hospital of Edinburgh, mentions Bower’s Scotichronicon, which is a text from the late 1400s compiling the works of other writers spanning the previous years to the early 1100s. MacLennan mentions 11 plagues in total in Edinburgh, from the 1300s to the 1800s.) One of the conflicts in information provided by the conventional timeline of events is that they say on one hand that by the late 1600s as many as 70,000 people were living within the Royal Mile, and that the buildings were as high as 14 storeys. They also say, however, that the plague of 1645 ravaged the city so badly that at one point there were fewer than 70 men left to defend the city- it would seem that surely both of these things cannot be true?
The accepted story tells that the city was built upwards instead of outwards during the time between the 1500s and the 1800s because of the fear of attack, from whichever force desired to possess and control this strangely desirable city at the time. They built Flodden Wall in the early 1500s, apparently after the Battle of Flodden (which is, to my mind, a prime candidate in the history of questionable wars which may never have happened- right up there with the Battle of Hastings- a key figure in this wee bit of history is the earl of Mar, and a wee look at Mormaers, Scottish earls, will give good flavour of how lines of succession are so corruptable- is he the first earl, the sixth earl, the nineteenth earl?). The 24-foot-tall wall encased a 140-acre area, and, for my money, was more likely to have been constructed during the rein of King David, when he granted the Royal Trading Charter, in order to be able to control the flow of trade in and out of the city- although, of course, we are expected to believe that a great stone wall of this nature is outwit the capability of people of this time, and a fence, or even just a ditch, was the precursor to the wall. About 10,000 people lived within its confines and six ports guarded the entrances in and out of the walled city, which also helped control smuggling (it’s real main purpose?). They destroyed homes which had been built outside the walls, on the pretext that they were built by those who were disloyal and put the city at risk, and chose to build upwards, and downwards, instead, which gives the unusual assortment of tall buildings and streets on many levels you can still see today.
Seemingly in 1460 one of the King James’ (how many were there?!! Really?!!) ordered the marshy grazing land below the castle to be flooded, forming what came to be known as Nor’Loch, a body of water which occupied the centre of the city, although records show there may well have been a body of water there for some time.. Its roles were varied, as it was a defence for the castle, a fun skating rink, a common smuggling route, a place to punish witches by ‘dooking’ (drowning), or other criminals were punished by being placed in boxes with holes and sunk. The loch became polluted and stunk with fumes so bad they caused locals to hallucinate, contributing to Edinburgh’s nickname, Auld Reekie, and the town planners of the 1800s had their own plans for ‘The Athens of the North’ so they had it drained again, and it is now the site of Princes Street Gardens and Waverley Railway Station- although there is not much record of what they did with the detritus- although there was a partially engraved pictish symbol stone found being used as a footbridge in part of the gardens, now housed in the museum nearby. There was a twin loch in the area known as The Meadows (next to George Square, and an area which also houses vast tunnels beneath) which was drained in 1621, so that the PTB had better control over the city residents access to drinking water, via the city reservoir, and turned to common grazing land, which it was until the 1920s. This area is protected from being built upon by an Act of Parliament, but supposing it could be uncovered and we could see what the top of these tunnels looks like- the roofs of some beautiful buildings?
By the time of the 'Enlightenment' (mid 1700s), Lord Provost George Drummond decided the New Town needed a centre for commerce and trade, so they built the Royal Exchange opposite St Giles Cathedral, but instead of clearing the way by knocking buildings down, they took off the top few floors and built directly on top. They blocked up one end of Mary King’s Close in this building project, sealing 300 people inside who were supposedly suffering from the plague, and leaving them to die. (This was unsealed in the 1990s and is now a very popular, money spinning tourist exhibition, which cost over £500,00 to start up, but which has become one of the most frequented attractions on the Royal Mile.) They even built parts of the Old College on top of crumbling parts of the Flodden Wall. The popular narrative suggests that the Old Town was at bursting point by the mid 1700s and in 1752 Drummond launched the Commission of Proposals for Public Works, with an ambition to “improve and enlarge the city and to adorn it with public buildings which may be for the national benefit”. The resulting document, authored by the scholar Sir Gilbert Elliott, states “Wealth is only to be obtained by trade and commerce, and these are only carried on to advantage in populous cities. There also we find the chief objects of pleasure and ambition, and there consequently all those will flock whose circumstances can afford it.” This proposal is widely regarded as modern and forward thinking, and is echoed in the proposals of UK city planners even now.
And so, it would seem, they famously had a competition to redesign the city, with young unknown, and newly qualified architect James Craig, winning with a design incorporating ‘wide boulevards, squares and grand new public buildings’. Craig came from nowhere to get this job, he is described as being “apprenticed to one of the city’s leading masons from the age of 16, he displayed notable draughtsman skills, and was soon absorbing himself in architectural treatises and learning as much as he could about surveying, building materials and town planning. Abandoning his apprenticeship in his early 20s, he set himself up as an architect without qualifications, and immediately entered the council’s competition.” The names of the street and civic spaces in Craig’s design reflected a new era of British patriotism. The principal street, George Street, was named after George III, the ruling monarch, while Queen Street was named after his wife, Queen Charlotte. Princes Street, to the south, was originally named St Giles Street, but was changed by George III and renamed after his sons as he discovered that St Giles, although the patron saint of the city of Edinburgh, is also the patron saint of lepers. St Andrew’s Square and St George’s square were the names given the two squares to symbolise the union of Scotland and England, yet St George’s Square was also quickly renamed as Charlotte Square to avoid confusion with George Square on the south side of the Old Town.
