On the Royal Mile after the crowd leaves, and the particular Edinburgh that emerges
The Royal Mile empties by five-thirty. The tour groups have completed their last departure; the Castle is closed; the whisky shops are locking their doors. At six, what remains is the street itself — the 17th-century tenements, the closes, the rock beneath everything.
The Royal Mile empties by five-thirty. The tour groups have completed their last departure; the Castle is closed; the whisky shops are locking their doors. At six, what remains is the street itself — the 17th-century tenements, the closes, the rock beneath everything. This is a different Edinburgh from the one available during the day, not because anything has changed but because the surface layer of the tourist city has withdrawn and the structural layer of the actual city is again visible.
The closes off the Royal Mile — the narrow alleys that descend perpendicular to the ridge on either side — are accessible in the evening with a directness that the day does not allow. At six on a weekday in October, the closes are empty. The buildings on either side are seven and eight storeys of medieval Edinburgh sandstone, the walls so close that the sky above is a narrow strip. The light at the bottom of the closes in the evening is the light of a space that receives it for perhaps an hour in the afternoon and not again until morning.
Grassmarket below the castle rock has, in the evening, the atmosphere that its history suggests it should have. The square was the public execution ground of Edinburgh for three hundred years. The evening there — particularly in October, when the festival crowd has left and the outdoor seating is enclosed by the remaining warmth — has a specific atmospheric quality that the middle of the day does not produce.
Edinburgh's relationship with its own history is neither romantic nor uncomfortable: it is simply direct. The city does not perform its past for visitors. The Old Town is still used — the Scottish Parliament is at one end, the courts of law are in the middle, the residential closes are still inhabited — and this everyday use gives the historical fabric a seriousness that preserved buildings lacking continued function cannot achieve.
The best version of the Royal Mile evening ends in a pub on the Grassmarket or in a wine bar down one of the closes. Not performing the Old Town experience: simply in it, at the end of a day, in the correct register for a city that has been doing this for seven hundred years and has settled into it with some confidence.