Taking Edinburgh Castle Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
Note: Scotland is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We encourage you, if you are able, to listen to the audio, which provides insight which is significantly different to how it appears on the page. Transcripts are generated from the original scripts of the episodes. They may be slightly different to the corresponding audio and may contain errors.
Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 9 - Taking Edinburgh Castle
MICHAEL PARK: It is 2019. You are standing on an ancient stone parapet, looking out across centuries of human spread and industrialisation. You close your eyes and let the rain hit your face. It always rains here - it feels like it never lets up.
You can barely make out the water from here and you know that somewhere in the distance there’s more land on the other side. The buildings below your feet stretch away into the distance and the hum of traffic and chattering tourists who haven’t learned to mute the camera sound on their smartphones stops you slipping into a trance.
Another tour party rumbles around the corner. You put your headphones back on and take another deep breath, wiping the rain off your forehead. You feel like you’re flying. You’re high above the city and you can see the medieval give way to the Edwardian avenues and boulevards, the splendour of the spires and copper domes, before the encroaching modernity sees office blocks and vast complexes of flats planted in its heart.
You feel the stone under your feet, the sheer weight of its age is the only thing anchoring you to terra firma. You reach out your hand to steady yourself - something in the back of your mind is telling you that if you took a step you would fly out into the grey sky like a bird and travel through the vast vortex of time - whenever you wanted to go.
The feeling of the stone on your hand, pulsing a life-force underneath the heat of your hand. Wet, crenellated, cold, pock-marked from generations of conflict.
And then It’s one o’clock.
You take a step out…
It is 1,381 years ago. Give or take. You are standing on a wooden parapet, looking out across vast swathes of green land all the way to the firth in the distance. You close your eyes and let the rain hit your face. It always rains here - it feels like it never lets up.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland, a show about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park=====
At your back is a fortress. Not the one you’ve just left - this one sprawls out across the rocky outcropping where people have made their home among the natural protection of the volcanic deposit for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years.
The people who live here - here in 638CE - have seen the Romans come and go. The Votadini, as they were known by the Romans had lived comfortably in the zone between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall but were left high and dry when the Romans pulled out of Scotland late in the 3rd Century.
They became a friendly buffer state to their former Roman occupiers and reaped what few benefits remained until the last of the Empire’s soldiers left Britain in 410. By the time you’re standing here, the Votadini have become the Gododdin.
You might have heard of the Gododdin before - their exploits from here at their fortress of Din Eidyn are legendary and are written down in an epic poem which eulogises the incredible bravery of their warriors at the battle of Caetrath, thought to be modern Catterick. The poem is the first known reference to Arthur.
You know… the one with the table and the wet sword.
These Gododdin look through you, out over the wooden walls of their fortress and out into the settling dusk. Below the high rock on which you, and they, stand, are faces. Hundreds, if not thousands of faces obscured by distance and the light from fires which are held out in front of their ranks.
Their numbers are illuminated and the light glints off sword and shield. You look back at the Gododdin, huddling together and turning their faces away from the assembled army. They are sick, malnourished.
Somewhere below you there is a gate, a snaking line of people trickles away from it where it pools in the body of the force below. There is an almighty crash as the gate splinters and tears away from its primitive hinges. The spiked shard of the almighty wood pierces through the collapsing barrier.
The fortress of Din Eidyn has fallen. You close your eyes, and step out into the vortex.
Mid Roll
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MICHAEL PARK: It is the year 1314. You are not standing on a parapet. You are crouching behind a boulder, flanked by men who are all dressed in dark clothes.
Above you, somewhere lost in the inky black of the night lies a fortress. Not the one you’ve just left, but it sits on the same rocky outcropping. This one is an ominous spectre, looming over the city as if waiting to hail down fire on anyone who dares challenge its authority. You close your eyes and wait for the rain hit your face.
It’s not raining.
There’s a first time for everything.
Edward the First, Longshanks to his pals and Hammer of the Scots to the tedious had taken Edinburgh Castle in 1300 after the first war of Independence. The castle had been a seat of the Kings and Queens of Scotland for two hundred years. Edward had plundered the treasures from the castle and turned it into a nightmarish fortress, full of the latest military technology.
But you know the old saying… technology is no substitute for local knowledge. Okay. I might have made that up.
