Ink, Ballads and Double Lives: Edinburgh's Literary Old Town

A walk through the world's first UNESCO City of Literature, from the Writers' Museum and Greyfriars Bobby to Robert Fergusson's Bedlam, Deacon Brodie, the first Encyclopaedia Britannica, Rebus country, Allan Ramsay's forbidden theatre and a house built for poems

Edinburgh · 12 stops · 30 min audio · Generated

  1. 1. The Writers' Museum & Makars' Court

    Lady Stair's Close, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh EH1 2PA, UK

    Step through the narrow passage of Lady Stair's Close and the noise of the Royal Mile drops away. In front of you stands a stone house of 1622 with a twisting stair tower, and under your feet the flagstones are carved with words. Read them as you walk. Each one is a line by a Scottish writer, from medieval poets to authors who are still alive. In 2004 Edinburgh became the world's first UNESCO City of Literature, and there is no better doorway into that story than this one.

    This courtyard is Makars' Court. Makar is the old Scots word for a poet, literally a maker, and Scotland's national poet still carries the title today. The house is the Writers' Museum, dedicated to three giants: Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. On your way in you passed Gladstone's Land, a merchant's tenement of the early seventeenth century, six storeys of stone piled above a street-level arcade. That is how the Edinburgh of these writers actually lived: stacked up in towers, rich and poor on the same stair.

    In November 1786 a young farmer from Ayrshire arrived in town with a book of poems that had just made him famous. Robert Burns lodged in a close that stood right here, sharing a room, and even a bed, with a friend from home. Within weeks the finest drawing rooms of Edinburgh were competing for him, and a new Edinburgh edition of his poems appeared in 1787. A plaque at the corner of the close remembers his first lodging.

    The house has its own tale. Its name comes from Elizabeth, Dowager Countess of Stair, a celebrated beauty of the early eighteenth century. The story goes that during her first, unhappy marriage, a fortune teller showed her, in a magic mirror, her absent husband about to marry another woman abroad. Walter Scott, who never wasted a good legend, turned it into a short story, My Aunt Margaret's Mirror.

    Inside, among portraits, manuscripts and first editions, there is a heavy wooden cabinet said to have stood in the childhood bedroom of Robert Louis Stevenson. It was made by a respectable Edinburgh cabinetmaker whose name you will hear again later on this walk. Leave the court, cross the Lawnmarket, and take the short flight of steps called the Upper Bow down onto the terrace above Victoria Street.

  2. 2. Victoria Street & the West Bow: Tales Saved from the Wreckers

    Victoria Street, Edinburgh EH1 2HE, UK

    Walk slowly down the curve of Victoria Street. The shopfronts are painted every colour of a paintbox, and above them runs a terrace with railings where people lean over and look down at the passers-by. It is one of the most photographed streets in Scotland, and visitors love to call it the real Diagon Alley... a claim that is easy to make and impossible to prove, so enjoy it as a game.

    The street is younger than it looks. It was cut in the 1830s as part of the same great improvement scheme that built George IV Bridge, and it was named after the young Queen Victoria. Before that, the way up from the Grassmarket was the West Bow, a steep, crooked lane zigzagging up to the Lawnmarket. Kings and queens making their ceremonial entry into the city rode up the Bow, and condemned prisoners were led down it to the gallows.

    The Bow had a darker resident. Major Thomas Weir was an old soldier and a famously pious Presbyterian, admired for the eloquence of his prayers. In 1670, as an old man, he suddenly confessed to a string of terrible crimes and to dealings with the devil. He was executed, and his sister with him, and for more than a century his empty house in the Bow was said to be haunted, his walking stick running errands by itself.

    This is where literature comes in. Walter Scott grew up on these tales, and in his novel Redgauntlet he named a mischievous pet monkey Major Weir. And a young bookseller called Robert Chambers went from close to close, collecting the old stories before the demolitions swept them away. His Traditions of Edinburgh, first published in the 1820s, is still the book that local guides quietly borrow from. Without Chambers, much of what you hear in the closes today would be lost.

    Those steps you came down, the Upper Bow, are a last surviving scrap of the old lane, so you have already walked in the Major's footsteps. Now carry on down to the bottom of the street, turn left along the eastern end of the Grassmarket, and climb the curving slope of Candlemaker Row. It is a short uphill pull, and at the top a very small dog is waiting for you.

  3. 3. Greyfriars Bobby & Candlemaker Row

    Candlemaker Row, Edinburgh EH1 2QE, UK

    There he is, on top of a granite drinking fountain: a little bronze Skye terrier, his nose rubbed shiny by thousands of hopeful hands. Please resist joining them... the city has had to repair that nose more than once. This is Greyfriars Bobby, perhaps the most famous dog in Scotland, and his story has been told so often that it has become literature in its own right.

