Kevin Nosferatu

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.

Entrance to Bakehouse Close from the Canongate

Bakehouse Close

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.

A photo showing the entrance through a stone wall into a courtyard with Acheson House, a Seventeenth Century mansion in the background. Photo by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

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.

Doorway into Acheson House

The Cock and Trumpet

A photo showing initials carved into the stone frame by the doorway into Acheson House. Photo by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

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’.

An old sepia photograph showing a woman in old fashioned clothing and a shawl around her shoulders standing in the doorway to a house. The photo is entitled Doorway to Acheson House and was taken by Dr Keith Thomas in 1856

Doorway to Acheson House, taken by Dr Keith Thomas in 1856

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.