By 1314 Longshanks was seven years in the ground and his son, Edward the Second, wasn’t as menacing a proposition to the Scots who again began taking castles under the leadership of one Robert the Bruce.
That’s where Thomas Randolph, the Earl of Moray comes in. He’s one of the men in front of you who have started scrambling up the rocks and onto the cliff - in fact, he’s the second man behind the real hero of the piece.
That’s William Francis. He’s the son of the last Scottish governor of Edinburgh Castle and he knows that the impenetrable rock-face on which Edinburgh Castle stands isn’t so impenetrable after all. How does he know?
He used to live there and he used this route to sneak out and get up to mischief.
Thirty elite, hand-picked Scottish soldiers are ahead of you now, using primitive rope ladders to scale the cliff. They reach a little platform where they are able to get their breath back, before continuing up to the walls.
Once they’re over the walls, the thirty men are still facing an English garrison of at least two hundred. But there’s nothing quite like the element of surprise. Coming from behind the defenders and showing no mercy with daggers drawn they’re able to slaughter the defending soldiers and just like that - in the space of one dark, Edinburgh night - the ominous spectre becomes a friendly ghost once again.
Mischief one, English military might nil.
The Bruce ordered that the defences at Edinburgh Castle be destroyed so that it couldn’t be turned against the Scots if it was taken again. Just months later the Scots would defeat the English at the Battle of Bannockburn and Thomas Randolph, the resourceful Earl of Moray, was in command of the Scottish vanguard.
The victory at Bannockburn didn’t win the war for the Scots. In 1328 - 14 years after the daring raid which claimed Edinburgh Castle - the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton was signed by The Bruce and Edward III, declaring Scotland independent and Bruce its king.
You close your eyes. And you take a step.
Mid Roll
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It is 1341. You’re sitting on the back of a cart, its wheels creak and crackle against the stones on the road which leads up to the castle rock and the great fortress. It’s seen better days but work is almost complete to refortify it since the English took over again in 1334.
The War of Independence has begun in earnest once again. The cart is one of a convoy carrying goods from Leith and at the head, just ahead of you, sits William Bullock, a French ship’s captain.
You close your eyes and let the rain hit your face. It always rains here - it feels like it will forever more.
Bullock isn’t a very French name and, to let you in on a secret, that’s because he isn’t French at all. He is one of the Lord of Liddesdale’s men and has been posing as a French merchant in order to gain access to the garrison at the castle.
He offered the cargo from his ship to the English for a price too good for the commander to refuse. The garrison of 100 men were in need of some rest and recuperation and this ship’s cargo was a godsend.
But there’s no cargo. As you sit on a cart trundling up to the castle gate, you and everyone, on every cart, know that there is only one mission here.
As the convoy arrives at the gatehouse, the portcullis is raised. The mighty iron grating with the vicious spikes at the end locks in place and the first cart is allowed through.
The rest stop - one makes sure to take its place below the portcullis. The driver of the cart quietly unhooks it and it tips backwards, blocking the portcullis from being brought down. He makes a great show of his frustration at the circumstances, throwing his hands into the air and shrugging to the perplexed soldiers.
A bugle cries out into the evening air and, as if from nowhere, a force of Scots comes flying out of cover, streaming under the jammed portcullis and into the castle, catching the defenders completely off-guard.
What happens next is a blur of whirling steel and spraying blood. The garrison is quick to surrender but their capitulation means nothing. No quarter is given, and the remaining soldiers are decapitated and their bodies thrown from the walls of the castle.
You jump down from the cart, and step through time onto the parapet. Your hand is laid on the same piece of stone and the noises of the traffic and of the tourists and their cameras are back, a cacophany of chittering and chattering. Selfies obscuring the skyline.
The guardian, and sometime tormentor, of Edinburgh stands, overlooking its people, waiting for its next call to action. The rain is the same. It always rains here.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park, and is a production from Be Quiet Media. The score for this episode was by the human sneak attack, Mitch Bain. Find him online and listen to more of his great work — search for Mitch Bain Music on Facebook.
You can find out more about the show on our website, thisisscotland.co, and get in touch with any ideas you have for us on Twitter - @BeQuietMedia or we’re on Facebook if you search for Scotland - Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.