    The version everyone knows goes like this. In 1858 a man called John Gray, who worked as a night watchman for the Edinburgh police, died and was buried in the kirkyard behind the gates beside you. His little dog refused to leave the grave. For fourteen years, the story goes, Bobby slept on it night after night, slipping out only to be fed in the eating houses nearby, until he died himself in 1872.

    In 1867 a new law said that unlicensed dogs could be destroyed. The Lord Provost, William Chambers, himself a famous publisher, paid for Bobby's licence and gave him a collar, which you can still see in the Museum of Edinburgh on the Canongate. A year after the dog died, the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts paid for this fountain, with a low trough at the bottom so that thirsty dogs could drink too.

    Then the writers took over. In 1912 an American novelist, Eleanor Atkinson, published Greyfriars Bobby, a sentimental book that turned the terrier into an international star, and in 1961 Disney made it into a film. The odd detail is that Atkinson is said never to have visited Edinburgh at all. The most famous dog story of this city was written from the other side of the Atlantic.

    Some historians have argued that the truth was less touching: that local traders kept the legend going because it brought in visitors, and that one Bobby may even have been quietly replaced by another. Nobody can prove it either way, and the dog has kept his place in the city's heart. On your way up Candlemaker Row you passed the old hall of the candlemakers' guild. Now follow Forrest Road south and turn right along Lauriston Place, to a palace built with a goldsmith's money.

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

    George Heriot's School, Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3 9EQ, UK

    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.

  5. 5. Bedlam Theatre: Robert Fergusson and Auld Reekie

    Bedlam Theatre, 11b Bristo Place, Edinburgh EH1 1EZ, UK

    Look at the Victorian Gothic church on the corner, with its pointed spire and its posters for student plays. For decades now it has been the Bedlam Theatre, run by students of the university, and the name is a deliberate echo. Close to this spot stood the city's old Bedlam, its public asylum, where in 1774 one of Scotland's finest poets died at the age of twenty-four.

    Robert Fergusson was the son of a clerk, a brilliant, funny, restless young man who copied legal documents for a living and wrote poems at night. In barely three years he poured out poems in Scots about the city he loved: its taverns and clubs, its fogs and gossip, its daft days of midwinter. His poem Auld Reikie, of 1773, celebrated Edinburgh under the smoky nickname it still answers to today.

    Then it all went wrong. After a spell of deep depression and a bad fall down a flight of stairs, he was taken to the asylum. He died there in October 1774, and the story goes that he lay alone in a cell on a bed of straw. The city that had laughed at his verses buried him in the Canongate Kirkyard without a stone.

    Twelve years later, a young farmer from Ayrshire came to town and went looking for that grave. Robert Burns found it unmarked, asked permission to put up a headstone at his own expense, and wrote the epitaph himself. He called Fergusson his elder brother in misfortune and, by far, his elder brother in the muse, and admitted that reading him had made him take up his own Scots verse with new energy. Today a bronze Fergusson strides out of the gate of that kirkyard on the Canongate.

    Other young writers grew up just south of here. Walter Scott spent his childhood in a tall house in George Square, a few minutes away, and walked each morning to the High School near the Cowgate. Now walk north up Forrest Road, past the little dog once more, and carry on along George IV Bridge to two great libraries facing each other across the road.

  6. 6. George IV Bridge: Two Libraries Face to Face

    Central Library, 7-9 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1EG, UK

    Stand on George IV Bridge and look at the two buildings facing each other across the traffic. On one side, a confident sandstone building with the words Let There Be Light carved above its door. On the other, a long, stern modern front with tall stone figures standing between its windows. You are on a bridge, by the way... the Cowgate runs far below, and both libraries drop floor after floor down into the valley.

    The sandstone one is the Central Library, the city's first great free public library. Its money came from Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish weaver's son who made a fortune in American steel and then gave much of it away to build libraries. It opened in 1890, and for the first time any citizen of Edinburgh could walk in and borrow a book without paying a penny. In a city of private collections and subscription libraries, that was a quiet revolution.

    Across the road is the National Library of Scotland. Its roots go back to 1689, when the lawyers of the Faculty of Advocates founded a library of their own. In 1925 they gave most of it to the nation, and the present building, begun just before the Second World War, was only finished in the 1950s. It is a legal deposit library, entitled to a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom, so its shelves never stop growing.

    Its most famous keeper was a philosopher. In 1752 David Hume was made Keeper of the Advocates' Library, and he took the job for the books, not the pay. When the curators objected to some of his purchases, he handed his salary to a blind poet, Thomas Blacklock, and kept working. There he wrote his best-selling History of England. Just before, he had lodged in Riddle's Court, a courtyard a few steps up on the Lawnmarket, and his seated statue on the High Street has a big toe polished bright by students hoping for luck.