This whole sorry tale is a red flag for me, and I suggest that these buildings pre-existed and were mud flooded, and either dug out, or restored from contemporary ground level upwards. The Edinburgh News states 23 men who worked on the project were dead as a result of silicosis four years after its completion, other sources show half of the 30 stonemasons who built a branch of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Bank on George Street in 1831 had succumbed to silicosis 12 years after the scheme had finished, and the Old Royal High School on Calton Hill had about 120 stonemasons working on it and the research shows that only 10 of them were alive 24 years after its 1829 completion, all dead as a result of silicosis. The BBC reported that almost 200 years on, the problem still remains, “A study for an occupational medicine publication found that between 2007 and 2013, six stonemasons between the ages of 24 and 39 were found to have developed silicosis while working in Edinburgh”. These men were working on restoration projects, not building from scratch.
You can see in the photo of Charlotte Square that the palace frontage of the street extends below the street line for every single building, a classic mud flood building feature. The centre of the palace front is Bute House, the First Minister's official residence, and at the centre of the square lies a large garden covering an underground bunker, used as an air raid shelter in WWII, and topped by a weird, phallic monument with a mounted Prince Albert perched at the peak- apparently a later addition. St Andrew’s Square has the same acclaimed neo-classical (or just ‘classical’) architecture, but with more discolouration to the lower floor, which may suggest having been dug out. It is also centred around a weird, phallic monument, but this time with Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville on top (a controversial figure, once nicknamed King Harry the Ninth and the Grand Master of Scotland (a play on the Masonic office, hence the huge eye symbol), he was an epitome of corruption and famously betrayed Scotland, but he does have places named after him all over the world, including Canada, America, Australia and Hong Kong).
Beneath St Andrew’s Square lies part of the Scotland Street Tunnel, a substantial underground space that runs from Canonmills, under Scotland Street, Dublin Street and Princes Street, and connects to the tunnels at Broughton and Rodney Street. It is not in any way a small tunnel, but is in fact quite cavernous. Another large, spacious tunnel, Crawley Tunnel, also runs under The Meadows, all the way to Princes Street, and there are several smaller tunnels running off it which connect to those at Scotland Street and also over to Lothian Road. It is a vast network, all apparently built in the mid 1800s, beneath all of the grand buildings recently erected above- but not thought of during the planning stages before these were completed, only a decade or so before. Edinburgh's architecture is so varied and eclectic that the sealed entrances to these tunnel networks are often hidden in plain sight. Hand carved caves, rumoured to connect to the constructed tunnels beneath the city centre, stretch under the crossroads at Gilmerton Cove, with huge rooms and dwelling places carved into the rock, and only a portion of what lies here is open to the public as it is a vast network. Brick built vaults exist under Waverley Railway Station, situated between arches which have now been bricked up. The official narrative is that they were built by the engineers responsible for the railway station in the 1890s, but closer reading would suggest that rather than building these vaults to situate the station on top, they did the traditional Edinburgh thing of building on top of what was already there- why build something just to raise the station up and then brick it in and never use it?
In the 1780s they constructed (or took credit for) the South Bridge, which consists of 19 arches, only one of which is visible, every other of the 18 arches being concealed between buildings on both sides or beneath the ground. I can find no pictures of construction of either of the bridges, and this seems to me to more logically be a mud flood remnant. There is certainly much superstition surrounding the bridge, not only around the famous ghost tours you can take to visit the many famous spirits of walled in plague victims in the Vaults, but apparently TPTB decided in their wisdom that the ‘first’ person to cross the bridge should be the eldest resident of the homes along the bridge itself, the wife of a local judge, and, although she died before the ceremony, they continued and carried her over in her coffin. This was judged by the locals to be a very poor omen and an evil action, but typical of TPTB here.
People lived in the vaults created in the arches of South Bridge, which were never designed for living in, and were damp and had poor ventilation- ideal conditions for disease to spread. The conditions became appallingly overcrowded, although it is not explained in the accepted narrative where these people came from. I read that many inhabitants were Highlanders who had been cleared from their lands, but I have a good knowledge of the Highland Clearances and know that those who were cleared were sent overseas, on the whole. Further research would suggest that immigrants to the area comprised mainly of Irish people escaping the Great Famine, who were often poor and would work for less than the accepted minimum wage of the time because they did not speak English well and were desperate, and Jews escaping persecution and agricultural depression in Russia, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. (As another aside, one of the sources I looked at was a 1990 publication called “Annales de Demographie Historique” by Houston and Withers, where they put forward the controversial view that “The 18th century Highlands were increasingly overpopulated.”, which is to say that famine and poverty in the north was caused by people escaping the situation in the cities, and implies that the Clearances of the Highlands were merciful. The situation was, in fact, caused by greedy landlords moving their tenant farmers onto smaller and poorer quality land, to discourage them from staying, to force them to move on. Please see this link for some excellent information about the Highland Clearances, running from their inception to the debate in the modern Scottish parliament, should you be interested: Highland Clearances)
Although the town vaults were apparently a forgotten secret until the 1980s, there are newspaper articles advertising them for use as storage space throughout the 1900s. Then, to round off this weird tale, and because there is no secret quite like one kept in plain sight, many of the vaults and caves are sealed up and not available to be viewed by the public, but some are exploited for cash, like the famous Scottish rugby player who apparently single handedly emptied some of the vaults under South Bridge. He has created quite the hospitality business, The Caves, within these vaults, and often leads tours around them personally, trading on the story that he helped Romanian rugby player, Cristian Raducanu, to escape capture by the Romanian Securitate by letting him exit through the maze of tunnels. He is not quite the ‘nice guy’ he likes to promote himself as, having famously campaigned against a homeless shelter being built in the centre of the city with the campaign slogan, “If you want a junkie for a neighbour, vote for labour”. I suppose those who lived and died in his business previously only refrain from haunting him to avoid further exploitation.
