On This Day – The Edinburgh Military Tattoo

Even though travel restrictions are easing I am not yet minded to risk it so I still have no new stories to post so I continue to go through my picture archives and see where I was on this day at any time in the last few travelling years.

On 15th August 1972 I was in Edinburgh in Scotland…

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On This Day – Edinburgh Castle and Lead Soldiers

While the current travel restrictions are in place I have no new stories to post so what I thought that I would do is to go through my picture archives and see where I was on this day at any time in the last few travelling years.

On 24th July 2015 I was in the Scottish Capital City of Edinburgh visiting the castle…

Even at ten o’clock there was a long queue at the ticket office, sensible people buy their tickets on line and get through quicker but I had failed in this instance to think ahead so I waited in line and shuffled ponderously towards the ticket office like a man with his shoe laces tied together.  I was cheered up however when I got there and noticed that I qualified for a 20% over 60s concession – there are some benefits to getting older but disappointingly the desk clerk didn’t ask me to prove it!

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Scotland, Edinburgh, Street Images

Scotland – Edinburgh Castle and Scotland The Brave

July 2015 broke all weather records by being the wettest UK July on record with Scotland being the wettest place of all, so it was a surprise when we woke in the morning and were greeted by clear blue skies and a blazing sun.

This was too good to miss so we hurried back to Calton Hill to get some blue sky pictures of Edinburgh and to see the monuments early before coach loads of visitors started swarming all over them.  The walk gave us an appetite and back at the Waverley we tucked into a full Scottish breakfast including haggis.  I ate it but I made a mental note to myself not to repeat the mistake of putting it on my plate the following day.

After breakfast we went our separate ways, Kim was drawn to the department stores of Princess Street and I returned to the castle stopping now and then in the tourist gift shops to see if I could find that illusive tartan polo shirt, alas without any luck!

Even at ten o’clock there was a long queue at the ticket office, sensible people buy their tickets on line and get through quicker but I had failed in this instance to think ahead so I waited in line and shuffled slowly to the ticket office like a man with his shoe laces tied together.  I was cheered up however when I got there and noticed that I qualified for a 20% over 60s concession – there are some benefits to getting older.

I am sure that I have been to the castle before, I visited Edinburgh in 1972 and 1984 but I couldn’t remember it at all.  This is another benefit of getting older, you forget things so even if you do them again they are like a whole new experience.

This is another benefit of getting older, you forget things so even if you do them again they are like a whole new experience.

Inside the castle I took a quick look at the battlements and the splendid views over Edinburgh but they were swarming with people so I moved on and went to the Scottish National War Museum.

The Scots like military history and the museum sets out the story of the last four hundred years of wars and battles.  It conveniently starts after the wars of Scottish independence and a succession of English victories but at least that spares the English visitor from the tedious stories of Bannockburn and William Wallace!

It was a good museum and I enjoyed it but what I wanted to see most of all was the museum of the regiment The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards – The Greys.  Being a fan of the Richard Sharp novels and the TV series there was one exhibit that I really wanted to see, the Imperial Eagle of the French 45^th Regiment of the Line captured at the Battle of Waterloo by Sergeant Charles Ewart.

I made my way through the museum stopping regularly to look at the show cases of swords and guns and uniforms (a lot of kilts) and followed the time line to 1815.  I wanted to see the painting of the famous cavalry charge Scotland Forever (see header) which I just assumed would be here but found out that the original is actually in an art gallery in Leeds in England so I had to make do with a reproduction.

I was getting closer now to Sergeant Charles Ewart’s Imperial Eagle and then I came upon the display case I was looking for.  I was in for a shock.  It was empty but for a scruffy hand written note saying that it had been loaned to the Scotland National Museum elsewhere in the City to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.  What a disappointment, I so wanted to see that Eagle and there wasn’t going to be time now to go to its temporary place of display.

So I visited a couple more regimental museums and then the dungeons and prisons of the old castle before making my way to the very top past Mons Meg, which with a twenty inch calibre is one of the biggest cannons ever made and then past a long line of people shuffling slowly forward to visit a dog cemetery.  A dog cemetery!  What the…? There are so many interesting things to see in the castle but hundreds of visitors queue up for the bizarre reason of seeing where army officers’ pet dogs are buried.  How bizarre!

At the top I joined another long line of people waiting in turn to see the Honours of Scotland, The Scottish Crown Jewels, the crown, the sceptre and the sword of state together with the stone of Scone, the Coronation Stone.  It took longer than I expected to make my way through a four hundred time line of history which charted every significant event in the history of the honours which seemed to dwell rather a lot on the repeated attempts of the English to steal them and as a consequence spending hundreds of years hidden under floor boards and locked up in a secret casket.

