On a warm and muggy day during the
Edinburgh Festival, I made my way up to the old town. There I found the streets crowded, not so
much with tourists and festival goers, but rather with piles of rubbish. Some were almost six feet high and beginning
to stink in the heat. Bins were
overflowing and cups and containers from takeaways were strewn across the
pavements and the road. In the slight,
gentle breeze napkins, tissue paper and plastic bags floated up, swirled around
and then dropped back to the ground. The
bin men had been on strike for only a few days and in those few days Edinburgh
had started to resemble one of those cities in zombie movies. There was abandoned junk everywhere, zonked
out people stumbling from show to show and bewildered looking tourists staring
glass eyed at their phones as they tried to work out where the hell they were
and how they could get to where they were going.
I made my way past them all and the
piles of rubbish, as I was in search of one of the many little streets, or closes
as they are called up here in Edinburgh, that you can walk down and feel you’ve
almost stepped back in time. One of the
most perfect examples of these being Bakehouse Close which sits just off the
Canongate and seems to belong to an era from maybe two or three hundred years
ago. Well, that is as long as you face
the Canongate entrance and ignore all the parked cars down at the bottom of the
close.
.jpg "Entrance to Bakehouse Close from the Canongate")
.jpg "Bakehouse Close")
.jpg "Entrance from Bakehouse Close out to the Canongate")
Just inside Bakehouse Close sits Acheson
House, a fine example of an old town mansion built at a time when the wealthy
all wanted to be close to Holyrood Palace and the King or Queen of the day.
.jpg "Entrance to courtyard of Acheson House")
Acheson House was built in 1633 for Sir
Archibald Acheson, who was the Secretary of State for Scotland under King
Charles I. It was originally built as a
three storey mansion with the main entrance being accessed through a courtyard
that led out onto Bakehouse Close. Above
one of the two doorways into the house was carved the date 1633, a monogram of
the initials of Acheson and his wife Margaret Hamilton, and also Acheson’s family
crest, a cockerel and trumpet. Acheson died the year after the house was
completed and it is unlikely that he ever actually lived there.
.jpg "Doorway into Acheson House")
.jpg "The Cock and Trumpet")
.jpg "Graffiti on the stone doorframe")
The house was inherited by Acheson’s
son, who quickly sold it on to Patrick Wood, a wealthy Edinburgh merchant. Over the next two hundred years the house was
sold on numerous times. In the early
nineteenth century, as the old town of Edinburgh became more and more run down
and overcrowded, the house was split up and became a tenement housing various
families and businesses.
One of the businesses that occupied the house
was a tavern, which also operated as a brothel.
It was commonly known as the Cock and Trumpet, as clients entered
through the door with the Acheson family crest above it. Of the many Victorian gentlemen who frequented
the brothel, there was one who would go on to be a world famous and much
respected author. This was the young
Robert Louis Stevenson, who often ventured from the stifling Presbyterian atmosphere
of his parents’ home in the new town, to drink in sleazy dives and explore the
dark delights of the old town.
Of the women who worked in the Cock and
Trumpet we know very little. There is
though a photograph from 1856 by Dr Keith Thomas showing a woman standing in
the doorway there. Whether she is one of
the women from the brothel or is a tenant of one of the tenements around it, we
do not know as the photograph is simply entitled ‘Doorway Acheson House’.
In 1924 Acheson house was bought by the
city council, who were buying up and demolishing the slum housing in the area. It lay empty for several years and then, luckily,
before it was knocked down, the building came to the attention of the Marquis
of Bute, who bought it from the council and had it restored. It was then occupied by several businesses before
becoming the home of the Scottish Craft Centre in 1952. In 1991 the Craft Centre closed, and the
building again lay empty. This time for
nearly two decades. As it began to crumble
into dereliction there was much huffing and puffing about what should become of
it, before plans were eventually drawn up and part of the building was
incorporated into the Edinburgh Museum, with the main house becoming the
headquarters for the Edinburgh World Heritage Trust.
The area outside the little courtyard
leading to the house now attracts many visitors, mainly Outlander fans attracted
to Bakehouse Close, as scenes from the series were filmed there. On a warm summer’s day try to walk down the
close without someone stopping you, handing you a phone or a camera and asking
you to take a photo of them there – I dare you.
I left the Skulferatu that accompanied
me on my walk around Bakehouse Close, sitting on the curve of an old drainpipe running
down the wall of Acheson House.
.jpg "Skulferatu #83")
.jpg "Skulferatu #83 on the curve of an old drainpipe")
.jpg "Skulferatu #83 on the curve of an old drainpipe")
.jpg "Map showing the location of Skulferatu #83")
The coordinates for the location of the
Skulferatu are –
Latitude 55.951205
Longitude -3.179022
what3words: pages.spoon.lamp
I used the following sources for
information on Acheson House and Bakehouse Close –
Information plaques at
site
Edinburgh World Heritage
Edinburgh World Heritage
- Acheson House
Wikipedia
Collins Encyclopaedia of
Scotland
By John Keay & Julia
Keay
1994
Royal Scottish Academy –
Keith Thomas
Royal
Scottish Academy: Keith Thomas - Edinburgh Photographs
No comments:
Post a Comment