McVentures: Edinburgh Day #3

10/17/07

Today we headed out to the castle. It was a beautiful sunny day, but a little cold, especially in the castle because it’s on a high hill. At the entrance of the castle are two statues, one of William Wallace (Braveheart) and one of Robert the Bruce.

William Wallace:

Robert the Bruce:

You walk up the cobble path to the Portcullis Gate, which is the main gate to the castle. It has two exterior swinging doors, and then that latticed gate that moves up and down.

After the gate is the Mills Mount battery, which have cannons facing the north side of the castle for protection. This also faces the harbour for the North Sea.

From there, you can go up to the summit of the castle from either the Lang (now called Long) Stairs or gradually from the cobble path that winds around. We took the Lang Stairs.

At the summit are more batteries to defend the castle. Here is the Forewall Battery, which was used to defend against enemies coming up the Royal Mile:

View of Royal Mile from battery:

And this is a well they used for fresh water (although it wasn’t always fresh because it’s right next to the battery, and when the guns go off, sometimes it contaminates the water). The well was really deep, but it never got very full so they didn’t have a lot of water and soldiers died a lot from bad water.

Here is the Half Moon Battery. This used to be the sight of the David Tower, which actually used to be where the Royal Family’s chambers were, but it was destroyed in an attack on the castle. The present king built another battery (Half Moon Battery) on top of the ruins of the tower instead of rebuilding the tower to help protect the castle even more, especially from the side of the castle where enemies would be coming more frequently. There is a basket on top of the wall used to signal that the enemy was coming. If all four batteries’ baskets were being used as signals, it meant the enemy was coming in force.

The main square at the top of the summit is surrounded by the Scottish National War Memorial, the Great Hall, and the Royal Palace.

The War Memorial was built to commemorate all soldiers that have died in all the wars in which Scotland has fought. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, but there’s not much to see anyway except a bunch of books with names and some statues and carvings.

The Royal Palace is where the Royal Family would stay when they were in danger. They didn’t like to stay there all the time because of how cold the castle is, so they usually stayed in Holyrood Palace, at the other end of the Royal Mile. The Royal Palace also contains the Honours of Scotland (the Scottish crown jewels) and the Stone of Destiny (Scottish kings placed their feet on it during their coronation). We couldn’t take pictures of the Honours, but they were amazing.

The Great Hall was used as a ceremonial hall and meeting place for Scottish parliament. Now it has a bunch of cool swords and other things used during war.

This is the original 16th century hammer-beam roof:

Under the Great Hall are the Castle Vaults where they held prisoners of war:

Then we went into the National War Museum of Scotland. It had a lot of exhibits displaying various things from war, such as medals worn by officers and guns used in war. We didn’t take very many pictures, but it was cool.

With the castle being on such a high hill (well, actually it’s a glacier-worn stump of an ancient volcano), there are beautiful views of Edinburgh and the surrounding areas:

In the afternoon, we went down the Royal Mile about halfway to see St Giles Cathedral and the Loch Ness Discovery Centre.

St Giles Cathedral:

In the Loch Ness Discovery Centre, we watched a 20 minute 3D film on the history of Loch Ness. It was pretty interesting to find out about it. The Loch is this huge chasm carved from glaciers that is 1km wide and several more km long. It’s so big that it can cover all people in the world 3 times. This is why it’s so hard to really search for the Loch Ness Monster (affectionately referred to as Nessie). At one point they had a huge fleet of ships spanning the entire width of the Loch with sonar to try to find it, but of course, they didn’t.

There is a lot of evidence indicating that it’s impossible for an animal that size (the size of a Brontosaurus) to live (dark water that can’t produce enough sea life, etc), but people still firmly believe it exists.

I got a Nessie beanie baby to commemorate our trip :)

Around 6:00, we went to this bar in the New Town called The Standing Order, which is actually housed in an old bank so it’s huge and really cool looking, to meet Melanie (who we met Monday night) and her friends to watch the soccer game with Scotland vs. Georgia. It was insane how many people were there to watch the game. I have never seen a bar so packed in my life.

Melanie and her friends ended up not being able to come, so we stayed for a couple of beers and then walked around to some other bars in New Town, where you can see a great night view of the castle.

We went to Jekyl and Hyde to eat. It was an interesting place, and the bathrooms were totally hidden in a wall of fake bookshelves! We had to ask someone to show us where it was.

We weren’t too interested in the bars in New Town because they were more like clubs, so we went back to Old Town and met up with our Aussie friends for another bar crawl. It was so much fun again. They are leaving on Thursday, so we are glad to be able to hang out with them on their last night here.

Chelsea, Charlie, Wayne, and Kristie: