Griff’s Aunt took us to Edinburgh castle today, she said it was, like, the most famous landmark in Scotland and she couldn’t bear for us to come all this way and not bother seeing it.
We caught the bus from her house and then had to walk for ages to get the castle. It was huge and on top of this massive hill, which used to be a volcano apparently. We all thought that was pretty cool. There were loads of people queueing to get in, but luckily Griff’s Aunt had booked ahead and we walked right past everyone.
We went on a guided tour with a load of tourists who kept taking pictures of literally everything. The tour seemed to go on for ages; we went in loads of different rooms and museum-type areas. The tour guide went on about the whole history of the castle, and I knew I should be more interested in historical stuff, especially now I was travelling back in time, but it was just so boring and even though I tried really hard to pay attention, my thoughts kept drifting away.
Jacobites, old kings, the English, the Scottish, the Anglo Saxons, Unions, French Revolution – how was one castle involved in all of this stuff? I totally lost track until they took us to a courtyard, which had the biggest cannon you have ever seen in your life!
It was huge! Apparently the biggest cannon ever used in actually warfare and was destroyed on purpose by the English when they were firing it to celebrate the coronation of some King of other. They said some of the cannonballs actually weigh as much as a car – can you believe that?
We spent ages climbing on the cannons and taking stupid pictures…
…and then the guide took us to the coolest bit of the whole castle – the dungeons.
The whole place was pretty dark and smelly and the ceilings were really low. Mark and Griff almost had to duck to get round some parts.
“Why is it so low?” they asked.
“People weren’t as tall as they are now, hundreds of years ago,” I said without thinking.
“Hmm,” said Mark.
‘How dya know that?” said Griff.
“History lessons,” I lied.
They room smelt like that the ghost train queue at Alton Towers. They said the dungeons were used right up to the 1900s and held French prisoners, but get this, they were also for Pirates. All the walls had these awesome carvings in them where people had written where they were from, their names and family members they missed. They weren’t given any tools, the guide said, so they must have used their fingers to carve away at the stone. One person had carved a whole ship into the wall; sails, ropes and everything!
When we came out of the castle, the sunlight was blinding. Griff’s Aunt led us back down the hill and bought us all an ice cream. We sat in the park below looking back up the hill and it was all great until Griff’s Aunt mentioned that all those roads we could see leading down to us used to be sewers and we were basically sitting on top of a massive cesspit. Nice!
And if it couldn’t get any worse, it reached for my phone to take a picture and it wasn’t in my pocket (so I had to ge this one from the internet). We searched all our bags and pockets but it had totally gone. What a disaster, how would SHARP contact me now?
Time Travel is Possible! 