Edinburgh Once More

We spent an afternoon at the Royal Botanic Gardens

It was a lovely day for a wander through some gardens. It was sprinkling when we arrived so we went to the Glass Houses first.

One of my favorites (call me odd) was that the moss in one of the houses was beginning its mating ritual. Look at all the little sporophytes!!!

Another highlight was the Juan Fernandez Fern for obvious reasons!

The only part of ginger I have ever seen are the roots in the grocery store, but apparently this is what the rest looks like.

Eben’s favorite was this plant with flowers that look like tiny hands. He thought they would fit right in with the likes of Dr. Seuss perhaps in The Lorax. We never did sort out what plant it was...


That night at 10pm we went on a ghost tour. Neither of us took any photos because, to be honest, we were a bit too freaked out by the whole thing. There are a series of underground streets and chambers that were sealed up over two hundred years ago and the only way to check them out is to attend one of these tours. You can of course go during the day, and I’m sure it’s a bit tamer for the kids. We started out walking through a section of the old city above ground. The tour guide painted a picture of Edinburgh in the Middle Ages. NOT a pretty picture! Lots of filth with sewage being pitched out windows onto the streets (and the homeless) running down to North Loch the city's source of drinking water (it was so foul that there was a crust on the loch that a grown man could walk across). Not to mention the bubonic plague causing large black pus filled sacs all over the bodies of the afflicted. Then there were the witch trials and the horrible things done to those women (one of which was being thrown, so that the crust broke, into the sewage filled loch to find out if you sank or floated). He told us about the prisons where a healthy young man would die within 7 months of incarceration because of the conditions (if they survived the torture). We then went underground to the chambers where the poor and homeless would flee and live in complete darkness and more filth. Apparently, these spaces are now haunted by some of those unfortunate people that died there. Some from ‘natural’ causes, others who were cooked during a huge fire in the city above that heated the stone walls and essentially created an oven. It was after this incident that the streets and cambers were sealed off. They were not discovered until the 1920s. It was all really interesting, but on the depressing side. We also saw about 50 different torture devices that had all been used on someone over 200 years ago. What I found scarier than the stories of the ghosts was being in the space where these things actually transpired, no matter how long ago. It was troubling, but full of great history. I used to think that it would be fun to live during the Middle Ages and maybe if you were royalty it was, but I’ll have to rethink that one!