The Edinburgh Dead

One of the most important characters in The Edinburgh Dead, I like to think, isn’t a character at all: it’s the city’s Old Town.

Edinburgh has one of the most spectacular and beautiful geographies – both natural and man-made – of any British city (actually I’m bending over backwards to appear less partisan than I am, there; truth is, it’s head and shoulders above all its competitors in that department).   But the Old Town, the ancient heart of the city, has an intimate, intricate, dark geography that is not exactly spectacular, but no less fascinating for that.

An aside: How can you tell when a city is ancient?  Well, Edinburgh has a New Town as well as an Old.  The New Town dates back almost 250 years.  That’s what counts as New in Edinburgh.

Anyway, back to the Old Town.  Here is what part of it looked like, very roughly around the time of The Edinburgh Dead:

A multitude of narrow streets projecting from one long, central thoroughfare that runs up the rising ridge from the Palace of Holyrood to the famous Castle.  What you can’t tell from that bird’s eye view is that all those narrow streets are not only narrow, but deep.

Centuries ago, the good folk of Edinburgh were modest pioneers of the skyscraper.  Nobody wanted to build outside the city walls, for fear of someone (well, let’s be honest – not someone; the English, that’s who) coming along and trashing everything.  So everyone kept living and building inside that tightly-defined limit, and they built higher and higher.  The result is the dark geography that still characterises the Old Town: narrow, straight alleyways sunk down beneath soaring tenements.  Places where sunlight hardly ever reaches.

Each one of these alleyways has it’s own name, more often than not a piece of deep history.  That one above is Fleshmarket Close, for example, because once – long ago – the Old Town’s meat market was down at the foot of it.  They are almost all called something-or-other Close, or sometimes Such-and such Wynd.

Here is the entrance to Borthwick’s Close:

Inviting?  Let’s venture down it a little way …

Places like this are where, until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the vast majority of Edinburgh’s inhabitants – rich and poor alike – lived.  Packed in, piled one atop one another.

At least until the rich tired of the intimacy, the filth, the intensity of it all, and decided to build themselves a grand, spacious New Town.  By the time of The Edinburgh Dead, many of the great and the good had moved out of the Old Town, but thousands of people still lived and died there, the patterns of their lives shaped by these architecural canyons.

Borthwick’s Close has an important part to play in The Edinburgh Dead.  At its foot, in a watery dawn, a body is found curled up on the doorstep of a shuttered whisky shop.  So there you are: a character portrait in photos.

Previous instalments of The Edinburgh Dead photo-trailer:

Duddingston Loch

The Arthur’s Seat Coffins

Guarding the Dead

Weaponry

Graveyards as fortresses. Not for fear of the rising dead, but – as a character in The Edinburgh Dead puts it – for the protection of the dead against the avaricious living.  Corpses had value in 18th and 19th century Edinburgh, as educational material for the city’s famous medical schools.   The bodysnatchers (or, as they were more dramatically known, the resurrectionists) emptied graves at night.  Yes, if you died in Edinburgh in 1828, when The Edinburgh Dead is set, and left a reasonably presentable corpse, there was a chance your mortal remains would be surreptitiously dug up, bagged, sold to an anatomist, possibly pickled, and then displayed and dissected for the edification of medical students.  The good folk of the city, not unreasonably, thought that more than a little uncalled for.  They took steps to deter the nocturnal corpse-thiefs.

They built and manned watchtowers in their cemeteries. (The one shown above is at Duddingston – a location that’s featured in this photo-trailer before).

They set cages about the graves of their loved ones.

They even resorted to massive, impenetrable iron coffins.

It could all easily be an array of defences against the undead, inspired by superstitious fear of revenants clawing their way out of the soil.  What’s more unsettling, though?  Those fantastical notions, or the truth: that men thought nothing of digging up their recently deceased fellows and selling them for dissection, and that respected – indeed internationally lauded – teachers of medicine found the imperatives of their calling so pressing that they thought it an acceptable way of obtaining cadavers for their anatomy lessons?

