We woke in an Edinburgh hotel, excited to explore the city. Covid dictated that indoor activities would require advance booking, and we aren’t exactly “advance booking” people (we’re more “last minute”, “impulsive”, “on a whim” people), so annoyingly two of the places I’d wanted to go most – the National Museum of Scotland and Edinburgh Castle – were fully booked. I’ve been before but I know that Ryan would love both, so at least we have good reason to return.
Instead we went to the Surgeons’ Hall Museum, which was even more interesting than it looked online. Jars of every body part imaginable lined hundreds of shelves in an impressive columned, balconied hall, and we learnt about an incredible array of diseases, injuries and body-snatching stories. It was fascinating and irresistibly grotesque, and I’d recommend it as an excellent couple of hours’ excursion for anyone who isn’t squeamish.
After lunch in The Advocate pub on the high street of Edinburgh old town, we spent the afternoon exploring the city centre on foot. Of all the cities I’ve been to, I think Edinburgh, with its hilly topography and incredible architecture, is my favourite. Standing at the top of the high street, the castle feels like the centrepiece of a bustling, timeless metropolis, with clean, cobbled streets lined by tall, straight-edged, regular-windowed buildings made of attractive yellow-grey stone. Pay attention and you notice the intricately carved details on window frames, corners, rooves and chimneys. Intriguing alleyways entice you in, staircases carry you to different levels of the city and monuments boast of its illustrious history. It feels like a place of paradoxes – colourful but classy, old but impeccable, stately but quaint.
After a good poke around, we had a couple of drinks in a Wetherspoons and walked the half hour back to the hotel to drop off the presents we’d bought to atone for being in Scotland on Ryan’s brother’s and dad’s birthdays. The walk took us past the towering Scott Monument, the columned Scottish National Gallery, the busy green Princes Street Gardens, a bunch of tourist shops and some lovely, posh-looking residential streets lined with tall, (I think) Georgian townhouses.
We changed clothes and walked back into town for dinner. We went to the old and incredibly charismatic Deacon Brodie’s Tavern on the high street, which was painted white, black and gold and adorned with an eye-catching array of hanging baskets and window boxes. It was quite striking inside, with dark walls, panelled ceilings and mahogany furniture, but for all that it was also cosy and inviting, and it definitely felt like a proper pub. It was named after William Brodie, a respected and wealthy Edinburgh cabinet maker and locksmith who, by night, copied the keys he had made for his clients and stole their money. He was caught and hanged in 1788, and his double life inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
We ate upstairs and I performed my signature move of drinking half a pint of cider and knocking the other half over. The food was divine and very reasonable – we shared a fish platter, then I had Balmoral chicken and Ryan had a burger. Not quite finished with Edinburgh, we left and went to Biddy Mulligans Irish bar at Grassmarket for another drink (or maybe two, I can’t remember). We walked back to the hotel totally enamoured with the city and already eager to return.
And so ended our trip to Scotland. We had an incredible nine days, fell in love with pretty much everywhere we went and did a whole load of cool stuff. It’s taken me an age to get round to writing about it, but now it’s done and I can get on with catching up on everything else.
To the land of glens, bens, tartan and thistles… we’ll be back.
curiousgnome 