A walk through the light and dark of Edinburgh history

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Edinburgh

Edinburgh is not just the capital of Scotland, it is also the capital of the “Caledonian Antisyzygy”: the idea that the presence of duelling polarities is a defining characteristic of the Scottish temperament. Originally coined to explain the productively contradictory impulses of Scotland’s literature, the antisyzygy is a sort of tartan yin-yang, encompassing such tensions as those between nationalism and unionism, Protestantism and Catholicism, canny pragmatism and romantic excess. And if any place embodies this split personality it is Edinburgh, a city with a history full of dark chapters that is famed for its contribution to European enlightenment.

So join me if you will for a walk to experience some of the sharp contrasts that give Edinburgh its distinctive character. Our tour will touch on economics, finance, politics, culture and religion, and even include a serving of seafood. We will follow a route that could easily be covered in an hour, but would make for a more enjoyable afternoon. 

We start on the Edinburgh Castle Esplanade. From here, one aspect of Edinburgh’s dual nature is clear: to the east, the medieval Old Town snakes organically down the shallow slope, while across the valley to the north lies the neoclassical New Town, begun in the late 18th century as an exercise in rational order. It is this “remarkable juxtaposition of two clearly articulated urban-planning phenomena” that earned Edinburgh its Unesco World Heritage Site status.

The castle facade offers another juxtaposition. Its gate is flanked by statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, heroes of the 13th- and 14th-century wars that secured Scotland’s independence from England. But it is a vast British flag that flies above its battlements. The statues are a reminder of the strong sense of nationhood that Scotland retained even after the 1707 union with the southern “Auld Enemy” that created Great Britain. With nearly half of Scotland’s population now supporting independence, however, such symbols are increasingly contested. Scottish nationalists recently accused the castle’s Redcoat Café, named in reference to the British army’s historic scarlet uniforms, of celebrating an “occupying force”.

The approach to the castle has been a focus of many brutal conflicts, from the wars of independence to the civil strife that accompanied Scotland’s conversion to Protestantism from the 16th century. It was here that cannon and troops sent by England’s Queen Elizabeth I helped crush a tragic last stand by supporters of the exiled Mary Queen of Scots in 1573.

I prefer to recall a less violent exchange during the castle’s final siege in 1745, when it held out against the rebel Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Royal Bank of Scotland was associated with the government cause and had stashed its gold and silver safely in the castle, but was presented with a dilemma when the Jacobites arrived with thousands of pounds in banknotes and demanded payment for them in gold. In the end, Royal Bank cashier John Campbell crossed the battle lines under a white flag and counted out the gold in the castle even as its cannonade continued. Thus did the “promise to pay” trump national politics. 

From the Esplanade, we head down into the Old Town, which retains its medieval “fishbone” cityscape of a broad spinal thoroughfare lined with the entrances to narrow closes. Among the tourist shops is an easily missed opening into Lady Stair’s Close. Beyond, in a charming 1622 mansion, is the Writers’ Museum dedicated to the lives and work of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. 

All three are exemplars of antisyzygy. Burns was a poet of love who left abandoned paramours in his wake and a whisky-loving, Jacobite-tinged critic of government who took a job as an exciseman. Many of Scott’s genre-defining historic novels explore — and try to resolve — social, religious and political conflicts. Stevenson wrote that great novel of the good and evil in human nature, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

There is much to enjoy in this museum: paintings of and inspired by the authors, Scott’s pipe, Burns’s desk, a historic printing press. In the basement is a more contemporary treasure: a paper book sculpture, one of an extraordinary series of works that were left by an anonymous artist at libraries and museums around Edinburgh in 2011. This one shows a Jekyll and Hyde scene crafted from pages of a novel by a modern chronicler of the city’s light and dark, crime writer Ian Rankin. This is art with contradiction at its heart: an intense expression of bibliophilia made from a shredded book.

Across the room sits a cabinet that hints at the real-life inspiration of Stevenson’s fascination with the wickedness that can hide behind respectable morality. The cabinet, which once stood in the author’s childhood bedroom, was made by 18th-century master carpenter William Brodie. A pillar of the establishment by day, Deacon Brodie at night plied a second trade as a burglar. Eventually unmasked, he was executed on a gallows reputedly of his own design.

Thirsty travellers might at this point repair to the nearby Deacon Brodie’s Tavern for a restorative pint of ale. Our tour heads instead down the hill, emerging on to The Mound, an artificial slope built from city refuse to ease entry to the Old Town. Here we find the headquarters of the Bank of Scotland and its quirky Museum on The Mound. This is a great place to introduce children to the history of money and banking, but even longtime FT readers may be intrigued by its eclectic collection of financial paraphernalia. Scots may feel sadness at the bank’s more recent history. Over-expansion and imprudent lending led BoS, like the rival Royal Bank, to disaster in 2008. Now the venerable national champions are mere arms of larger UK banking groups. 

