Edinburgh, for the first time, after years of imagining it.
Your brain doesn’t keep a separate drawer for places you’ve been and places you’ve only imagined. It builds both in the same room, out of the same parts.
The room is mostly the hippocampus, the little seahorse-shaped structure everyone files under memory. For a long time that was the whole story: the hippocampus is where your past gets kept. Then researchers started asking people to imagine a future that hadn’t happened yet, or to picture a place they’d never actually stood in, and watched the same region light up. Remembering and imagining, it turns out, run on one shared network. Memory hands over the raw material, a doorway from here, a quality of light from there, a smell that belongs to a completely different year, and the brain recombines the fragments into a scene you can walk around inside.
The proof is in the people who’ve lost it. Patients with damage to the hippocampus, who can no longer lay down new memories, were asked to imagine something simple. Picture standing on a beach. Most of us produce sand, surf, a gull, the heat on the back of the neck, a whole coherent place to be. They couldn’t. What came back was thin and disconnected, a few unanchored details with no scene to hold them together. The part of the brain that stores where you’ve been is the same part that builds where you’ve only dreamed of going. Lose one and you lose both.
And one finding stayed with us. Imagining a place you’ve never been lights that region up more than remembering one you have. It’s the harder job. Recalling somewhere real is retrieval. Building somewhere you’ve never stood is construction, from nothing, every single time.
Which means a place you’ve wanted to go for years isn’t a wish. It’s a build. You’ve already made a version of it, in detail, and filed it exactly where your real memories live, indistinguishable in the moment from somewhere you’ve genuinely been. And the rare, specific privilege of finally going is this: you get to set the real one down on top of the one you made.
We did that this week. We went to Scotland.
We’d never been to Scotland
The confession, then. Between us we’ve spent decades in Britain. London until it feels like a second set of house keys. Wales top to bottom. The whole map coloured in. And somehow, never once, Scotland. Not Edinburgh, not Glasgow, not a single Highland mile. We’d been imagining it instead. From films and books and other people’s photographs and a hundred half-promises to ourselves, we built a Scotland and kept it, and never once checked it against the real thing.
So the two people about to run the experiment arrived the way real travel actually delivers you. A delayed flight out of Copenhagen. A Heathrow computer that looked at the hour and a quarter we had to make our connection, decided on our behalf that we couldn’t, and bumped us to a flight a few hours later. A lounge turned into a mobile office. A second delay. Wheels down in Edinburgh just before midnight, into an airport laid out by someone who has never been tired. Then a taxi through the dark, the driver’s accent the first properly Scottish thing to happen to us, and even at that hour we loved it. The Hoxton at one in the morning, eleven Georgian townhouses in Haymarket pretending to be a single hotel, our room in a category called, and we promise we did not invent this, Biggy. Somewhere out in the dark was the city we’d made. The real one would have to wait for morning. For two people who’d carried an imagined Edinburgh for decades, that turned out to be the perfect way to arrive: one last night sleeping beside the version we built, before the swap.
Edinburgh keeps two versions of itself
Edinburgh, it turns out, understands the problem better than we did, because it has done the same thing to itself.
It’s two cities, kept on purpose. The old one stacked itself up a volcanic crag in the Middle Ages, one ridge of a street with stairs and alleys, the closes and wynds, spilling off it into the dark. It built upward when nobody else in Europe was, tenements ten storeys tall called lands, lords and fishwives and lawyers sharing one stair and feuding about it. Then, a few centuries later, the city got rich and reasonable and drew itself a second self next door: the New Town, a calm Georgian grid of straight lines and even windows, the Enlightenment done as town planning. And instead of knocking down the messy old version to make room for the tidy new one, Edinburgh kept both, side by side, and never chose.
You arrive carrying two versions too. The one you built and the one in front of you. The strange grace of Edinburgh is that it doesn’t make you pick.
One full day in Edinburgh, used properly
We gave it a day, which is an introduction rather than a visit, and built the day around the late northern light instead of an early alarm. Out by nine, which between us has always meant ten.
Dean Village first, ten minutes from the door and a full century down: a little milling hamlet sunk in a green gorge on the Water of Leith, turreted and honey-coloured, behaving as though the capital around it were only a rumour. It has the same quiet, cinematic stillness as the small settlements we’d just left in Greenland, a place for wandering rather than ticking off, and the Water of Leith walkway earns the hour: old mills, hidden gardens, a heron running its own errands, corners that reward the unhurried. We were unhurried.
Then the Vennel, which is nothing at all. A narrow staircase between buildings, maybe a minute of climbing. Except that from those steps the Castle arranges itself perfectly between the walls, the picture of Edinburgh everyone has seen and nobody can quite place, and we sat on the stairs for a very long time doing exactly what the steps are for: looking at a fortress and letting nine hundred years of it arrive.
