The Real Mary King's Close, Edinburgh

The room is small, dark and dingy and smells of earth, damp and dust. It’s hardly surprising, when you consider that I had to walk down 38 steps to get here. On the floor in the corner there’s a bucket for doing one’s business. ‘It was emptied twice a day when the bells of St Giles [the nearby church on the Royal Mile] rang’, remarks our guide.  

Centuries ago, some Edinburgh folk lived in this cramped dwelling in the heart of the city’s Old Town. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, the upper storeys of the building and those around it were lopped off, with the remainder serving as foundations for the new City Chambers. Now tour groups like mine wander through this dim subterranean world of vaulted rooms and low doorways. 

Our guide is a chambermaid called Agnes. (Actually, she’s an actor playing Agnes). A white cloth keeps her hair in place, and she sports a shabby throw and a white apron round her waist. She has a broad Scots accent. ‘Watch your step and mind your heeds’, she says repeatedly. On one occasion she tells us to avoid the nails sticking out of the walls, and I wonder how long it will be before some busybody shuts the place down. 

Agnes takes us through a cowshed with a very uneven, cobbled floor, and a room containing plague victims, all the while offering glimpses into seventeenth century life. ‘Nobody drank the water – it was dangerous – so we were all a little bit drunk most of the time’, she quips. We hear noises evocative of medieval Edinburgh: a man’s dying scream, an unseen woman shouting ‘gardyloo’ as she hurls a bucket of excrement out the window, and cows mooing. 

Agnes plays up the supernatural angle, telling us that ‘We are in supposedly some of the most haunted rooms in Scotland’. Apparently, a Japanese psychic called Aki visited in the nineties, and claimed to have felt the presence of a sad girl. She returned with a doll, a gesture which apparently relieved the gloom, and now a great drift of toys rests against one of the walls.  Evidently, none of my group knew about this tradition beforehand, for nobody leaves such a token. 

We descend more stairs to the close, or street, Agnes cautioning us in her Scots patois to ‘dinnae use’ the handrail. It’s pretty dark in the close, of course, and steep and narrow; maybe two metres across. Everything’s relative, though, for our guide points out that it was once much a ‘sought-after’ address ‘because it was so wide’. Washing hangs above our heads between the buildings on either side, which rise three or four storeys before dead-ending at the base of the City Chambers. It’s a remarkable place. 

We stand outside a door on the close, which Agnes pushes open in virtual slow-motion. The creaking sound is practically deafening in this echo chamber. Inside is a hall of wooden floorboards caked in dust, walls treated with arsenic to prevent mould and a naked light bulb, which provides a modicum of brightness. ‘No one is allowed in here’, Agnes remarks. At the end of the passage is a ‘thunderbox’, an improvement on the bucket seen earlier. The residents were forced to leave in 1897 as it was illegal to dwell underground. 

It took me fourteen years to get round to visiting The Real Mary King’s Close. Still, it’s better late than never.

Royal Yacht Britannia, Edinburgh

I’m standing at the stern of the ship on the ‘verandah deck’, a large space with a 2 inch thick teak floor, formerly used for games of quoits and deck hockey and painting. Above my head a Union Jack flutters gently in the easterly wind, bringing with it the scent of fuel from the nearby docks. It’s freezing cold and the sky is gunmetal grey. 

A sun lounge opens on to the deck, and inside are bamboo chairs, walls panelled in teak and a well-stocked drinks cabinet. You can easily imagine someone sitting here fifty years ago, watching bronzed sunbathers stretched out on the deck through the open sash windows, or sipping a glass of champagne as the yacht cruised through the azure waters of the Pacific or the Caribbean. 

Those glamorous days are long gone though. Now the five-decked ship with its royal insignia and deep blue hull is attached to a struggling shopping mall in the north of Edinburgh. Within a 500 metre radius there are two unsightly blue and yellow tower blocks and a flour mill, as well as a number of down-at-heel streets. Royal Yacht Britannia looks utterly out of place. 

Queen Elizabeth travelled the world on Britannia for over 40 years. Befitting a ship of such size, it had an enormous crew of 220 yachtsmen and 20 officers. It truly belongs to another era. Indeed, some aspects of life on board seem barely believable now. For instance, the petty officers (and, I suppose, other yachtsmen) slept in hammocks until 1970, the same year the crew’s rum ration was eliminated. The Queen was accompanied by 45 attendants when the boat was used for official state visits, and took 5 tonnes of luggage on board with her. Yes, 5 tonnes. Pompously, menus for dinner were printed in French, and it took 3 hours to set the very long dinner table.

I learn these intriguing titbits from the audioguide which is included in the steep £14 ticket price. The man performing the description sounds as though he could be a member of the royal family himself. Prince Philip, he remarks, wanted a ‘mah-sculine cabin, although he somehow ended up with a tiny single bed. You could go your whole life without meeting someone who speaks in this fashion.    

As I walk round, passing thickly carpeted staircases and rooms decorated with mementoes of past voyages like a whale rib bone and a Swedish broadsword forged in 1738, I can’t help thinking that working on board must have been intolerable. The verandah deck, for instance, was scrubbed daily with sea water by junior yachtsmen. These unfortunates were obliged to work in silence, ‘so that the royal family was not disturbed’. Indeed, were a sailor to find himself in the presence of one of these exalted individuals, he was to ‘stand absolutely still and look straight ahead until they had passed’. 

