I recently spent a week in Scotland. The purpose of the trip was to present at a conference, at the University of St. Andrews. But after the conference was over I had a couple of days to pass in Edinburgh on my own. Solo travel is a rare luxury, for me. Typically, on a journey, I’m trying to make plans based around the needs and interests of a small child (my daughter just turned seven). In Edinburgh I had the challenge, or privilege, of deciding how to use my own time.
There’s a lot to do, in Edinburgh. The city is small enough to navigate quickly and easily. So there was a lot that I could have done. But I’ve never been a Harry Potter fan. And I’m completely uninterested in checking out the Crown Jewels of any castle. It was more than enough, for me, to stare up at Castle Rock and to witness the way that it still makes itself such a formidable presence in the most mundane of daily affairs there.
Luckily a friend who I’d been hanging out with in St Andrews, who knows all about my current underworld obsession, recommended a visit to Mary King’s Close—an old buried street that you can still access through a guided tour. That night, after we returned home from a long evening at the pub in St. Andrews I bought an advance ticket for the Saturday tour. It was the one concrete item on my agenda. It wasn’t the only thing I ended up doing, but I think it was probably the highlight. Perhaps my after-dinner trip to Sandy Bell’s—where I ended up dancing to Scottish folk music with strangers down a narrow passage through the bar—would have beat it out. But the visit ended in a debate about guns (that lasted for hours) with an intoxicated Scottish right winger who somehow decided that I was an American with “lefty” views to be disabused of.
At any rate, given that I’m writing a book about underworlds, and given that I’m slated to cross the ocean again in early July (with my mom) to do some underworld tourism in the Paleolithic caves of the Dordogne region of France, I’ve been thinking a bit about the appeal of underworld tourism. It has something to do with secrecy, and the desire to get close to a past that might otherwise seem inaccessible. But it’s not reducible to this. This desire for secrecy is woven together with our desire to be a little bit afraid, to feel our hearts beat a little harder. To feel a little bit more alive.
The Buried Street
A close is another name for a tiny alleyway that runs off the main thoroughfare. This buried close, in the center of Edinburgh’s Old Town, was named after Mary King; an early 17th century woman who was both a fabric merchant and a burgess (eventually elected to the city council) during a time when women still didn’t have the right to vote. She was a woman with political power whose legacy was literally buried. Mary King’s Close was apparently a marketplace, before it was buried. It was a crowded and dirty street where the 30,000 residents of the old city would buy and sell food, dry goods, and live animals.
Over the next century or so, as the city grew, the buildings that hovered over the close also grew taller and taller. At their peak they apparently stood twelve stories high. People inhabited every story, although it was only the poorest folks who lived at the very top; they would have had to climb up twelve flights of stairs to get there. Numerous people were said to have fallen from the highest stories into the marketplace below. Late in the 18th century, city officials made the decision to build a new street on top of Mary King’s Close, effectively sealing it off on one end and turning the remaining portions of the street into an underground cave. The city built an indoor marketplace on the street above it.
Initially all residents of the close were evacuated, but it appears that some residents were allowed to return (maybe because they refused to leave?) One buried apartment was inhabited until the 1930s. They even installed indoor plumbing (you can still see the pipes on the exterior of the home.) Our tour guide opened the door to the apartment so we could peer inside, but we weren’t allowed to enter. Apparently the residents had covered the place in Scheele’s Green wallpaper, which was loaded with arsenic. From the arsenic wallpaper to the ceilings where the horsehair plaster was crumbling above our heads, the tour was very carefully managed. There are lawsuits around every corner in that buried street, I suspect.
The last family was evacuated in the 1930s, and the whole close was finally sealed off. The city used the close as a bomb shelter during World War II. After that, the close lay fallow for many years, though there were probably people in the city who made “illicit” use of the space (exploring it against any public edict, for instance). The company who hosted the tour has been doing this since 2003. But there was a woman on my tour who visited with another company in the late 1980s or early 1990s. She told me that this other company let people wander through the close, on their own. She also said that they would periodically turn out the lights, just to scare people.