At the bottom of the Vennel sits the Grassmarket, cafés and pubs and easy crowds now, the city’s execution ground for centuries before that, and it wears the contrast openly rather than hiding it, which by then we were beginning to understand is the Edinburgh way. We took a table at the White Hart Inn, pouring since 1516 and by most reckonings the city’s oldest pub, and drank a slow pint under five hundred years of ceiling. Farmers, drovers, soldiers, lawyers and poets have all passed through it; the inn claims Burns and Wordsworth among its drinkers, and the claim is old enough to have earned its keep either way. Outside its door, look up: the Castle stands over this corner almost unchanged, the one piece of the skyline a traveller from the 1500s would still recognise on sight. We considered The Last Drop a few doors along and agreed it was too soon for more pints, a sentence that improves considerably once you learn what the name commemorates.
Then up into the medieval city, the Royal Mile running the spine of the ridge, the closes dropping away on either side into courtyards and sudden staircases. Victoria Street curving below in its painted shopfronts, the curve everyone photographs, the city wears lightly, and a generation of readers refuses to believe wasn’t the blueprint for a certain fictional shopping street. We also paid quiet respects at a café that claims a famous beginning, a rite of passage for reasons of our own that belong to a post further west.
At one o’clock, the gun, in theory. Fired from the Castle almost every day since 1861, back when it was an honest time signal for the ships down at Leith so they could set their clocks. The locals don’t flinch; the entire pleasure of the One O’Clock Gun is supposed to be watching the people who don’t know it’s coming. We contrived to be in the wrong street at the wrong moment and missed it entirely, which we’re choosing to file as a genuine Edinburgh experience and a reason to come back.
There was a piper somewhere on the Mile, as there is statistically always a piper somewhere on the Mile between ten and six. You just move through a city with bagpipes in it, the sound bending around corners ahead of you, and at some point you stop trying to find the source and accept it as weather.
It was during one of these pipe fronts that we bought butterscotch fudge and ate it standing in the street, listening. No plan, no photograph, just sugar and drone and a castle up the hill. It is possible we have never been more on holiday in our lives.
Then the Royal Mile Tavern, for Edinburgh gin dressed with orange and basil, scotch eggs, and, at last, the fish and chips Dee had been promising herself since we landed in Britain. Worth the wait. All of it.
The afternoon went to the volcano. Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags sit in the middle of Edinburgh like a piece of the Highlands that wandered in and refused to leave, a genuine extinct volcano you can climb in an afternoon, the whole city laid out below and a herring gull at the summit thinking exclusively about chips. Then Calton Hill, ten minutes of climbing for the panorama half of Europe envies, the monuments scattered across the top like a giant’s abandoned chess set, and the whole day’s route laid out below us like a receipt.
The evening went back up the Mile, to a pub in the shadow of the old courthouse, where we did the thing this city makes you do, which is talk through its crimes over a drink as though they happened last week. Edinburgh’s history doesn’t sit behind glass. It leans on the bar next to you.
The city underneath the city
Then Real Mary King’s Close, and the fact of it is stranger than any ghost story told inside it. In the 1750s the city needed a grand new Royal Exchange, so it built one directly on top of an existing street. The tenements were sheared off partway up and what remained became the foundations. The close didn’t fall down. It was buried alive, rooms and hearths and doorways intact, and for two and a half centuries people have gone to work in the building above without their floor ever quite being the ground.
We walked down into it and felt the whole city rearrange. We’d spent the morning learning that Edinburgh keeps two versions of itself side by side. It keeps the older ones underneath. A city this old isn’t a place so much as a stack: every street you walk is the roof of an earlier one, and under the City Chambers the earlier one is simply still there, plague years and all, close enough to touch. Four centuries of lives passed through those particular rooms. People were born in them, traded in them, nursed each other through 1645 in them, and the sum of all of it is now, literally, a floor. It’s too much to hold, and we mean that as praise. Standing down there, you understand what the ground under every old city is actually made of: other people’s entire lives, compressed. We spend our working lives documenting single days on the theory that they matter. The close is the counterweight and the proof at once. The days vanish, the layer remains, and the layer is made of nothing but days.
And we kept thinking, down there, of the other stack we’d stood on a week earlier. The Greenland ice sheet is the same idea written by weather instead of people: a layer for every year, a hundred thousand winters and more of them, each one keeping the air that fell with it. Drill a core and you can read it the way you read the close, and not only for volcanoes and forest fires. Greenland’s ice holds the lead that drifted north from Roman smelters, and scientists have traced the whole rise and slump of Rome’s economy, its plagues and its wars, in snow that fell four thousand kilometres from the forum. A buried street made of days. An ice sheet made of winters, with our fingerprints in it anyway. Different archive, same instinct. The world files everything.
The close is named, it should be said, for Mary King, a merchant who traded in her own name in the 1630s, which was its own kind of remarkable. And its most famous resident is a ghost child named Annie, whose legend was declared on the spot in 1992 by a visiting psychic from Japan, and whose room is now heaped with dolls left by strangers. We report it, as ever, without endorsing it. But we note that the close’s most famous story was found by someone from the country we live in, and we have decided to find that companionable.