Eventually the journey through time came to an end and I was in the strong room which houses the valuable artefacts, so valuable it seems that photography is strictly forbidden and there are far more people on duty than really necessary to make sure no one sneaks a picture – even more than at Lenin’s tomb in Moscow.  Perhaps they worry about a modern day Colonel Blood who stole the Crown Jewels of Scotland and England from the Tower of London in 1671.

It was time to leave the castle now so I walked through the Esplanade being prepared for the 2015 Tattoo back along the Royal Mile and getting familiar with the city now a couple of short cuts through unpromising narrow alleys, past Waverley station and back to the hotel where Kim was waiting for me.

I think it is important not to have regrets in life but I do often wonder what possessed me to spend nearly £2,000 collecting model lead soldiers.  I cannot even explain it away as a moment of madness because it took nearly four years to build a collection of two hundred Napoleonic cavalry and infantry soldiers which are now stored in a box and destined to remain there forever.

One of the figures in the collection is Sergeant Charles Ewart  of the Royal Scots Greys…

More Scottish soldiers from the collection…

Glasgow Highlanders, Gordon Highlanders and Black Watch.

All reasonable offers considered…

Scotland – Edinburgh, Old and New

Take a look at a map of Edinburgh and you will see that it is conveniently divided into three separate areas.  To the south is the old town, to the west is West End and to the north is the New Town.  Our hotel was on Princess Street so we started with the neoclassical New Town where the roads are broad and grand and symmetrical and we looked for somewhere for lunch.

Edinburgh can be expensive which is explained by the fact that it enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the UK, after Bristol it is voted the happiest city in the country, unemployment is low and it often appears in lists of the best places to live.  Earlier this year, it was said to be the happiest city in the UK in a survey by the Office for National Statistics.  These facts seem to have conspired to drive up prices in this, the commercial centre of the city so we looked for a Wetherspoons* pub where we could be certain of prices more consistent with our holiday budget.

After a quick lunch we made our way out of the New Town to the Old and made towards the castle by what looked to be the most direct route along a path up Castle Rock, ignoring signs along the way that there was no access along this route on account of preparations for the Edinburgh Tattoo in a few days time.

This was a foolish thing to do because after an energy sapping climb there was indeed no access on this route and we had to turn around and go back to the road.  The most annoying thing about this was that lots of people had made the same mistake and not one of these tipped us off as they walked back down the hill as we were going up.

Anyway, we eventually made it to the road and entered the sinuous labyrinth of the Old Town which in layout is in total contrast to the orderly New Town with a general appearance and character that remains firmly medieval.  Here are tortuous alleys, twisting steps that knock the breath out of the unfit and tightly packed streets. We climbed a particularly steep set of steps through a narrow alley with overhanging buildings so tight we had to breath in to pass through and finally emerged at the Castle Esplanade.

Now we had a decision to make – to visit the castle or not?  Kim wasn’t keen, she has been before quite recently, it was rather expensive (£16.50), there was an almighty long line of people queuing for tickets and it was starting to rain.

So Kim won this particular debate and we made our way out of the castle and back to the top of the Royal Mile, a tourist trap street with whisky stores, wailing bagpipes and street entertainers on every street corner and a succession of shops selling everything tartan.

Well, everything tartan is not strictly true.  Later this year I am going back to Scotland to play golf with a group of pals and I had set my heart on a loud tartan polo shirt for making a fashion statement on the links.  Do you think I could find one? Absolutely not! There was tartan everything from baggy underpants to kinky suspender belts, from socks to bobble hats, from sporrans to contraceptives but never a polo shirt so I had to make do with a golf cap and a nylon kagool that I spotted on a sale rack at the back of a shop.  Now I hope that it rains so that I can wear it.

My shopping over and done with and Kim in a state of shock we continued to walk down the Royal Mile but the rain suddenly got heavier so we dashed for cover and a visit to St Giles’ Cathedral which is called a cathedral but really isn’t because Edinburgh falls within the Diocese of St Andrew’s a few miles away.  The interior is quite interesting with some stained glass windows and memorials but once again photography was forbidden and so our visit only lasted as long as the rain shower outside.

And so we left the old town and back on Princess Street the lure of the department stores was too much for Kim to resist so while she went off to the shops I walked east to Calton Hill.

