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.