Rollo in Scotland

by Jacob Abbott

Chapter XII.

Edinburgh.

From Loch Leven Castle our party returned in the coach to the railway station, and thence proceeded to Edinburgh. They crossed the Frith of Forth by a ferry, at a place where it was about five miles wide.

Edinburgh is considered one of the most remarkable cities in the world, in respect to the picturesqueness of its situation. It stands upon and among a very extraordinary group of steep hills and deep valleys. A part of it is very ancient, and another part is quite modern, so that in describing it, it is often said that it consists of the old town and the new town. But it seems to me that a more obvious distinction would be, to divide it into the upper town and the lower town; for there are almost literally two towns, one upon the top of the other. The upper town is built on the hills. The lower one lies in the valleys. The streets of the upper town are connected by bridges; and when you stand upon one of these bridges, and look down, you see a street instead of a river below, with ranges of strange and antique-looking buildings on each side, for banks, and a current of men, women, and children flowing along, instead of water.

The different portions of the lower town, on the other hand, are connected by tunnels and arched passage ways under the bridges above described; and then there are flights of steps, and steep winding or zigzag paths, leading up and down between the lower streets and the upper, in the most surprising manner.

There are twenty places, more or less, in the town, where you have two streets crossing each other at right angles, one fifty feet below the other, with an immense traffic of horses, carriages, carts, and foot passengers, going to and fro in both of them. You come upon these places sometimes very unexpectedly. You are walking along on the pavement of a crowded street, when you come suddenly upon the break, or interruption in the line of building on each side. The space is occupied by a parapet, or by a high iron balustrade. You stop to look over, expecting to see a river or a canal; instead of which, you find yourself looking down into the chimneys of four-story houses bordering another street below you, which is so far down that the people walking in it, and the children playing on the sidewalk, look like pygmies.

At one place, in looking over the parapet of such a bridge, you see a vast market, with carts filled with vegetables standing all around it. At another, you behold a great railway station, with crowds of passengers on the platforms, and trains of cars coming and going; at another, a range of beautiful gardens and pleasure grounds, with ladies and gentlemen walking in them, or sitting on seats under the trees, and children trundling their hoops, or rolling their balls, over the smooth gravel walks.

Sometimes a street of the upper town, running along on the crest or side of a hill, lies parallel with one in the lower town, that extends below it in the valley. In this case the block of houses that comes between will be very high indeed on the side towards the lower street; so that you see buildings sometimes eight or ten stories high at one front, and only four or five on the other. These structures consist, in fact, of two houses, one on top of the other; the entrances to the lower house being from one of the streets of the lower town, and those leading to the one on the top being from a street in the upper town.

The reason why Edinburgh was built in this extraordinary position was, because it had its origin in a castle on a rock. This rock, with the castle that crowns the summit of it, rears its lofty head now in the very centre of the town, with deep valleys all around it. This rock, or rather rocky hill,—for it is nearly a mile in circumference,—is very steep on all sides but one. On that side there is a gradual slope, a mile or more in length, leading down to the level country. A great many centuries ago the military chieftains of those days built the castle on the hill. About the same time the monks built a monastery on the level ground at the foot of the long slope leading down from the castle. The rocky hill was an excellent place for the castle, for there was a hundred feet of almost perpendicular precipice on all sides but one, and on that side there was a convenient slope for the people who lived in the castle to go up and down; and thus, by fortifying this side, and making slight walls on all the other sides, the whole place would be very secure. The level ground below, too, was a very good place for the monastery or abbey; for it was easily accessible from all the country around, and was, moreover, in the midst of a region of fertile land, easy for the lay brethren to till. There was no necessity that the abbey should be in a fortified place, for such establishments were considered sacred in those days, and even in the most furious wars they were seldom molested.

In process of time a palace was built by the side of the abbey. This palace and a part of the ruins of the abbey still remain. Of course, when the palace was built, a town would gradually grow up near it. Many noblemen of the realm came and built houses along the street which led from the palace up to the castle—now called High Street. The fronts of these houses were on the street, and the gardens behind them extended down the slopes of the ridge on both sides, into the deep valleys that bordered them. Little lanes were left between these houses, leading down the slopes; but they were closed at the bottom by a wall, which was built along at the foot of the descent on each side, and formed the enclosure of the town.