    Among the library's treasures is the last letter written by Mary Queen of Scots, in the early hours of the morning in 1587, a few hours before her execution. Now walk back up to the corner of the Lawnmarket and Bank Street, where a pub carries the name of the most two-faced man in Edinburgh's history.

  7. 7. Deacon Brodie's Tavern & Brodie's Close: The Double Life

    Deacon Brodie's Tavern, 435 Lawnmarket, Edinburgh EH1 2NT, UK

    On the corner of Bank Street, find the old pub called Deacon Brodie's Tavern, and then look a few steps west for the narrow passage of Brodie's Close dropping away from the Lawnmarket. This is where William Brodie grew up, and where he lived both of his lives.

    By day, Brodie was a pillar of the community. He was deacon, the elected head, of the guild of wrights and masons, a member of the town council, and a skilled cabinetmaker who fitted furniture and locks in the best houses in town. Which meant he knew exactly where the keys were kept. He pressed them into putty, made copies in his workshop, and came back at night.

    Behind the respectable face was a gambler with two mistresses, several children and very expensive habits. With a small gang, Brodie robbed shops and houses for years, while the council he sat on puzzled over the crime wave. In 1788 the gang broke into the Excise Office on the Canongate, in a courtyard you will stand in later. It went wrong, one accomplice turned King's evidence, and Brodie fled to Amsterdam. He was arrested there before he could sail for America, brought home, tried, and hanged outside the Tolbooth beside St Giles' in October 1788.

    Legend adds the perfect twist. The story goes that Brodie had helped improve the design of the very gallows that hanged him, and that he hoped a steel collar hidden under his cravat, and a doctor waiting nearby, would let him survive the drop. If that was the plan, it failed. Even Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie, that most respectable of Edinburgh schoolmistresses, boasts of being descended from the Deacon.

    Almost a century later, a boy who had grown up with a Brodie cabinet in his bedroom wrote a play with his friend William Ernest Henley: Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life. Henley, a one-legged poet Stevenson had first met at his bedside in the Royal Infirmary, where Joseph Lister was treating him, later gave Stevenson the idea for Long John Silver. Then in 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson published Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He set it in London, but many readers have always felt that Hyde's foggy streets smell of the Old Town. Now walk down Bank Street, turn right along Market Street, and climb the steep steps of Fleshmarket Close, where a famous fictional detective is waiting.

  8. 8. Fleshmarket Close & Cockburn Street: Rebus Country

    Fleshmarket Close, Old Town, Edinburgh EH1, UK

    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.

  9. 9. Anchor Close: Birthplace of the Encyclopaedia Britannica

    Anchor Close, High Street, Edinburgh EH1, UK

    Walk into the narrow slot of Anchor Close and try to imagine the clatter of a printing press. There is little to see now except old stones and a nameplate, but in the second half of the eighteenth century this lane was one of the busiest addresses in the intellectual life of Europe.

    In a printing house here, between 1768 and 1771, a printer and scholar called William Smellie produced the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It came out in weekly instalments and was then bound into three volumes. Smellie wrote and edited much of it himself, while two Edinburgh men, the engraver Andrew Bell and the printer Colin Macfarquhar, put up the money. The most famous reference book in the English-speaking world began as a local publishing gamble in a close off the High Street.

    Smellie was a man of enormous reading and a great fondness for drink and argument. He founded a club that met in Dawney Douglas's tavern in this close, and its members called themselves the Crochallan Fencibles, a joking imitation of a militia regiment. They sang bawdy songs, played elaborate pranks on newcomers and argued about everything under the sun. In 1787 Smellie brought along a new friend: Robert Burns.

    Burns loved it. Smellie's press was printing the Edinburgh edition of his poems, and the poet is said to have spent long hours in the printing house reading his proofs. The rude verses Burns wrote and collected for his fellow Fencibles were later published as The Merry Muses of Caledonia, a book that respectable Victorian admirers of the poet preferred to pretend did not exist.

    The tavern and the printing house are long gone, swept away as the city rebuilt this slope. What remains is the name, and an idea born here: that all knowledge could be gathered, printed and sold to anyone who wanted it. Now climb back up to the High Street, turn left, and walk downhill past the crossroads with North Bridge. On the same side of the street, look for the entrance to Carrubber's Close.

  10. 10. Carrubber's Close: Allan Ramsay's Forbidden Theatre

    Carrubber's Close, High Street, Edinburgh EH1, UK

    Find the entrance to Carrubber's Close on the north side of the High Street, a narrow passage dropping steeply towards the railway. It looks like a hundred other closes. But in 1736 a wigmaker poet opened a theatre in here, and some of the city's ministers never quite forgave him.

