Gratuitous Castle Post

I finally got to go inside Edinburgh Castle yesterday! The castle looms over the city, a fortress that has been around for hundreds of years, growing slowly over that time. The most intimidating part of the castle? The entrance fee. It's £15 for adults. Conveniently, the University of Edinburgh Historical Society has a £4 membership fee and free admission to the castle on certain days in the semester. So yesterday, Molly and I decided to take advantage of that.


Yesterday (Wednesday) and today have been amazing as far as weather. People are walking around in shorts and I've had my bedroom window wide open in hopes of getting a small breeze. For lunch, Molly, Hillary, and I went to a bakery a few blocks away and bought meat pies and pastries for a couple pounds each. We ate them in the Meadows and soaked up as much sun as we could.


Then Molly and I headed to the castle. It's at the end of Royal Mile, so not too far from campus. As soon as we got there, we took the obligatory we're visiting a castle pictures:

As we waited for the History Society officers, a group of small children taking a tour of the castle walked by. The best part? They all had on adorable little crowns. We wanted a picture so I pretended to take a picture of Molly:

Once inside, I went camera crazy, taking over 50 pictures in about 2.5 hours. 

The castle is built on a hill and, in a way, built into the hill. All around, you can see parts of the hill.

A lot of canons are set up around the castle. One we saw later was Mons Meg.

A lot of the castle was museums: the Scottish War Museum, the Prisoners of War Museum, the Military Prison Museum, etc. My favorite part was the crown jewels, but no pictures were allowed. They had the history of coronations in Scotland. The exhibit says that the original stone used for coronation (the Stone of Scone) was stolen by Edward I, who invaded Scotland. He then took the stone and built upon it the Coronation Chair used by all English monarchs since. However, I went home and looked this up and Wikipedia actually lists this as a theory, while the Scottish Historical Trust exhibit described it as a true story. The exhibit did have old English song lyrics that described the chair as "built upon the scone."

Outside of St. Mary's Chapel was a view of the soldier's dog cemetery:

Me outside the Scottish War Memorial:

The most castle-y part of the Castle was David's Tower, which was the original part. It was really fun to explore the different sites, and hopefully I'll go back to see the castle gardens soon.