Ghost tour Edinburgh

Edinburgh is built on a ridge, and that single fact explains almost everything about these tours. The Old Town runs down the spine of it from the castle, and the ground falls away so steeply on both sides that the closes leading off the Royal Mile are less streets than staircases. When the city needed to expand, it did not level the hill. It bridged it, and then built on the bridge.

The South Bridge is the clearest example. Work began in August 1785 and it was finished in 1788, and although it looks like an ordinary street with shops down both sides, it is a bridge of nineteen arches. The arches were not left hollow. Inside them, builders formed roughly a hundred and twenty stone rooms — anything from two square metres to forty.

For about thirty years those rooms did ordinary work. Taverns. Cobblers. Storage for the merchants trading above. Then the problem showed up: the vaults had no windows, no drains and no ventilation, and the bridge above them was never properly sealed. Water came through. Business moved out, and abandonment had begun as early as 1795.

What moved in was people who had nowhere else. Through the early 1800s the vaults became housing for the poorest in a city that was already overcrowded, and the written record of that period is almost non-existent — nobody was keeping accounts of who lived in a room under a bridge. They had gone by around 1860. After that the chambers were filled with rubble and forgotten for well over a century.

They came back by chance. In the 1980s a former Scotland rugby player called Norrie Rowan was working on a property above and broke through into the space beneath it; excavation in 1985 turned up the evidence that people had lived down there. Everything on this page — every vault tour in this city — exists because of that.

The closes are the same story told a different way. Mary King’s Close ran down from the Royal Mile like any other. In 1753 the city built the Royal Exchange over the top of it, which partly demolished it and buried the rest. People carried on living in what was left: the last resident, Andrew Chesney, was still there in 1897 and took a compulsory purchase of four hundred pounds to leave in 1902.

And here is where we part company with most sites in this niche. You will be told, on some tours, that plague victims were sealed into that close and left. It is a very good story. The record does not support it. The strange lights people reported are more plausibly explained by biogas drifting up from the Nor Loch, the polluted marsh that sat where Princes Street Gardens are now.

None of which makes the tours worse. It makes them better, because the real thing is stranger: a city so short of ground that it buried its own streets and forgot where they were, and a hundred and twenty rooms under a working road that nobody opened for a hundred and twenty-five years. You do not need a ghost for that to be worth twenty-five dollars.