Previous instalments of The Edinburgh Dead photo-trailer:

The Arthur’s Seat Coffins

Duddingston Loch

I’ve got the Godless World Gazetteer here on the website, a modest little library of odds and ends fleshing out some aspects of the setting and history amidst which the events of that trilogy play out.  A little bit of bonus content for readers, if you like.

In the run up to August publication of The Edinburgh Dead, I’ve been thinking of doing something similar, but different.  It’s a book that offers rich potential for footnotage.  Being the faintly obsessive sort I am, it’s very tempting to offer a detailed breakdown of which bits of the book are historically accurate, which are not and which fall somewhere in between (I’ll bet you there’d be those greatly surprised at some of the stuff I didn’t have to make up, because Edinburgh’s history offered details easily odd and unpleasant enough for a writer of dark fiction).

I may give in to the temptation to attempt some sort of historical compare and contrast exercise here on the website eventually – we’ll have to see – but in the meantime, as publication draws near, I thought I’d use the next month or two for a slightly different exercise.

Welcome therefore, to the first instalment of a sort of photo-trailer for The Edinburgh Dead.  There will be no major specific spoilers in these occasional posts, but there may be hints.  Foreshadowings.  Possibly even red herrings, but only if I’m feeling particularly mean and out of sorts.

So, we’ll begin with something pretty.  Duddingston Loch.

A modestly wild wetland lying beside Duddingston village, which was long ago absorbed by Edinburgh’s urban sprawl (there’re some notably run-down bits of the city lying just to the south of it).  It’s a nature reserve now, has been for a long time, and only a smallish section of its bank is easily accessible to the public, but on a the right day it’s a lovely, peaceful oasis of green calm.  There’s not many cities can match Edinburgh for semi-wild and dramatic green spaces (I mean, we’ve got an extinct volcano dominating the whole eastern half of the city), and Duddingston Loch is a part of that claim to fame.

But the place is not just about tranquility and wildlife.  It’s got it’s history, too.  A couple of hundred years ago, when the climate was evidently more conducive to such things, it was the place for Edinburgh’s folk to go for a spot of skating and curling, when the long, dark winter got cold enough to lock the place up in ice.  Nowadays, of course, people are no doubt told to stay off the ice for fearing of fatal misfortune, and to be honest it’s  pretty rare for there to be thick enough ice that anyone but a complete idiot to think some skating would be a good idea.  Back in the day, though, it was all the rage, as one of Scotland’s more famous paintings shows:

That – as I wouldn’t blame anyone for not knowing – is ‘Reverend Robert Walker (1755-1808) Skating on Duddingston Loch’ by Sir Henry Raeburn.  To digress into ungenerous scepticism for a moment, I’ve never really got why people seem so fond of this painting.  I don’t particularly like it.  Bit dull, if you ask me.  But then, you could accomodate my knowledge of art in a thimble.  Maybe a teacup.

A slightly more interesting snippet of Dudidngston Loch’s history (to my mind, anyway): way back in the 18th century, a mysterious hoard was dredged up from the loch.  Weapons and other artefacts something like 3000 years old.  A little bit of magic to reflect upon, as you sit today on its grassy banks, enjoying the view: a thousand years before the Romans came to Britain, or Christ was born, way back in the dark, numinous past, people of the Bronze Age stood at perhaps the very same spot and for reasons we can never know – magical or mundane – they consigned to the waters a whole load of what must have been to them quite precious metal.  And three millennia later, a rather uptight-looking reverend in black coat and hat went skating on the ice above those very waters.  Funny old world.

What does all this have to do with The Edinburgh Dead?  Well, I’m not saying, of course.  Except that Duddingston Loch’s in the book.  Our hero pays it a visit, and for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with skating.

I think for the next instalment in this photo-trailer, maybe something a little less pretty is called for …