The first discarded leaves of autumn crunched underfoot where they lay scattered amongst the graves of Greyfriars Kirkyard. They served as a thematic link to the tombstones – proper 18th century grave-markers carved with macabre skeletal figures and empty-eyed skulls. Why dress things up? The seasons turn and we age. Change is inevitable. Death is inevitable. The new replaces the old. And nowhere is that truer than in Edinburgh, where the filth and jumble of what we know as the ‘Old Town’ was abandoned for the sterility and order of the New Town across the Nor Loch. These two aspects of Edinburgh were jointly and justifiably inscribed as a single World Heritage Site. This was a fitting tribute to Auld Reekie’s split personality, a city where Deacon Brodie could serve as a respected councillor by day and rob by night, where the professors of medicine could procure fresh corpses for their anatomy classes from body-snatchers, and which influenced native son Robert Louis Stevenson to pen The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

This was probably my tenth visit to Edinburgh, though my first as a pure sight-seer. Previous visits had been for weddings or stag dos, to see friends, to watch or to perform at August’s Fringe Festival or for work. As my wife pointed out, “The rules are different when you’re a tourist. Even more so when you have a child.” And so on this trip we did all the touristy stuff: visiting the castle, shopping for Harris tweed, stopping to watch the bag-piping buskers. But what shocked me when I consulted a map of the actual boundaries of the inscribed area was this: to me, Edinburgh is the Old Town but to UNESCO the Old Town is maybe only a third of what makes the city special. The New Town spreads out and over the ridge of Princes Street for a considerable distance north; it also spills west out beyond Haymarket Station. A fascinating comparative investigation of the Old Town’s Gladstone's Land (a 17th century merchant’s tenement on the Royal Mile) and the New Town’s classical Robert Adam-designed Georgian House (both owned by National Trust Scotland) will have to wait for another day.

Our New Town trip started and ended with a bus stop on Princes Street. The remainder of the day was spent in the Old Town: up the steep cobbled slope of Ramsay Lane (a challenge with a push-chair!), an explore of Edinburgh Castle (including the Romanesque 12th century St Margaret’s chapel, the oldest building in Edinburgh), and then a wander down the full length of the Royal Mile (with a side-trip up George IV Bridge to Greyfrairs) to the gates of Holyrood Palace. Edinburgh Castle is expensive – thankfully we got in for free with my wife’s Historic Scotland membership because otherwise turning up without pre-booking would have cost us £37! Prices are cheaper if you pre-book an entry slot. One piece of newness since my last visit is that the Tron Kirk on the Royal Mile now houses an exhibition from Edinburgh World Heritage. It features the views of locals on what World Heritage status means to them (not always complimentary – one young woman is featured stating that the city is full of statues of long-dead men who mean nothing to her), information about other World Heritage Sites in Scotland, and a bric-a-brac store.

And so back to Greyfriars Kirkyard. If anywhere should stand as a representation of the split personality of Edinburgh’s World Heritage Site I would argue this is it. It has the history of Edinburgh running right through it – quite literally, as a section of the Flodden Wall, thrown up to defend the city from a feared English invasion, bisects the kirkyard. Presbyterian Scots signed their National Covenant against monarchical and ‘Papist’ interference in the kirkyard in 1638. Some 40 years later the defeated remnants of the Covenanter forces were imprisoned here in an open-air camp. The notables buried here run the gamut of the great and good of Scotland from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Mortsafes, cast iron cages designed to protect graves from body-snatchers, can still be found in situ. As a nice link to the New Town, its chief architect James Craig is one of them. And of course there is the nice story-book gloss of the tale of Greyfriars Bobby, the faithful Skye terrier who guarded his master’s grave for 14 years, a tale that found favour with the Victorians who were always keen to sentimentally project human emotions on to domestic animals in a way they never seemed to do with, say, the actual humans living beneath the yoke of their far-flung empire.

World Heritage-iness: 4

My Experience: 4.5

(Visited September 2018)