From The Mound we head up Bank Street towards St Giles’ Cathedral, a focus of Edinburgh’s religious life for 900 years and a crucible of the Scottish reformation. From its pulpit, the devout but misogynistic Protestant preacher John Knox helped make the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots’ reign a misery. Here too, in 1637, local woman Jenny Geddes became a Protestant heroine for hurling her stool at a dean reading High Anglican prayers imposed on the congregation by Charles I. Look for the plaque and a bronze three-legged stool commemorating Geddes’ zeal.

But there is also a plaque commemorating the dean, for St Giles’ is a church rich in antisyzygy. For proof, seek out the memorial statues on opposite sides of the church, depicting two great 17th-century rivals in the religious conflict that followed Geddes’ stool-throwing. James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, was a dashing royalist who in 1644-45 fought a near-miraculous campaign around Scotland against the Presbyterian government led by Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll. Eventually captured, Montrose was hanged outside St Giles’ and his dismembered body distributed around Scotland. 

It was not a fate that dismayed him. Montrose wrote cheerfully on the eve of his execution of the prospect of his “parboiled head” being placed on a stake and his ashes scattered, adding in lines now inscribed on his memorial: “Lord! since thou knowest where all these atoms are/I’m hopeful thou’lt recover once my dust/And confident thou’lt raise me with the just.”

Divine intervention was not required to recover Montrose’s mortal remains. After the restoration of the monarchy, his corpse was reassembled and buried with all honours in St Giles’. For Argyll, however, the restoration was a disaster. Despite joining in the crowning of Charles II at Scone in 1651 as King of Scotland, he was beheaded outside the cathedral and his own head displayed on the same spike that had held Montrose’s. Argyll’s memorial was installed in St Giles’ in the 19th century as an act of symbolic reconciliation. “I set the Crown on the King’s head,” reads the slightly plaintive inscription on it. “He hastens me to a better crown than his own.”  

Neither man would recognise today’s religious landscape. Zealotry’s decline was driven in large part by the Scottish Enlightenment, part of a Europe-wide intellectual embrace of reason over faith, and just past St Giles’ is a statue to one its heroes, the great 18th-century political economist and philosopher Adam Smith. In his later years, Smith worked just over the road as Edinburgh’s Commissioner of Customs and we follow his homeward commute down into the historic Canongate and past the balcony of Old Moray House, from which Argyll in 1650 watched the condemned Montrose being carted up the hill towards his doom.  

It is a route Smith walked in distinctive fashion — contemporaries remarked on his “vermicular” or worm-like swaying gait — to Panmure House, where Smith lived from 1778 to his death in 1790. It has been restored by Heriot-Watt University and is often used for public events. Even when it is closed, I like to peer through the glass-doored entrance at the rare copy of Smith’s influential work The Wealth of Nations on display within.

A short way back up the Royal Mile we pay our respects at Smith’s final resting place in the Canongate Kirkyard. Though often misunderstood as a crude champion of unregulated free markets, Smith understood the complexities and contradictions of human nature — not least the need to balance self-interest with the common good. The economist’s work was even a powerful inspiration for Robert Burns, who incorporated Smith’s ideas into his poems.

Burns was also inspired by another graveyard resident, the Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson, whom the national bard dubbed his “elder brother in the muse”. Though something of a linguistic challenge even for Scots nowadays, Fergusson’s affectionate and humorous takes on topics from the merits of fresh water to the infuriating din of local church bells still sing across the centuries. Many of his lines were echoed in poems by Burns, who paid for a headstone for Fergusson’s previously unmarked grave. 

Outside the graveyard gates, a charming statue of Fergusson is a happier memorial. But in a cruel Caledonian antisyzygy, this poet of cheerful and humane sociability succumbed to mental illness and died in poverty in 1774, aged just 24.

My favourite Fergusson poem is a paean to the pleasures and benefits of eating oysters, which in his day were a cheap delicacy enjoyed by people of all classes in Edinburgh’s crowded taverns. The 19th-century publisher Robert Chambers wrote of respectable ladies and gentlemen descending into dingy cellars for rude feasts of raw oysters and heavy drinking, a practice he saw as demonstrating a national tendency to “oscillate between a rigour of manners on the one hand, and a laxity on the other”, which some tourists may yet observe today.

So how better to end our tour than by toasting the Caledonian antisyzygy over oysters? A short walk up the Canongate is the White Horse, a seafood bar on the site of an 18th-century tavern. Here we can mourn the extinction of the native oyster beds in the nearby Firth of Forth and salute the work being done to reintroduce them, as we slurp delicious Pacific oysters from cleaner Scottish waters and sip a glass of crisp Spanish wine.

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