Edinburgh Castle

The door had been walled over so long that people had stopped believing anything was behind it. Inside was a room, and in the room an oak chest, and the chest had been shut since shortly after the union of the parliaments in 1707. By the early nineteenth century the common assumption in Edinburgh was that the Scottish regalia had quietly been carted off to London and that the sealed room was a face-saving fiction. In 1818 the novelist Walter Scott secured a warrant, took a small party in, and had the lock forced. Under layers of linen were the crown, the sceptre and the sword, exactly where they had been left. One of the men present said afterwards that nobody in the room spoke for a while.

A Volcano With A Tail

The lump of rock under the castle is the plug of a volcano that stopped erupting long before anything walked on it. During the ice ages a sheet of ice ground east across the land, hit this hard column, and had to split around it, scouring away the soft ground on either side and leaving a long ramp of debris trailing behind. That ramp is the street now called the Royal Mile. Edinburgh's whole spine exists because a glacier could not get through the castle rock.

Cliffs on three sides, a slope on the fourth: people found this useful very early, and excavation has turned up traces of Iron Age occupation. The oldest building still standing is a small twelfth-century chapel, one room with thick walls, built by David I in memory of his mother. Its identity was lost for centuries and it served as a gunpowder store until a researcher in the 1840s noticed a Norman arch under the fittings.

Taken From The Side Nobody Watched

In 1314 a party of about thirty men climbed the north face at night. That side was sheer, so it was barely guarded. The man leading them up knew the route because his father had served in the castle and he had used the same cracks and ledges to slip down into the town to see a girl. They went up the lover's route carrying weapons, came over the wall, and had the place before the garrison was properly awake. Robert the Bruce's response was to pull most of the defences down so the English could not use them again — the first instance of a pattern that repeats here. Whoever wins this castle usually breaks it.

The Tower That Was Lost Inside A Wall

The worst siege ran from 1571 to 1573, with the castle held in the name of the deposed Mary and English artillery brought north to end the argument. David's Tower, the grandest thing on the rock, collapsed under bombardment and its rubble choked the castle's only well, which is what actually ended the defence. A new gun battery was built straight over the stump and the tower was forgotten. Nobody knew where it had stood until 1912, when workmen inside the battery broke through into its lower floors. For roughly three hundred and forty years people had been walking around inside a building they did not know was there.

In a small room a short walk away, a boy was born in 1566 who would end up wearing both the Scottish and the English crowns.

One Round A Day

Since 1861 a gun has been fired from the castle at one o'clock every day except Sundays and a couple of holidays. It was never ceremonial. Ships in Leith needed to set their chronometers, and a time ball dropping from the monument on Calton Hill did the job except on the many days when the haar rolled in and nobody could see it. Sound does not care about fog. So they put a gun on the rock, and the city has jumped once a day for over a century and a half.

The other gun here is Mons Meg, a fifteenth-century siege bombard given to a Scottish king by a Burgundian duke, capable of throwing a stone ball weighing about as much as two men. Its barrel split in 1681 while firing a salute. It was hauled off to the Tower of London in 1754 and only came back in 1829 after Walter Scott — again — spent years lobbying for it.

Now

The castle is run by Historic Environment Scotland and is the most-visited paid attraction in the country, taking in around two million people a year. It is also still a military address, with regimental headquarters and museums inside the walls. Edinburgh's Old and New Towns have been a World Heritage Site since 1995.

The real anxiety is the rock. The cliff faces are monitored, loose blocks are taken down, and the stonework wears under rain and wind on an exposed summit. Add the enormous temporary stands built on the esplanade every summer. The castle survived several centuries of people trying to knock it over; what tires it now is weather and footfall.