George Heriot's School: Jinglin' Geordie's Palace

Why is it significant?

Stop at the railings on Lauriston Place and look across the playing fields. Just beyond the school's western edge, at the top of a stepped lane called the Vennel, survives a stretch of the Flodden Wall, which the town threw up in a hurry after the Scottish army was destroyed at Flodden in 1513.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop at the railings on Lauriston Place and look across the playing fields. Just beyond the school's western edge, at the top of a stepped lane called the Vennel, survives a stretch of the Flodden Wall, which the town threw up in a hurry after the Scottish army was destroyed at Flodden in 1513. And in front of you rises something that looks like a Renaissance palace, all turrets, chimneys and carved windows. It is a school.

It was paid for by George Heriot, goldsmith and moneylender to King James the Sixth and to his queen, Anne of Denmark, who loved jewels rather more than she could afford them. Edinburgh called him Jinglin' Geordie, for the coins that always seemed to rattle in his pockets. When James inherited the English crown in 1603, Heriot followed the court south to London, and there he grew richer still.

He died in 1624 without legitimate children and left most of his fortune to found a hospital, in the old sense of the word: a charitable school for the fatherless boys of Edinburgh. Building began in 1628 and went on for decades, and before the first pupils moved in, Cromwell's soldiers used it as a military hospital in the 1650s. Today it is a busy independent school, so admire it from outside the railings.

Here is the literary twist. Walter Scott, who loved nothing more than turning real Edinburgh characters into fiction, put Jinglin' Geordie into his 1822 novel The Fortunes of Nigel. In it, the shrewd and kindly goldsmith rescues a penniless young Scottish lord lost among the temptations of the royal court in London. Two centuries after his death, a banker from the Royal Mile became a romantic hero, read by thousands across Europe.

Fans of a certain boy wizard like to compare these towers to a school of witchcraft and wizardry, and standing here you can see why the comparison sticks. Whatever you make of that, the building has been teaching children for well over three centuries. Now walk back east along Lauriston Place to the corner of Bristo Place, where a church has turned into a theatre with a very uncomfortable name.