The Underground City.
Hi,
Welcome to yet another Saturday!
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Now that we are retired, and hopeful that Big H will soon be fixed….medically that is…..not like a tomcat, I have been looking at the ‘must see’ things that we have not yet managed to do, and as we wish to move south to somewhere warmer a.s.a.p. then I have started with relatively local wonders.
For instance, in Edinburgh!
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Edinburgh is a very beautiful, unusual and exotic place, with a long and varied history.
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One of the most unusual features of this great city is the other ‘underground city’ that lies beneath it.
This is a vast network which was abandoned in the mid 1800′s, and forgotten about.
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It began because Edinburgh was a place surrounded by a huge defensive wall.
Of course this meant that all of the expansion had to take place within these city walls.
It eventually became very heavily populated, and still the population kept expanding beyond the capability of the city to absorb them.
The only way to accommodate this expansion was by building upwards, but eventually the tenements were incredibly high and something had to give.
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The solution was to build even more buildings on top of the ones already erected, resulting in the creation of dark underground slums.
For the next 300-400 years people lived miserable lives in these dark underground slums, prone to crime and abject poverty..
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Other, luckier city dwellers, living above the ground in the sunshine, more or less chose to forget the scenes of misery and degredation being enacted beneath their very feet for hundreds of your human years.
( sorry I am being silly again….Stop it now Jaksie.)
When the subterranean city was eventually abandoned it just became forgotten in the same way that it had been ignored for so long.
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For many years after it’s rediscovery, only a very few lucky people saw the place.
However, since April 2003, there have been tours available to visit ‘ The Real Mary King’s Close‘.’
This medieval street has a large number of Closes to be visited.
These Closes are a warren of very narrow walkways enclosed by towering houses that are several stories in height, dating back to the 16th century.
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There are also tours available to The Vaults.
When the Old Town was so overcrowded that it was becoming uninhabitable, the Council decided upon a solution to the problem facing them.
They decided to build a New Town.
In order to make access from the New Town across to the Old Town much easier, they decided upon the creation of The North Bridge.
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A South Bridge over the Cowgate Ravine was then created so that access to Edinburgh itself was also much improved.
The construction plan created 19 arches and all of the land in the ravine was cleared to make the Edinburgh Vaults.
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These were spaces of various sizes where people who had businesses on thr South Bridge could store things, and where some families lived in unsanitary, unhealthy and dreadful conditions.
When it got even worse eventually, not helped by water ingress, these places were filled in and forgotten about.
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These are the vaults that were rediscovered later and excavated, and some of which are thought to be haunted.
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Anyway, I think that we should make an effort to see something so unusual as this before we move away.
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It has to be an extremely ‘real’ experience.
I hope that it is not too spooky for me!
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Have a grand Saturday yourself,
Jaksie,x.
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