Underground (ish) Edinburgh

There is no denying that Edinburgh is an old City. There is a castle and there is a wall that goes around it and for a long time the people lived within the walls.

Edinburgh is also situated on top of a very extinct volcano providing visibility from attack. That elevation also created interesting geography to build a houses and business on and around.

It created an opportunity to build structures where, because the hill sloped away, on one street the building had 6 stories but the same building from the other side was 8 stories. This differences in elevation, the compact city and the sheer number of people who wanted to live within the walls of Edinburgh created some really narrow alleys (called closes), and some houses that are two or more stories are below ground and built into the foundations of structures.

These spaces were dark, lacked ventilation, diseased and generally messy places, but they were also places were people lived day-to-day because they had to. The Bubonic plague, and the mnemonic plague hit these areas hard but so did food issues, cooking, heating and every other challenge you can think of.

We toured an area called Mary Kings Close where we went into some of these rooms, closses and spaces and we heard stories of their lives and deaths. The Plague Doctor (the statue that Marc is sitting with) is one such thing that I had seen before but never knew why a person dressed this way or how the clothes protected them from the plague. We learned a lot and it was really cool.Read more