Britannia certainly offers an intriguing insight into the past, and has considerable snob value. Then again, do you really want to spend 14 quid to view innumerable pictures of Prince Charles?

Nikko

          The wide avenue slopes gently uphill towards the shrine of Toshogu. It is dimly lit and in places shrouded in complete darkness. Great sugi, or cryptomeria, trees soar above ancient-looking stone walls on either side of the broad path, and crystalline mountain water flows lazily downhill through narrow channels at their feet. 

          The silence is profound, the only sounds coming from the resounding crunch of my feet on the carpet of tiny stones and the soft lapping of the water on its stony beds. Except for me, the approach to what may be Japan’s greatest sight is utterly deserted. 

          I arrive at a set of shallow steps, then a torii gate. Beyond, the entrance to the shrine is shut. As I stand in the pitch blackness, I imagine I’m hundreds of steps above, in front of the two grinning, hellish hounds with blazing eyes: the guardians of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s seventeenth century tomb. The mere thought of it is spine-tingling. 

          For I have been to Nikko before. Four years ago, on a morning of almost unbearable humidity, I saw the wondrous gold-leafed Yomeimon Gate, the storehouses adorned with three monkeys and gold-tusked elephants, and finally Ieyasu’s understated mausoleum. But I didn’t get the chance to wander its empty paths after sundown. 

          Narrow paths fork off to the left and right of the entrance, flanking the borders of the shrine complex. I turn left and espy a seemingly limitless row of tall and antiquated stone lanterns that extend along the outer wall. In the darkness they look alarmingly human. 

          More immense cryptomeria trees stand upon the inner side of the wall, rising far above the weather-beaten stone parapet and the newer vermilion fence. The eaves of an ornate hall just inside the compound almost overhang the boundary, its vibrant colours and cylindrical roof tiles hidden by the night. 

          I walk back down the great avenue to the Daiya River, where the water crashes into huge rocks on the riverbed and soon arrive at my hotel, the Turtle Inn. I feel a tinge of sadness, for I know that this may be the last time I ever experience the electrifying atmosphere of Nikko at night. 

          Tomorrow morning I will return to the shrine but I know the magic will have departed. Swarms of tourists, mostly Japanese but also many gaikoku-jin, or foreigners, will have assumed temporary control of the spellbinding approach to Toshogu.

Scotland's Secret Bunker

          ‘It may also have contained a secure store of cyanide for taking if, after three months of being sealed underground, there was nothing to come up for. Or, more realistically, if the inhabitants could not get out.’ 

          I listen to this grim piece of information inside the Armoury in Scotland’s Secret Bunker, a once secret Cold War installation that would have served as a Scottish governmental headquarters had a nuclear war broken out. It was completed in 1953 and remained in service for forty years. It is located beneath a flat stretch of land in Fife, a peninsula of farms and dreary towns between the Forth and Tay estuaries (or firths, as they are known here). 

Taken in isolation, the house beneath which it is situated looks rather mundane, although it does feature a very un-Scottish verandah. The air smells of dung and the only sounds come from the wind and the rattle of flagpoles. The surroundings, however, have the accoutrements of a high-security military base: there are fences topped with coiled barbed wire, armoured cars, a tank and a Soviet SAM-2 missile adorned with a red star and Russian inscription.

          I descend stairs that lead from the house to a long, cold tunnel bordered by twin red lines and white walls. A stream of incomprehensible chatter is piped in on speakers, creating a weird, almost paranoid atmosphere. Red blast doors have been opened at the end of the tunnel and I read that the bunker beyond is encased in ten feet of solid concrete, reinforced with tungsten. Doors open off a corridor inside the bunker.  

          Through one of these doors is the dormitory, a Spartan affair coloured a light yellow and featuring sixteen green framed bunk beds. Grey blankets have been tucked into the uninviting beds and the pillows are stained yellow with sweat. Bundles of bed linen wrapped in brown paper and white string sit upon the mattresses, while tall and narrow grey lockers stand against the walls. A night in here strikes me as a thoroughly unappealing prospect.  

Down a further set of stairs lies another corridor, off which can be found the aforementioned Armoury, a small room of grey walls and a wooden floor. It is a war lover’s wet dream: blue Vigilant anti-tank missiles marked ‘Drill’ have been placed near the door, and there is an assortment of machine guns and other firearms on display, including a Russian SKS assault rifle with attached bayonet and an antiquated Israeli Uzi. 

The bunker is fascinating. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, I also find my visit slightly unnerving. I’m very aware that I’m a hundred feet below ground, and the beeps of Morse code, air raid sirens and doomsday messages instructing people how to react in the event of a nuclear attack add to the sense of insecurity. The air is strange, too: the smell is like a combination of paint and dust, and it sticks at the back of your throat.

Before I leave I encounter one of the guides. Somehow we get on to international affairs and he expresses concern about the situation in Ukraine, as well as Chinese foreign policy. He tells me he saw a six lane motorway that terminated at China’s border with Nepal while in Tibet. ‘What’s it there for?’ he asks, rhetorically. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, but I don’t doubt him. In this place of unreality, just about anything seems possible.