Back above ground, one last drink at the tavern on the corner named for Deacon Brodie, a nightcap under the sign of the city’s most famous double life, which by then felt like toasting Edinburgh itself. We were tempted by the Devil’s Advocate down its close, and declined, on the grounds that we had no argument left in us. We were dead in our feet. We looked haggard. But alive. We walked back at midnight with the long Scottish afterglow still hanging over the rooftops, because in July this far north the dark never fully commits, twenty-three hours after an airport we couldn’t navigate. What a day. Thank you, Edinburgh.
Haar: the fog that makes its own light
Edinburgh’s other word, after the gun and the pipes, arrives by sea. Haar. A cold summer fog with a precise recipe: warm air drifts out over a North Sea that hasn’t finished warming up, the moisture condenses, an easterly wind walks the result ashore. It came into Scots off the same water that makes it, a Dutch and Old Norse word carried in by the sailors who met it first. Its specialty is turning up exactly when the weather is otherwise perfect.
The thing the haar does, the thing that made us love it on sight before we’d even seen it, is that it can swallow the east of the city whole while the west sits in clean sunshine. Two weathers, one capital, at the same time. A city already keeping two versions of itself can apparently keep two skies as well. If we wake one morning to a white window, we’ve decided in advance that this isn’t a problem. It’s a photograph.
A city built out of double lives
We spend our lives telling other people’s stories, and we’d walked into a city made almost entirely of them, most of them about people being two things at once.
The pub where we ended the night is named for Deacon Brodie, a respectable city councillor and cabinet-maker by day who let himself into his clients’ houses by night with copies of their own keys, and was eventually hanged on a gallows he’d helped design. A man who was two men. He handed Robert Louis Stevenson, an Edinburgh boy, the idea that became Jekyll and Hyde. The city is full of this. Greyfriars Kirkyard, where a hanging judge once penned over a thousand prisoners into an open-air pen and now lies in a tomb behind a few centuries of reported hauntings, and where, as it happens, a novelist short of names borrowed a few off the headstones, a Thomas Riddell among them. And the pub we’d drunk in that afternoon, wearing its own double life more openly than anywhere in the city. On execution days the Grassmarket gallows drew crowds in their thousands, and afterwards many of them stepped into the White Hart for ale and conversation, a cosy room doing brisk trade a few metres from the rope. In 1828 Burke and Hare are widely believed to have drunk here while choosing their victims: at least sixteen people murdered, never grave-robbed, suffocated without marks in a method that entered the language as burking, the bodies sold to Dr Robert Knox’s anatomy school. The ending is the city’s darkest irony done in full. Burke was hanged in front of a vast Edinburgh crowd in 1829, then publicly dissected, the exact fate he’d been supplying. His skeleton stands in the university’s anatomy collection to this day, and a notebook bound in his tanned skin survives, and the outrage helped rewrite Britain’s anatomy laws. The pub, naturally, also keeps the requisite resident ghosts, a woman in red and footsteps in empty rooms, which we report without endorsing. An execution ground out front, now a perfectly nice square.
It’s a city that has spent six hundred years being decorous on the surface and something else entirely underneath, and has decided, like the haar, like the two towns, to keep both rather than tidy one of them away.
What we were actually doing there
Here’s the part the castle and the closes don’t explain.
We didn’t cross the world for Edinburgh. As much as we’ve wanted it for years, as long as it’s sat built and waiting in our heads, it isn’t the reason we’re in Scotland at all. The reason is ten days away and forty miles west, in a swimming pool in Glasgow, where a boy we love is about to pull on green and gold and climb onto a set of blocks. Ten days out, and both our hearts have already started rehearsing. Everything between now and then, this city, the road into the Highlands, an island we’ve wanted even longer than we wanted this one, is the long way round to an evening in a grandstand.
Nobody warns you about this part of finally arriving somewhere you’ve only imagined. The light keeps coming anyway. It doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a warm-up. Edinburgh handed us pipes around a corner, a staircase that frames a castle, five centuries of pub, a street buried alive beneath a building, and a hill full of strangers from a dozen countries up there for exactly the view we were. None of it was the point. All of it was a gift.
And somewhere on the crags in the afternoon, Tracey had already gone quiet and still in the way she does, looking at a ledge of volcanic rock with the whole city stacked up behind it, working out precisely where two people would stand. Decades of dreaming about Scotland, twenty minutes into the actual thing, and the eye was already at work. We came here to watch a boy swim. We can’t help carrying the rest of it home with us.
The version that wins
You only get to lay the real city over the imagined one once.
We have the real Edinburgh now, the actual one, gulls and pipes and gun and gold, and it’s quietly taken the place of the one we carried for years. We didn’t feel it happen. That’s the strange cost folded inside the gift: the city we built and kept for decades is gone, written over by the one that was there all along, and we’ll never get it back, and we wouldn’t undo the swap for anything.
Tomorrow Tracey drives, the grid gives way to the geology, and we go looking for the next place we’ve only ever imagined.
Read more Greenland/Scotland travel stories here:
The Night the Fjord Disappeared
