Mary King’s Close

One of the things I have been trying to do while I travel is to find some out of the ordinary places to visit. Otherwise you end up with a pretty routine way to look at a city in Europe. Tour the palace/castle/manor house, tour the church/Cathedral/Abby, go to the town square, check out the local statues, maybe see some roman ruins, and so on. Most towns and cities have the same main elements. Larger cities also have museums, and very large cities have more unique sites such as the BA Eye in London, or the Eiffel tower in Paris. But in most medium and small cities this isn’t the case, but a lot of times you can find something unique to an area. One such place in Edinburgh was Mary King’s Close. An underground tour of what were in effect Scottish tenements. These though had been paved over to build a modern city.

A Close is essential a street that is between 7 or so story tall buildings on both sides where thousands of people live basically in Squalor. At least most the people in a close did, some like Mary King had some money and lived in the middle levels, while people with more money lived in the top levels. Most people however lived in the first few levels with more than 10 people crammed into a single 10x10 or smaller room. No furniture, no beds, no windows, a bucket to collect waste (all waste) and a fireplace. Not the nicest of conditions according to the tour. There were two plagues going around and generally unsanitary conditions everywhere. In fact people emptied their waste buckets straight into the street, even people on the upper levels, so you had to watch where you stepped or for surprises from above.

These closes all ran from the Royal mile in the center of Edinburgh down a hill for about a mile down to a lake that no longer exists. It was said that the lake was covered in a foot thick film of filth until it was eventually filled in and a park built in its location. Eventually the government closed out the closes one by one forcing people to move and cut most of the buildings in half and built a new city on top of them! You can actually see the underside of the roads when looking up while touring one of these closes. The tour is quite interesting, including live tour guides dressed in period garb. They tell ghost stories, along with some other stories of murder, plague, along with others and they show a house that was featured on some shows about the most haunted places. You go through several “houses” and rooms and see some mock ups of how people lived. It was quite interesting and a lot of fun. I was certainly glad that we stopped into see. I am also very glad that I live in the twenty-first century and have much nicer living options available to me!