Days Have Passed...

It has been over a week since we last updated this. We have had very limited access to Internet in the places we have been. Just after the last post we resumed our tour of Edinburgh. We walked down the Royal Mile to the parliament building and the Palace at Holyrood House. Here is wiki link to info about Old Town which is where we spent our time. (http://www.edinburgholdtown.org.uk/edinburgh-old-town/)

After that we walked the volcanic ridge left from the formation of the island however many million years ago. The top of it is called Arthur's Seat and we got some spectacular pictures from there.




We used our guidebook to take a walking tour of the city after the climb and we ended up at Edinburgh Castle after a refreshment stop in the Grassmarket area. There is a memorial in the Grassmarket commemorating the hundreds that were hung during the Protestant Reformation. We stood on the site where the gallows used to be. We toured the castle in about 90 minutes which is far from a complete tour, but it was near closing. It was worth the time spent to hike to Arthur's Seat so we didn't mind the limited time in the castle.

We pursued dinner after that and had a couple of pints and food on the second floor of a very nice Irish pub. After dinner we took another underground tour of the storage tunnels under South Bridge. This tour was led by a PhD in history, named Ian and was very thorough and interesting. After the underground we went to see the graveyard at Greyfriar's Kirk. We stood in and heard the history of Scotland's largest plague graveyard. Hundred's of thousands were buried there during the years that the bubonic plague swept through Britain. The bodies were often sledge-hammered flat and rolled up or stacked very deep and burned to save space. We also saw the Covenanters' Prison, located in in the churchyard, which is the first recorded concentration camp. Catholic dissenters were held here by the Presbytarian government during the Reformation. The people imprisoned here were brutally tortured and killed. The first photo is just a shot of a row of tombs and graves. The next is our guide, Ian, at the gates of the Covenanters' Prison, the third is the tomb of the MacKenzie family. Sir George MacKenzie was the overseer of the Prison and was responsible for the deaths of over 18,000 people there. The tomb is said to be a hotspot for poltergeist activity.

The three pics that follow are taken of the inside of the MacKenzie tomb. The third picture has little blobs of light that the first two do not. According to our guide, those little blobs are the manifestations of the MacKenzie poltergeist. Several people on our tour took similar pictures and had those little blobs show up as well.



In the graveyard there is also a remnant of the Flodden Wall. This is the wall that used to surround Edinburgh. It would have marked the border of the city in the 17th Century. After the tour we headed back to the train station and back to Glasgow. We didn't get home until after midnight. It was a long, but very rewarding day.