by Lucky Poet » Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:08 am
Coincidentally, a friend asked me the other week if I'd ever heard about tunnels in the area of the east end of the New Town. Reading the thread on the tunnels in Glasgow to do with the GPO and what not, it would make sense for there to have been similar defence/civil control type thing in Edinburgh. When they were ripping out the inside of Edinburgh's old GPO a while back though, the crude way they went about it suggests there are no floors below the ground level at Calton Road - tearing the building's innards down with heavy machinery leaving huge piles of rubble in the middle of the site. Any associated tunnels would have to go north towards Register House. Having said that, the Scottish Office's hideous old pad New St Andrew's House is in that direction; I don't reckon they would have bothered for atomic age bunkers though. Edinburgh would have been too much of a target and the governmental complex is only a short hop away in Fife (there's also a bunker near Kirknewton). I've never even heard rumours of tunnels, though that doesn't conclusively prove there's nothing. I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.
So far as railway tunnels go, the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Scotland Street, the Innocent, Haymarket, the one through the shoulder of Calton Hill, and one near Balerno/Currie (currently part of a bike path along the Water of Leith). And under the Mound if you count that.
I came across mention of a very old tunnel or cave near the railway one at Calton Hill, but it was a sketchy report from very long ago and there's been no trace found since (I'll try to find the source again though). In the Old Town, there's the likes of Mary King's Close and the vaults at the South Bridge of course, but places like that aren't tunnels so much as areas at original ground level that have been built around. There'll be a few other places like that, but nothing very much more exciting than old basements I would think. Other than that, you're going back into myth. There are ancient stories of a tunnel from the Castle to Holyrood, but this is probably just very old urban myth. There is reliable record of one near Bank Street, an old smugglers' tunnel from the North Loch, but it was obliterated when they built George IV Bridge. It seems a bit crap that a settlement of Edinburgh's age doesn't have much more, but that seems to be about it as far as I know.
All the world seems in tune on a Spring afternoon, when we're poisoning pigeons in the park.