Started today off with a little bit of retail therapy. Always a dangerous prospect when you only have a backpack, but I was careful! I have my flight to Ireland on Thursday to think of, never mind the return flight to Australia…
After spending a while wandering the shopping areas around Princes Street, I headed up to the Royal Mile, which runs from Holyrood Palace (the Queen’s residence whenever she’s in town) all the way up to Edinburgh Castle. It can be quite steep in places, and can take quite a bit of effort when you’re walking! I found a lovely little cafe to have and early lunch at (and a hot chocolate with marshmallows to warm up!) and spent another little while people watching.
Just around the corner from the cafe is the National Museum of Scotland. It’s a fascinating place, and one of my favourites of all the museums I’ve been to. Unfortunately, they’re undergoing some renovations at the moment, so there’s a number of galleries that are closed until 2016, when everything will be ready for the museum’s 150th anniversary. Still, there was plenty to see, including an exhibition on video games, which was quite interesting (and put on by the ACMI in Melbourne funnily enough). Thanks to the renovations I didn’t get to see Dolly, the first cloned sheep, but one of their more interesting (and macabre) exhibits was still there.
Around 1828, there were a series of murders that occurred throughout Edinburgh, eventually attributed to William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare had met a doctor, Robert Knox, who would pay them for any corpses they exhumed from the local graveyards, in order for Knox to use them in his lectures on anatomy. After a while, they realised that they could forgo the effort of digging up corpses, and just murder their victims directly and deliver them straight to Knox. After 16 murders they were finally caught. Burke was hanged, publicly, and his body used for a rather well-attended anatomy lecture, by order of the judge who sentenced him. His skeleton is preserved at the Anatomy Museum of the Edinburgh Medical School, as well as a book and calling card case bound in his skin! Eight years after the murders, a group of boys playing on Arthur’s Seat, a rocky outcrop next to the city, found a cave containing 17 small dolls in wooden coffins. At the time people thought they had something to do with witchcraft, but a popular story today is that they are related to the victims of Burke and Hare. In all honesty, we’ll probably never know who created them or for what purpose, but the surviving coffins and dolls are on display at the National Museum of Scotland.
The museum is also home to a couple of the Lewis chessmen, a group of 12th Century chess pieces found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831 and carved from walrus ivory. The museum holds 11 of the pieces, with the other 82 owned by the British Museum in London. The museum in Edinburgh also holds Sir Alexander Fleming’s Nobel Prize, awarded for the discovery of penicillin.
The animals hall of the museum is fantastic as well, housed in a three tier gallery of cast ironwork. I ended up staying at the museum until closing time, which was a bit longer than expected! After essentially being kicked out I wandered the streets for a bit, grabbed some dinner and made my way back to the hotel. Having an early one this evening at tomorrow is going to be a long day – the tour leaves at 8am and we’re due to arrive back into the city at 8pm! Will be worth it though – the Scottish Highlands are simply amazing scenery-wise.
