Fleshmarket Close & Cockburn Street: Rebus Country
Why is it significant?
Climb the steep, narrow steps of Fleshmarket Close and stop halfway, where Cockburn Street cuts across. Below you lie the tracks of Waverley Station. Above you, the backs of tall tenements rise towards the High Street.
Key Facts
| Place | Fleshmarket Close & Cockburn Street: Rebus Country |
|---|---|
| Address | Fleshmarket Close, Old Town, Edinburgh EH1, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95100, -3.18890 |
| Part of Walk | Ink, Ballads and Double Lives: Edinburgh's Literary Old Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Climb the steep, narrow steps of Fleshmarket Close and stop halfway, where Cockburn Street cuts across. Below you lie the tracks of Waverley Station. Above you, the backs of tall tenements rise towards the High Street. The name tells you what this was: the passage to the old flesh market, where butchers sold meat, and the gutters ran with things you would rather not imagine.
In 2004, the year Edinburgh became a City of Literature, Ian Rankin published a crime novel called Fleshmarket Close. Its hero is Detective Inspector John Rebus, a stubborn, hard-drinking, rock-loving policeman who first appeared in 1987 and has since walked through more than twenty novels. Rankin's Edinburgh is not the shortbread-tin city. It is a place of housing schemes, politicians, old money and quiet corruption, and it made him one of the best-selling writers in Britain.
Critics gave this kind of writing a name: Tartan Noir. Its roots go back further than you might think, to Stevenson's double lives and to an even stranger Scottish novel, James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in 1824, in which a young fanatic is shadowed through Edinburgh by a mysterious double. Scottish writers, it seems, have always been fascinated by the man who is two men.
Now look at Cockburn Street itself, curling down the hill in a graceful S-bend. It was built in the 1850s to link the new railway station with the High Street, and it is named after Henry Cockburn, a judge who wrote one of the liveliest memoirs of old Edinburgh, and who fought, often in vain, to stop the city destroying its own old buildings. A society founded in his memory has been defending Edinburgh's buildings and views since 1875.
And the station below? Waverley, named after the first of Walter Scott's novels. It is often said to be the only major railway station in the world named after a novel. Now walk a few steps up Cockburn Street and look for the entrance to Anchor Close, climbing back up towards the High Street.