Adventures in Subterranean Edinburgh

The best part about people coming to visit is that I get a great excuse to go out and do all the more "touristy" things that I wouldn't normally spend my evenings doing. Last week, we were visited by Jenn (sister of Agent Sovtek) as well as my sister Amy and her roommate, Adam. As well as spending a whole lot of time in pubs, and seeing some of the sights in Edinburgh, we also went on a couple of walking tours. The first one we did (the Auld Reekie tour) was okay. It explored the other side of the South Bridge vaults (which we had previously seen on the last tour we did), but the one which really blew me away was the Real Mary King's Close tour.

Edinburgh is a really interesting city, to say the least, and in the mid-18th century, the city council decided that it would build a huge building over top of some of the more ruined houses and streets off of the Royal Mile, which would later become the City Chambers building, and which looks like this today. What resulted is a whole series of underground streets (closes) underneath the building. It wasn't until 2003 that they started bringing people down into the abandoned closes for tours, such as Mary King's Close

This tour was very historically-oriented. All of the tour guides here are in character, which is pretty cool, and even though a lot of the "script" sounded memorized, the history was what made the tour so interesting. We were taken through some old rooms of buildings, told about the times of the plague, and life in Edinburgh hundreds of years ago (which doesn't sound so appealing, actually) and finally, we wound up on the old Mary King's Close (the street in the photo), which has the foundation of the City Chambers building as a ceiling. You could look into the house of the last remaining resident of the close, although they don't actually permit groups to go in - mostly due to the damage it would cause to have hundreds of people walking through every day, but also because the walls are laced with arsenic, which is a bit of a health hazard for anyone with a penchant for licking walls. I was amazed at how well kept the close was, although I'm sure they must have done some cleaning it up before letting people walk through there. It's almost too bad that you're only standing on the old abandoned street for a few minutes before heading back upstairs, I could have stayed there for a while longer. It's a surreal feeling, to be on a street that's been covered up for hundreds of years.

Anyone who visits Edinburgh should definitely do this tour. The one downside is that they don't permit you to take any pictures, which is probably so they can sell you their official tour guide for £6. (I took the above photo from Wikipedia) But still, it's hard to forget what it felt like down there, and that's what made it awesome for me.