Edinburgh Castle is in Scotland, UK. It has dominated its surroundings with majesty for centuries. Today the castle continues to attract visitors to its rocky perch.Edinburgh’s Castle rock has been a stronghold for over 3000 years.
Din Eidyn
Archaeologists have found evidence for human occupation of the Castle Rock reaching back to 900 BC, the late Bronze Age. During the Roman occupation of Scotland in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, it was a thriving settlement. In those far-off days they called the place Din Eidyn, ‘the stronghold of Eidyn’. Then came the invading Angles, around AD 638, and ever since then the rock has been known by its English name - Edinburgh.
A royal castle
In the Middle Ages Edinburgh became Scotland’s chief royal castle - seat of royalty, headquarters of the sheriff of Edinburgh, military garrison and storehouse of the royal gun train, and repository of the nation’s crown jewels and state records.
Impressive buildings were constructed, including the 12th-century St Margaret’s Chapel, the oldest building in Edinburgh, David’s Tower, built for David II, Robert the Bruce’s son, in the 1370s, and the monumental great hall of James IV, opened in 1511. But the long and bitter Wars of Independence with the ‘auld enemy’, England, took their toll, and the castle endured siege upon siege; Edward I, Edward III and Henry VIII all did their utmost to batter down the walls.
In 1566 Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to James VI in the royal palace within the castle. The tiny bed-closet still survives, a room that has a special significance for Great Britain, for in 1603 James VI became also James I of England - the ‘Union of the Crowns’. The departure of the Scottish court for London saw much of the royal ‘glitter’ go from the castle. Thereafter the stronghold became little more than a garrison fortress and arsenal. The last sovereign to sleep there was Charles I in 1633, prior to his coronation as king of Scots.
New roles
The Jacobite siege of 1745, during which Bonnie Prince Charlie held court at Holyrood Palace but could not wrest the castle from the Hanoverian King George II, proved to be the last. Since that time, the ancient fortress has continued to serve as an active army base, but has since found new roles - as a major visitor attraction, as home of the Scottish National War Memorial and two proud Scottish regiments (the Royal Scots and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards), and as host of the world-famous Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
In 1996 the Stone of Destiny, Scotland’s coronation stone, was placed in the Crown Room alongside the nation’s Crown Jewels (the Honours of Scotland), following its return from Westminster after a space of 800 years. In 1995 the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh
Castle secrets
The stone cannonball fired from Mons Meg in 1558, to celebrate the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the French Dauphin, François, was later found on Wardie Muir (where the Royal Botanic Garden is today) - that is 3 km (almost 2 miles) away! King James IV was able to spy on his subjects gathered in the Great Hall through a little barred window up and to the right of the fireplace; we call these ‘laird’s lugs’ [lord’s ears] in Scotland.
Prior to Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to the castle in 1984, the K.G.B. asked that the ‘lug’ be bricked up on security grounds. Mr Gorbachev never made it to the castle on that occasion, for that very morning he received news of the impending death of his predecessor as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Chernenko.In August 1830, some bones of a child, a fragment of cloth and pieces of wood were discovered in a wall in the Royal Palace. The cloth bore the letter ‘J’.
Within 50 years, fertile imaginations had created the myth that the baby born to Mary Queen of Scots in 1566 had been still-born; and that the boy believed to be her son was a surrogate!
When the Honours were returned to the Crown Room in 1660, the Sword Belt was missing. No-one knew where it had gone.
In 1790 a garden wall was being demolished at Barras, the home near Dunnottar of Sir George Ogilvie, keeper of the castle during Cromwell’s siege, when the Belt fell out of it. It was returned to its rightful place in Edinburgh Castle in 1892.Only one other dog cemetery exists in Scotland - at Fort George, near Inverness, built in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden in 1746
In 1938 a monument was erected on the Castle Esplanade to Sergeant Charles Ewart, of the Royal North British Dragoons, (the Scots Greys), who single-handedly captured the eagle and standard of the French 45th infantry at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.
But look behind that great block of granite and you’ll see the broken gravestone that was rescued from his actual burial-place in Salford, England.
The electric cable linking the clock next to the Time Ball on Calton Hill with the clock beside the One o’Clock on the Half-Moon Battery was 1237 metres long, making it the longest electric cable in the world in 1861.
High up in a stained-glass window in the War Memorial is the horseman, Faithful and True, from the Bible’s book of Revelation. On his cloak is a swastika.
Even as the mortar was drying in the walls, this ancient symbol of fortune was appearing in the skies over Europe, the insignia of a man who, like the rider on the white horse, would ‘smite the nations and rule over them with a rod of iron’ - Adolf Hitler.
In February 1720, 21 pirates, captured in Argyll with their ship Eagle, were thrown into the castle dungeons. They had all previously sailed with one of the most infamous pirate-captains of the Caribbean, Bartholomew ‘Black Bart’ Roberts. Most were ‘hanged by the neck upon the gibbet’ on Leith Sands nine months later.
In the 11th century, the Castle Rock was known as the ‘Castle of Maidens’ Why ‘Maidens’ is a mystery, but there was a story that the Picts, the native tribe living to the north of the Firth of Forth, used to keep virgins there! Beneath the floor of King James ‘s Birthchamber is a grim pit-prison. No one knows who might have been thrown down there.
Canadians believe that part of the Castle Esplanade belongs to them. The tale originated in 1624, with King James VI and I’s attempt to establish a Scottish colony called Nova Scotia (‘New Scotland’).
One hundred baronetcies were offered for sale to Scottish landlords, but they didn’t actually have to travel to Canada to meet the Crown’s conditions. A visit to the Castle Hill in Edinburgh, to receive a handful of earth there from the king’s representative, was sufficient!
The original plan for the New Town, drawn in 1766, would have taken the idea of the United Kingdom even further, for it resembled the Union Jack, the national flag, with one central square and the principal streets radiating off it. It was subsequently altered before construction work began.