There is a lot to see at Calton Hill because based at St Andrew’s House it is the headquarters of the Scottish Government with the Scottish Parliament and other notable buildings including Holyrood Palace near the foot of the hill.  The hill is also the location of several iconic monuments and buildings – the National Monument, the Nelson Monument, the Dugald Stewart Monument (which is almost always used in photographs and postcards of the city), the old Royal High School, the Robert Burns Monument, the Political Martyrs’ Monument and the City Observatory.  That is a lot of sightseeing!

On the way back down I visited the graveyard to see the tomb of the philosopher David Hume and a memorial to American Scottish soldiers and then returned to the hotel where we just sat in the window of our hotel room and enjoyed the views along Princess Street and across the road all the way along to the castle.

Well, believe it or believe it not, Kim had spotted a small restaurant that she thought looked promising for evening meal and so, not being inclined to argue with her on the matter of restaurant selection we later made our way back into the New Town and enjoyed wonderful food and a great bistro atmosphere at the Café Marlayne that was good enough to make us make the instant decision that we would be returning there for our second meal tomorrow.

*Wetherspoons is a UK chain of pub/restaurants which champions cask ale, low prices, long opening hours, and no music. It has become famous for converting large, unconventional premises into pubs. This one used to be a bank.

Scotland – Edinburgh, First Impressions

We caught the train to Edinburgh from Newcastle Central and I just knew that there was going to be a problem when a group of misbehaving middle aged women joined us in our carriage with tee shirts announcing that they were celebrating ‘Marie’s 50th Birthday’.

There were signs in the carriage saying keep the noise down but I don’t think any of them could read so they cracked the cans and topped the bottles and made an almighty racket all the way to Edinburgh. I actually prayed to God that they weren’t staying in our hotel.

We found a seat at the other end of the carriage and ignored them as best we could and enjoyed the ride. Trains used to chatter but now they hum and the journey took us along the Northumbrian coast past Alnwick and Lindisfarne, Holy Island and Berwick and then followed the Firth of Forth towards our destination.  It was like a vivid reminder of our two day mini bus excursion in Turkey  with the Dagenham Womens’ Darts Team.

There is surely no finer city to arrive by train than Edinburgh! If there is, then please let me know?

In most cities the railway terminus is out of town, somewhere in the scruffy district with the graffiti and the dirt, somewhere well past its best but not so in Edinburgh because Waverley Station (the only station in the world named after a novel) is right in the beating heart of the city and once ascended from the subterranean platforms a visitor is deposited immediately into Edinburgh’s principal thoroughfare – Princess Street. The A1, the road that links Edinburgh to London, four hundred miles away and a road on which Scottish Nationalists would construct a border crossing at Berwick upon Tweed if they had their way.

And so it was that we emerged from the underground chambers of the railway station and arrived blinking and unsure into the centre of the capital city of Scotland, the seventh largest city in the UK, but only the second in Scotland after Glasgow. The largest UK city is of course London with a population over seven million and the smallest is St David’s in Wales with a tiny population of only two thousand.

Immediately we were met by the unpleasant reception of dozens of beggars hanging around the station concourse and we picked our careful way though the dirty sleeping bags and on to the wailing siren of bagpipes on every street corner. There was no mistaking that we were in Scotland!

Adjacent to the station there are a number of fine old hotels, The Caledonian, The Scotsman, The Royal British and the Old Waverley where we were staying. It was only a five minute walk from the station and we presented ourselves at reception and were booked in and handed our key and we made our way to the fifth floor. Edinburgh hotels are expensive and I was not expecting anything special but when we opened the door we were delighted to have a suite at the front of the hotel directly opposite the Scott monument and with a fine view of the castle.

From the tall windows there was a grandstand view of the city. There were soaring towers of granite with green copper domes standing straight backed and proud like soldiers of a Highland regiment, high pitched roofs to deal with winter snow, salt and pepper coloured buildings with symmetrical windows that would please a mathematician, terracotta chimney pots in orderly rows and flagpoles with waving Saltires but also quite surprisingly an equal number of Union flags. The 2015 vote on independence split the country down the middle and the evidence was here to see.

The buildings here rise imperiously above a narrow gorge where railway lines squeeze themselves into the city in between gardens of rain soaked velvet green and above it all stands the castle, a magnificent structure rising from the ground as though announcing the beginning of a volcanic eruption.

And opposite, almost within touching distance was the soaring Gothic memorial to the novelist and poet Walter Scott. Some people don’t like the memorial but I think it looks just fine.

On account of the view I could have stayed in the room all afternoon but that wouldn’t have got a lot of sightseeing done so as soon as we had unpacked and could tear ourselves away we went back to Princess Street with a plan to see the city.

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