The tour company who guided us through seemed much more cautious about how they were managing their audience. They were more professional, you could say. The tour was so highly produced that they’d installed large digital portraits of historic characters who’d lived on the close (such as Mary King herself). The portraits would come to life, to introduce themselves and speak with one another. This tour company wouldn’t have done anything so base as turning out the lights, simply to create terror and panic in the audience. But they were, now that I think about it, also exploiting the fear factor of this underworld space.
The tour was filled with tidbits of history that aimed to bring 17th and 18th century Edinburgh (when the close would have been unburied) to life. One major event in history, during this time, was the plague. Several rooms in the close were dedicated to plague history. They described to us the quarantine process (including the brutal punishments people were subjected to, for violating it). They told us the story of the plague doctor George Rae who (like many other plague doctors) wore a raven’s mask and who had to fight the city in court, just to be paid for his services. They also brought us into a claustrophobia-inducing little room, where sickly mannequins had been subjected to the symptoms of plague. The lighting was dim, with some red light oozing from the corners of the room. We listened to them describe what it would have felt like to live in one of those tiny apartments, with as many as twelve other people (who used a wooden bucket as the collective toilet). And I started to feel a bit ill. My skin started itching and I felt like my throat was swelling up. I started to feel a low-grade irrational sense of panic that an amorphous, floating form of illness had bitten me.
When we surfaced again, and I could see the light of day, I felt all of my symptoms magically disappear. In the end, my experience of that underworld space was so tied to the plague, I ended up buying my daughter a “plague ducktor” in the gift shop, as a souvenir.
Feeling Alive
As I wandered around Edinburgh that day, I had plenty of time to ponder my own motives for going on that underworld tour. Why is this the sort of place that I tend to end up in, when I’m on vacation?, I wondered. It’s not just because I’m writing a book about underworlds (although this is obviously related). Rather, I think, I’m writing a book about underworlds because this is the sort of thing that I seek out, in my spare time. Part of the reason, yes, is that I’m a little bit morbid. But this tour has a broad appeal that goes beyond morbidity, I think.
Part of the reason for this broad appeal, as I see it, has to be that underworld tourism seems to give us access to a trove of buried secrets. Rather than experience, and witness, what the most wealthy people and institutions in a given locale have managed to preserve (the castles, the art museums), underworlds give us another sort of window into the past. We end up in the spaces and places that the wealth and prosperity of the city wanted to bury. We feel like (and we probably actually do) get closer to the everyday matters that people like us, people without much wealth or power, would have been living through. We end up somewhere dirtier, and grittier. And it feels more real.
There’s a part of me that feels a little bit cynical about this particular motive for seeking out the underworld. It makes me think about something that my friend
said, in our collaborative sound piece on the night: “we live in a time of maximum brightness.” We want everything to be seen, and spoken. We want to unbury everything. Part of me worries that underworld tourism is just another method for exposing what’s been buried in city life, in history, to this maximum brightness. Part of me worries that this is also my motive, in studying underworlds: to pursue some method of extreme exposure.But I keep coming back to the feeling I had, after being squeezed into that little (imaginatively) dim and plague-filled room. In that tight space I felt a synthetic version of the kind of low-grade panic that I remember living with for months, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. I felt closed in by my own fear. And more than that, I recognized that part of me was looking forward to being—in some way—a little bit scared when I went underground. There are many reasons we desire some form of fear, I suppose. But I don’t think we can discount the simple, basic effect of feeling afraid for a brief moment: our hearts beat a little faster, we actually feel them in our bodies, we remember that we have real hearts, and that they work. Sometimes a little fear can make us feel just a little bit more alive.
In the end, perhaps, this desire is more of draw than the desire to pull the curtain back on the past. I don’t know that the small flickers of information about this buried life of the past that I was given access to has demystified 17th and 18th century Edinburgh for me. I don’t feel that I’ve exposed it to any bright lights. If anything, being in that underworld space has made that past even more strange, obscure, and curious. I was reminded of how absolutely strange the past was, how other to me the past always continues to be. No matter how deep we dig, we will never really get there: to that core of the experience of being alive in that time, and in that place. We can never return to the past of other people, or the past of ourselves. We are always journeying forward, most of the time with our eyes half closed.