Monday September 23rd was our last full day in Edinburgh and Scotland. This would be a day filled with walking and stairs and information. We were thankful on this morning that Greg was well enough to walk and not miss our special tour.
We took the Lady Stair’s Close to get up to the Royal Mile. We stopped to take some photos outside the Writer’s Museum.
Early on the Royal Mile there were fewer folk milling about. That would change soon.
We scheduled a private Scottish Reformation Tour on this day.
I included the link above. We were to meet Jimmy at 9am in front of St. Giles Cathedral.
Soon we saw who we assumed was Jimmy and he came right to us assuming we were his clients for the morning.
St. Giles was not open to the public yet on this particular morning so Jimmy took us around to the parking lot between St. Giles and The Supreme Court building. We would visit the inside of the cathedral at the end of our tour.
It looked to Jimmy’s keen eye that something was going on in the Supreme Court building so he managed to gain us access into the hall outside the courtroom.
It was quite fascinating to see all the ‘big wigs’ standing around and some pacing back and forth the length of the room discussing their cases.
Back outside we were on the search for parking space #23.
Here at space number 23 in the car park is approximately where John Knox is buried!
The Scottish Reformation leader’s grave was paved over and is now a parking lot. The stone inscription reads;
‘The Above Stone Marks
the Approximate
Site of the Burial
In St. Giles Graveyard
Of John Knox
The Great Scottish Divine
Who Died 24th November 1572′
It’s said that Knox wanted to be buried within 20 feet of Saint Giles, so he was laid to rest right outside the church in what was once a proper graveyard. However, the site has since been tarmacked over and is now a functioning parking lot. A plaque in parking space number 23 marks the approximate location of his now-lost grave.
Knox was a 16th-century preacher who commanded that his people be able to read the Bible in their own language. He was a key figure in turning a nation of Catholics into one of Protestants. His fire and brimstone sermons and teachings often put him at odds with the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots.
On our walk to Victoria street we came across this Famous Heart.
The Heart of Midlothian is both a historic mosaic dating to the Middle Ages and a landmark that denotes the location of Edinburgh’s Old Tolbooth administrative building. Locals often spit on the sign as a good luck charm, a tradition that has morphed from its original meaning of disdain for the many executions that took place at this site over the years. The Heart of Midlothian F.C., the local soccer club, takes its name from the mosaic and the Old Tolbooth.
The Heart was installed as part of a replacement building to the Old Tolbooth in 1561, and after this second building was demolished in 1817, the Heart was all that remained. It has been an inspiration for the writings of Sir Walter Scott and has become an iconic part of the city’s culture and historic identity – even if many now don’t remember its true origins.
FYI: Tolbooth is a Scottish term that refers to a townhall, jail or guildhall where tolls are collected.
From here we walked down Victoria Street to Grassmarket.
Victoria Street is said to be an inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books but J.K. Rowling denies that it is. Nonetheless fans flock here and stand in line to get in the museum on this colorful street.
This is where the ‘meat’ of our Reformation Tour began as we were told that this was the route that martyrs would take from their sentencing in the courts above then down Victoria Street to the public gallows. Once we reached Grassmarket we stood around this monument to Martyrs and Covenanters who lost their lives at this spot for their faith.
The Grassmarket is an wide open street on the south side of Edinburgh’s Old Town. The city had the public gallows there, and many Covenanters were executed during the Covenanting period.
A circular memorial, erected by public subscription in 1937, marks the site, and an adjoining plaque lists the names of the many Covenanters who were hanged there.
In a recent renovation of the locality, a representation of the gallows’ shadow was made on the ground using different coloured stone, as seen in the picture to the left.
Our tour continued from here. We made stops at Greyfriars Kirkyard, The National Museum, The National Library and St. Giles Cathedral.
At this stage in January, many months later, I’m not sure of the order of those stops! Travel failure in not writing a journal while on our trip. I’ll put it down to the fact that our days were so full we didn’t have a lot of down time in the evenings.
Hello to February. I was hoping to have our Scotland Journal Posts done by the end of January but it will take a few days into February to accomplish that.
The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b. 