The Royal Mile

After a deliciously short flight from Belfast to Edinburgh, I walked around the city. This is an absolutely beautiful city. Everywhere you look you see stately architecture hewn from grey sandstone. And lots of statutes. This is the 5th Duke of Buccleuch on the Royal Mile, whoever he was.

Most of my Royal Mile photos were disappointing so I’m not posting them. It is hard to capture the beauty and scale of that majestic mile. I took this near the castle:

Not sure what the witchery is. My photo of Adam Smith didn’t turn out--too dark. Also David Hume. I love all the statues of the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment. It’s like being in Boston and realising how many important ideas and societal changes were nurtured in one fertile place at one magical time.

The last time I was in Edinburgh I was a young teenager. Traveling with my family meant that, at any given time, my parents were fighting with each other, my sister and I were fighting with each other, my sister and I were fighting with our parents, or all of the above. I don’t have any fond memories of Edinburgh. This time around, I get to wander the streets lost in my own thoughts about history, aesthetics, and how many woollen scarf shops can exist in one royal mile.

I like the steeple visible through this passage:

I eavesdropped on a tour, where I learned that Edinburgh once was a walled city and, if you left and came back, you paid a high fee. The result was no one left and the city was built vertically--very high apartment buildings (she called them tenements, but that makes me think of decrepit housing, which you don’t see in Edinburgh).
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