    His name was Allan Ramsay. He came to Edinburgh as a boy from Leadhills, a lead-mining village in the hills of Lanarkshire, to learn the trade of wigmaker. Powdered curls paid the bills, but in the evenings he wrote verse in Scots, the everyday tongue that many educated Scots of his time were busily trying to forget. His pastoral comedy The Gentle Shepherd, published in 1725, was reprinted again and again for more than a century.

    Then he did something radical. In his bookshop beside St Giles' he began lending books for a small fee, and that shop is often called the first circulating library in Britain. Some ministers of the kirk were horrified: ordinary people taking home plays and romances, with nobody checking what they read. A theatre was the obvious next step, and here, in Carrubber's Close, Ramsay built one.

    It did not last. In 1737 Parliament in London passed a Licensing Act that allowed plays only in theatres holding a royal licence, and Ramsay had none. Within a year his theatre was shut, and he lost a great deal of money. For decades afterwards, Edinburgh's actors had to dodge the law, advertising concerts with a play performed free in the interval.

    Ramsay retired to an eight-sided house below the castle, which the town nicknamed the Goose Pie, and his son, also Allan, became portrait painter to King George the Third... so the wigmaker's boy ended up painting kings. Now walk on down the High Street, across the brass outline of the old Netherbow gate in the road, and into the Canongate. A little way down on the right, look for the arch of Chessel's Court, where the story of the Edinburgh stage picks up again.

  11. 11. Chessel's Court & the Old Playhouse: Brodie's Last Job and a Scandalous Tragedy

    Chessel's Court, 240 Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8AD, UK

    Step through the archway into Chessel's Court, a quiet courtyard behind the Canongate, closed in by a tall eighteenth-century block of flats. In 1788 part of it housed the General Excise Office for Scotland, the tax office, and one March night it became the scene of Deacon Brodie's last burglary.

    Brodie and his gang let themselves in with copied keys, expecting a fortune in tax money. Instead they found a pathetically small sum, and while they searched, an official came back unexpectedly for some papers. The lookout panicked, everyone fled, and within days one of the gang went to the authorities. The respectable deacon's double life ended here, in a courtyard you could easily walk past.

    Now walk a few steps further down the Canongate to the next story, in Old Playhouse Close. There, in December 1756, the Canongate theatre staged a new tragedy called Douglas, written by John Home, who happened to be a minister of the Church of Scotland. A clergyman writing for the stage! The Kirk was outraged, ministers who had gone to see it were disciplined, and Home eventually gave up his parish.

    The audience, though, went wild. The story goes that on the first night, someone in the pit leapt up and shouted in broad Scots: Whaur's yer Wullie Shakespeare noo? Home's friend and kinsman David Hume praised the play to the skies, and it went on to triumph in London too. Few people read Douglas today, but that shout from the pit has become one of the most quoted lines in Scottish literary history.

    A few years later Edinburgh finally got a properly licensed Theatre Royal, and the battle between the Kirk and the stage, which began with Allan Ramsay in Carrubber's Close, was over. Now carry on down the Canongate and turn right into Crichton's Close, to a house built for poems.

  12. 12. Scottish Poetry Library: A House Built for Poems

    Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT, UK

    Walk down Crichton's Close and you come to a small, light-filled building of timber, glass and stone, tucked in among old walls. It looks almost shy. Yet this is the Scottish Poetry Library, one of very few buildings anywhere built purely for poetry, and the right place to end a walk through the first City of Literature.

    It began in 1984 as the idea of the poet Tessa Ransford, who believed poetry should be as easy to borrow as a novel. For years it lived in borrowed rooms. This building, designed by the architect Malcolm Fraser, opened in 1999, the same year Scotland's new parliament first sat. Anyone can walk in, pull a book off the shelves and read, and the collection runs from medieval verse to poems written last year.

    Think back over the voices you have met today. Allan Ramsay lending out books by St Giles'. Burns reading proofs in Anchor Close. Scott listening to Border ballads, Hume among his books, Stevenson dreaming up his double man, Rebus climbing the steps of Fleshmarket Close. In 2004 UNESCO made Edinburgh its first City of Literature, and in the same year Edwin Morgan became the first Scots Makar, the national poet of modern Scotland.

    Just across the Canongate stands Panmure House, where Adam Smith spent the last twelve years of his life. Before economics made him famous, Smith had given public lectures in Edinburgh on rhetoric and literature. And a few days before he died in 1790, he asked two friends, the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton, to burn almost all of his unpublished papers. They did. Nobody knows what went into the fire.

    A little further down the hill, the long wall of the Scottish Parliament carries quotations from Scottish writers carved into its stone, so even the politicians walk past literature every day. This is where the walk ends. Find a chair, take down a book of poems and rest a while... and if your legs still have something left, Arthur's Seat is rising just beyond the rooftops, with stories of its own.