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Published: August 6th 2005
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Well my plane touched down in Edinburgh and i was greeted by sunny weather and had to remove my jumper which made a nice change!!! I was expecting the worst after Adam pointed out the weather for the last couple of days for here which were 9-13 degrees and raining!!
Getting to my hostel was easy by catching a bus from the airport for £3 to the city centre which took about half an hour. On the bus in you catch a glimpse of Edinburgh Castle which sits at the top of a sharp hill (which I later learnt was a was the remains of a volcano that is 350 million years old) looking rather imposing. It is said that when the Loch beneath the castle was drained there were 3,000 bodies at the bottom. They said that some of these bodies were from people that got thrown off the the castle, others were people who were trying to climb the walls and didn't make it but the majority was suspected witches... They said that when people were suspected of being witches they would drown them and the theory was that if they survived than they were witches and would
be burnt at the stake - those who didn't survive the drowning apparently weren't witches and it was a horrible mistake!!! oops!!
You notice that there are many old stone building and castle like structures and funny looking taxis!! You can hear bag pipes playing in the distance.
Old Town is 4,000 years old and had a wall built around it so a lot of the buildings were built up as they couldn't build out anymore. As there was no sanitary solutions in this area and people used to throw their toilet buckets out onto the street the place started to get a little stinky so after a while the rich decided they would find another place to live and they built the new city which is still about 250 years old.
They tell me that Gotham City in Batman was modeled off churches and the like in Scotland as there is a lot of gothic architecture here to be seen.
Buckingham Place was built from stones quarried out of Scotland as they were harder than the ones available in England.
I had an option of walking up the biggest flight of stairs I have
ever seen or taking the scenic route that went around for awhile then up a bit of an incline, I was glad that I had decided to travel light!!!
On arrival I asked someone to direct me towards the Royal Mile or High Street.
I found my hostel without too much trouble and checked into my 6 bed dorm to find two other Australian girls already there. They seemed really nice and are also doing a tour with Haggis Tours but unfortunately not the same one as me but we decided to all get dinner together so headed down to an Italian restaurant. Afterwards we did a little shopping and I decided to be on the safe side and picked up a water proof jacket before the tour starts!!!! although I am optimistic!!
Found the Haggis office and got ready to start out tour. The bus was full with 39 people and soon enough we were on our way.
The first thing we saw was the Forth Rail Bridge, which is made from 55,000 tones of steel and 8 million rivets. 57 People died during it's construction and 1 was murdered...Story has it that there was
a man by the name of Tom who whilst working on the construction, fell down one of the hollow pylons just 2 days before the bridge was due to open. They tried to get him out by winching him but he had broken his back during the fall and was unable to hang on to the rope, the bridge construction manager refused to cut the bridge open to get him out as it would delay the bridge opening and incur extra expense, so they offered him some whiskeys and continued to check on him, and then they gave him a sandwich, a little while longer everything went silent. Turns out the bosses poisoned the sandwich that they feed to him so that they wouldn't have to deal with the problem!! and he was left there. Apparently when they x-ray the bridge for structural damage every couple of years his bones can still be seen at the base.... His family drop flowers at the base of the bridge every year on the anniversary of his death, 2 days before the bridge opening.
We were told about the Stone of Destiny which was used in Edinburgh to crown kings and queens
and was then stolen by Edward the 1st of England when he was going through Edinburgh taking everything he wanted. It was finally given back to Scotland in 1996 and now lives in the Buckingham Palace. However, they say that the monks realised that Edward the 1st was going to take the Stone and hid it replacing it with a cesspit cover!! So it's not known if the real one was ever stolen...
Back years ago some uni students, when drunk, decided to go and steel the Stone which they managed to do and then took it out to parties and showed it to their friends, but unfortunately dropped it and split it in two... one of the kids fathers was a stone mason and put it back together. The police desperately tried to get it back and made an announcement that if it was returned no charges would be laid so they left it in the specified church as they realised they didn't want to go to jail for this!! and it was all good and was returned although apparently if you look carefully you can still see the line where it was put back together!!
We
stopped at Dunkeld Cathedral where the monument of the 'Wolf' was. He was a high court judge and very wealthy and was fairly untouchable. Apparently he was an awful man and killed a lot of people and raped more than 700 women. He handed out unfair sentences depending on his mood and was not liked by the majority of the people. Once a woman came to him asking for money to raise his baby and he cut the babies head off and put it on a spike saying that she would never get any money out of him and for it to serve as a warning to others that would try and ask for his money....
When he died no one wanted him buried at their church so every time he would be buried they would dig him up and put him in the town somewhere until Dunkeld agreed to take the body and burry him once and for all. It is said to be bad luck to touch effigy of Wolf.
We saw the Heather and Peat that covers all of the hills. There are birds that live on the Heather. On the 12th of August each
year the locals take to shooting them all to keep the numbers down!! They tell me that this is a good day out!
Our guide tells us that if women managed to see 1000 white horses (which he later changed back to 100) whilst touring around Scotland that you will marry the next man who's hand you shake....
Went to the Battlefields of Culloden where the Jacobite Clan went to battle in the uprising... There is a monument here now and you can walk around and see the gravesites of the various clans. Most people were buried in their clan names, but there are sad graves titles 'mixed clans' where they put people that they couldn't identify or that were in bits. It was an unfair fight which saw 1,000 Jacobites battle against 15,000 red coats. A very sad day in the History of Scotland, if things had have gone differently would have scene Scotland take control of England.
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